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Top 6 Smart Eating Habits to Help You Lose Weight Permanently
WHY spend good money on expensive diet pills and crash diets when you can easily and lose weight safely and permanently with a simple change to smart eating habits?
My own experience with diet pills showed that any immediate weight loss was temporary and any pounds shed returned with a vengeance as soon as I was off the diet.
Here are my top 6 smart eating habits for a healthier and lighter you:
Smart Eating Habit #1 – Start the Day with A Lemonade
Skip the coffee and start the morning with a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade or lemon juice (but with no sugar added). It’s a refreshing and stimulating drink as it’s a great natural body cleanser. Drink two or more glasses of fresh lemonade or lemon juice every day and notice the improved bowel movements!
Make a point to have a lemonade with your meals, especially after a heavy high carb meal. Lemonade slows the digestion of carbs in your meals and reduces spikes in blood sugar levels, the cause for overeating and weight gain.
Whenever I feel a little sluggish and ‘heavy’ – I will make myself an extra glass of lemonade – and in an instant, I feel energized. Nutritional properties of lemon.
Smart Eating Habit # 2 – Eat Smaller and Frequent Meals (And Snacks)
If you want to lose weight, don’t skip your meals and don’t ever skip breakfast. Eating frequently throughout the day prevents hunger pangs. When you’re hungry, the body goes into starvation mode and stops burning calories. When you take 5 or 6 evenly spread-out meals in a day, you’re “tricking” your body into burning calories continuously throughout the day!
Be careful to eat nutritionally balanced meals. Snacks and fruits count as mini meals too. Three conventional meals and two snacks will make up at least 5 meals for the day.
Smart Eating Habit # 3 – Drink Water, Water, Water!
Hydrate yourself with at least 6 to 8 glasses of still water a day, excluding herbal tea, soya bean drinks, fruit juices and coffee. Water temporarily eases our hunger pangs. It cleanses our body of toxins. And water is needed by the body to burn calories and convert the carbs we eat to glycogen, the stored fuel in our muscles.
Smart Eating Habit # 4 – Eat The Right Foods
If you are serious about permanent weight loss, start thinking about what you eat. The fact is – you can eat as much as you want and still lose weight if you eat the right foods!
The modern diet is unfortunately packed with foods high up on the high glycemic index. As people become more affluent, they go for poor quality carbs – sweetened white breads, white rice, pasta, donuts, and processed baked products.
These high glycemic foods will spike our blood sugar levels because the body converts them quickly into glucose. We soon get hungry again because our bodies have ingested the high glycemic foods a bit too quickly – causing us to want to eat more to fill up.
Low glycemic foods found mainly in whole grains, fruits and vegetables – however, will help you lose weight gradually and permanently. The body converts them into glucose gradually so we feel full for a longer period reducing our need to keep eating.
Smart Eating Habit #5 – It’s OK to Snack But Snack Wisely
Learn to snack smartly – on seeds and nuts. Many people have the false perception that eating nuts is fattening. True, nuts are packed with fats but with the right kind of fats the body needs.
It’s a smart eating habit to eat a handful of almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or a few apricots and figs a day. These nuts and seeds will not only prevent hunger attacks (a frequent cause for overeating) but also nourish our bodies with excellent sources of essential amino acids, antioxidants, as well as polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats – healthy fats good for our hearts and bodies.
Smart Eating Habit # 6 – Stop Eating At Least Two Hours Before You Sleep
At night, our body’s metabolism dips as it prepares for sleep. If you eat an ice cream dessert just before bedtime, the body is not going to digest the food or burn off the calories fast enough. The undigested food stays in the digestive tract and whatever calories that are not burnt off are likely to be stored as fat.
Anyone can start to lose weight naturally by adopting any of the 6 smart eating habits.
Photo Credits: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
© Teresa Cheong, RightEatingHabits.com
