I had always struggled with my weight. I am a very active person and regularly go to the gym for a good workout. I always thought my eating habits were the culprit. To correct this, I would eat less and less. In fact, I would eat very little. But yet my weight was still not going down. Turns out, I was partly correct in that my eating habits were bad.
I decided to seek the help of a professional nutritionist or dietician. When I called to make my appointment, the receptionist told me to come with a journal of my daily intake of food and beverages for the next seven days until my appointment. Although, she told me not to change my habits, I must confess, I tried to eat even less and even better than I ever did.
I presented my journal to the dietician smugly believing he would indeed inform me that I ate very well and there must be some medical problem with me. He reviewed it without saying much. He asked me a few questions about my lifestyle, my work, my physical activities. Then he took the vitals - height, weight, body fat percentage, blood pressure. He made a few notes and then began telling me what I had not expected to hear - you aren't eating enough!
He explained to me in a very clear, concise manner how eating 5-6 small meals per day would help me balance out my metabolism and I would quickly drop the excess weight. By assuring your body that it is going to be fed regularly, it begins to store less as fat by raising your basal metabolic rate. I had been eating about 1700 calories per day in three meals (sometimes two). He changed it to 6 meals of 300-700 calories each or a total of about 3000 calories. He gave me a list of foods that I should incorporate into my diet and foods to avoid.
He suggested dropping anything processed and white grain. Here is an example of what I could have during a day:
Breakfast (7:00 am) : whole grain bagel with natural peanut butter, glass of skim milk, orange
Snack (10:00 am): 1 cup of plain, low fat yogurt with high fibre cereal
Lunch (12:00 pm): whole wheat pasta with unsweetened tomato sauce; spinach salad, low sodium V8
Snack (3:00 pm): apple, 1/2 cup of raisins
Dinner (6:00 pm): salmon, broccoli, whole grain rice
Snack (9:00 pm) 1/2 cup of almonds, glass of red wine.
This is merely an example of what my eating changed to each day. It is very permissive and concentrates more on the types of food rather than the quantity. The theory being, eat more burn more. He was right. Within one month, I dropped 15 pounds of fat and lowered my body fat percentage tremendously. It seemed like I was eating all the time and sometimes I would really not be in the mood to eat, but I would anyways.
There are a lot of fad diets out there promoting strange and promising things. But the best advice anyone could use for losing weight in a healthy consistent manner, and keeping it off, is to change their habits. Seek the help of a professional nutritionist for sound advice on getting to your healthy weight. Not only will you feel better and look better, you'll eat more!
