Nutrition is the king of weight loss and health. Of course exercise is important for overall health as well but eating healthy, but eating right will give you the quickest results in fat loss. Exercise just helps speed along the process.
One of the main problems many dieters face is the mass amount of misinformation about nutrition that leads them to believe that unhealthy foods are actually healthy for them. Most of this is propagated by clever marketing campaigns repeated over and over via commercials and packaging and keywords such as “organic,” “fat free,” “sugar free,” “all-natural,” and many other words that people have been taught to associate with health when in reality a closer examination of the ingredients of these foods shows them to be less than healthy.
Here is a great resource for learning the basics of nutrition. It is may also be useful for you to start learning about and using some of the best herbs for weight loss in your dishes when possible or supplement with them.
What You Should Focus On For Effective Fat Loss Nutrition
First off, you need to hash out your goals. It is amazing what kind of progress can be sparked by simply defining and tracking your goals. If you goals are wishy washy, your results will be wish washy. If your goals are vague so will your outcome be vague.
So, to start out with make a very specific goal with a time hack. For example, you could make the goal of losing 5 pounds every month for 3 months for a total of 15 pounds.
Whatever your goal may be, make it doable and once you accomplish it set a new more challenging goal. Focus on one goal at a time as well. For instance, you may want to lose fat, get your heart into better conditioning, and gain some muscle in your thighs. While there are definitely ways that you could accomplish all three, instead pick your most important or immediate focus and stick to that until you have satisfied yourself by reaching a goal.
With regards to weight loss nutrition goal setting comes into play big time because many people accomplish short term goals with a complete disregard for long term body composition goals.
Does it really make sense to lose 25 pounds of fat in 8 weeks if you just keep putting it back on again and again? While there are cases where you may want to cut weight relatively fast, in the long run the “rebound diet” is not very healthy for your body and it beats up your mind mentally because each time your fail at keeping off the weight your attitude takes a hit. Subconsciously your mind is beginning to believe that your fat loss goals will never come to fruition, and the subconscious mind is a strangely powerful force.
“The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire and not things we fear. ” – Brian Tracy
That being said, no matter how many times you may have fallen short of your goals before, I believe anyone can change things around. You simply need to reevaluate your goals. Instead of trying to lose weight think about trying to be as healthy as you can possibly be. I truly believe that a simple mental shift like this can do wonders for you. Focus on being as healthy as possible and learning what that means and how to obtain maximum health.
OK, I Will Make The Mental Shift of Focusing on Health… Now What?
Now that we are focusing on the health instead of the imperfections of our bodies and eating and lifestyle choices we now need to take action steps toward a healthier life. To accomplish this we can take three simple steps.
- Learn what it truly means to be healthy and what it takes to become healthy
- Identify 1 – 3 lifestyle changes to make yourself more healthy
- Make a plan to implement these changes toward greater health
- Execute, Accomplish, then set new goals and repeat.
First lets deal with number 1 on our list. To learn what true health means is going to take some studying. Unfortunately the internet and magazines are full of tons of advice on healthy living that is discombobulated and fails to take a holistic view of health.
This is very true of the supplement industry which often misconstrues various studies to consumers as proof that their supplements are effective at generating certain results. Does that mean all supplements are worthless? No, not at all. There are many that can be quite useful.
What it means is that you should not take anything you read at face value, especially from a supplement website or on the product itself. Do some further research yourself. For instance, if you read an article that creatine can help your workout harder or gain muscle don’t stop their. Try to find the sources that the article quotes. If they don’t quote a source google online “creatine studies” or “creatine research.” Attempt to find studies on website ending in .edu or .gov
There are many government and educational institutions that publish their research for the public to freely view. While it may be a bit difficult to discern all the scientific talk, it’s really not too bad once you struggle your way through about ten of them. Don’t understand a word, just look it up. I usually just read the abstract of a study since that gives you the gist of the research as well as the researches conclusions.
Also start reading books about health. I prefer reading books from actual Doctors although there are some non-medically trained authors that also have some books with solid health advice out there. On the other hand there are also some Doctors who have very strong ties to certain supplement industries or pharmaceutical industries and as a consequence their bias shines through.
I don’t want to think that just because they have earned the title of Doctor that they necessarily have unclouded judgement but typically their education should give them a better perspective on overall human health. So I tend to stick to reading books by experienced Doctors or researches. Start with a goal of reading at least one book of each of the three categories:
- Nutrition
- Exercise or Physical Fitness
- Stress Management / Meditation
So start today by reading at least one health related article on our focus here which is nutrition and diet.
Make a plan to read one about exercise tomorrow, and meditation, yoga, or something related to your mental health the day after.
Repeat this over and create a new habit. Everyday you will be learning something new about health from educational, medical, or scientific sources and as a result your entire mental model will shift toward focusing on health.
Trust me, once you start doing this for a week or two is will easily become a habit because it is so interesting and affects us so thoroughly.
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