Having the right eating habits can lead to drastic changes in your daily life and overall health
What’s the point of being on a diet for weeks if you are going straight back to the old eating habits immediately after? The weight that you lose during the cut is usually regained after the diet and in many cases, the weight regained is higher than the pre-diet weight.
A simple solution is tweaking both your eating habits and food content to better fit your goals. As scary as that might sound the simplicity of it becomes apparent once you get the overall picture and understanding your goal.
A change in eating habits
When people think of diets, they usually think of completely altering their meals and turning their calorie intake upside down. Having the right eating habits can lead to drastic changes in your daily life and overall health.
So, what do I mean by eating habits?
There are two categories to that.
- Food quality.
- Eating frequency
Food quality
The fitness lifestyle can be quite easy and straightforward once you get into it. Something that is essential to getting a good understanding of is nutrition.
Good nutrition is made up of both macronutrients and micronutrients.
Macronutrients are the main energy sources and building blocks of our bodies. These are carbohydrates, fats, and protein.
Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals.
They help booster our immune system, heal wounds and keep our bones healthy. In short, they keep our overall health in good shape. Eating a variety of foods and fruits is usually enough to cover the needs of vitamins and minerals. If you think that you are short of them, then a blood test should give you an indicator of what you are eating too little of.
Macronutrients
Macronutrients are the main energy sources and building blocks of our bodies. These are carbohydrates, fats, and protein.
The recommended amount you should have in your daily diet is as shown below. They represent how the amount should be spread throughout your meals.
- Carbohydrates = 45-60% of your meal should be made of carbohydrates.
- Fats = 25-40% of your meal should be made of fats.
- Protein = 15-20% of your meal should be made of protein.
This is the recommended breakdown of how you should divide the macronutrients in your meals.
In fitness however, things are rarely written in stone, meaning that the breakdown can be changed depending on your goals. The more active you’re the more energy your body will need to keep up.
The best and quickest energy source your body likes to use is carbohydrates. So, the more you train the more carbohydrates your body will require from you to stay energetic throughout the day. You can afford to reduce the carbohydrates on your off days or if you know that you aren’t that active in your daily life.
Protein should stay high to ensure that your body can recover and heal. Protein repairs more than just muscles, it repairs your inner organs as well.
Food frequency
Food frequency is essentially about how often you eat. This could easily alter your diet despite your matriculate meal prepping. The norm is eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is typically where people might have loopholes without knowing it. It is rare for people to go through the whole day on just those three meals. That’s where snacks can snick in and complicate things.
Snacks
Eating the traditional way of three meals a day can make you wait many hours between your meals. Waiting many hours before you eat obviously leads to hunger and hunger leads to craving sugary and oily foods with a high calorie amount. A solution is having small snacks in between your bigger meals, the recommendation is for the snacks to be under 300 calories so that the bigger meals can take more calories.
Snacks are rarely included in the meal planning, and they are rarely added to the calorie count when people are planning their meals.
Let’s say your TDEE calorie intake is 2500, it’s easy to divide that into breakfast, lunch, dinner, and forget the small snacks that you eat in between those three big meals (even after dinner).
Let’s say you eat just one banana as a snack between each of those big meals. One medium-sized banana has 105 calories. Eating a banana 3 times a day would make it 315 calories and that would bring your calorie intake to 2815 calories. So, you would be in a calorie surplus without knowing it and the unwanted weight gain would start.
To avoid that, add those to the TDEE and ensure that you don’t go beyond it (2500 calories).
I used a fruit in this case as the snack but that’s far from what some people eat, there are a lot more snacks with a bigger calorie amount. I recommend keeping the snacks low in calorie but high in quality. Fruits provide that option with all the vitamins and antioxidants that do wonders for your health.
Food shopping habits
One crucial tip when it comes to going shopping for food is not to do it while hungry. Your body will always try to trick you into buying delicious foods while hungry and those usually have extremely high calories. So, going shopping after eating will keep you level-headed and help you to make better decisions.
Cooking and storage
Cooking the traditional way of breakfast, lunch, dinner all at different times of the day can be extremely challenging and very hard in the long run. A simpler solution would be to cook perhaps once a day and store the food or take it with you in small food containers like you would take to work.
