If you are trying to lose weight, gain weight, or simply retain weight one thing that everyone will keep telling you is to keep an eye on the diet. We have seen that people start with eating healthy, significantly reducing the portion, and train themselves which is probably not the best technique.

Don’t Starve Yourself

According to the fitness trainers, when you go on a strict diet, there is a very high chance that you will soon relapse and start eating junk so it is better to keep your options healthy while eating whatever you want to eat. Additionally, doctors tell you that your whole-body mechanism changes when you try to starve yourself.

When you try to restrict your body to eat less or go on fasting mode, your survival mode kicks in and your body starts to take this very seriously. Eventually, everything you eat is taken as your last meal and your body makes the most out of it, eventually, when you stop the diet-based food and start a regular diet, the first thing that happens is, that your body takes in as much as possible.

Survival Mode

You start to gain fat because the body is still in survival mode, ready to store as much as possible, just in case the starving happens again. So, it is better to keep your options healthy while retaining the actual pattern of eating food.

For beginners who are still trying to figure out what they can do, it is important to start by understanding the healthy alternatives of food that you eat currently along with your daily exercise routine. This will only make your current diet healthy without altering the food portion or food choice.

Switch to Whole Foods

This is a great way to help your body enjoy the food. If you are a pasta lover or you feel like without bread, biscuits, and wraps, that you will feel stranded. This is a great way to motivate yourself for constant food intake. You can switch to whole-food, multigrain bread, brown rice, whole wheat pasta options. These options are viable in the market and if you use them after toasting, they taste better than regular bread. Additionally, you can season it perfectly for a better taste or try different brands to keep it interesting.

Calculate Your Calories

This is a great way to know what you are eating and how much you should eat. We have seen that most people do not understand the idea of calories so they just fill up things in the same bowl for a vague estimate. But it is important to understand that a bowl of chicken and a bowl of rice does not have the same amount of calories. So, it is important to measure the calories properly, you can learn how many calories a bowl of food contains that you have prepared or you can simply use a digital calorie calculator. There are so many calorie calculators available on the phone and online that you just have to add up the food that you have prepared and you will get an estimate of the calorie that your food contains.

Divide the Portion

Portion division is one of the biggest things that can help you lose weight. If we start with the basics, you need to know what we mean by portion, usually, a portion is one serving of food that is served to one person but we have seen that portion size is different in different countries. In America, portion size is huge as compared to United Kingdom where it is kept very calculated. Similar is the case in the Middle East where food quality is measured by the portion, so if you are finding it hard to understand the idea of portion it is quite normal.

However, it is advised that you can start with using your regular portion of food and then divide it into three portions that you can eat after a one-hour interval. This is quite normal because when you eat more than one serving you are just loading yourself with calories without keeping count. This will help you eat just the right amount without going overboard.

Skip Sugar and Oil

Sugar and oil are the biggest calorie contributor to the diet so, if you can restrict the intake of sugar and oil, this will help you stay healthy. However, natural sugar can be used for adding sweetening to your food. If you want to add sugar, you can add organic honey in your drinks and food, this is healthy and you are not consuming too many calories as well. Additionally, if you want to use oil, try switching to basic virgin olive oil, fish oil, or sunflower oil. Fish oil is quite healthy but it has a very limited shelf life, so it is better to only get fish oil if it is fresh. Oil intake can also be avoided if you just stick to a nonstick pan and pots for the preparation of food.

Some Recipes That You Can Try

We have seen that there are so many different places that serve good diet food and healthy options for everything and they taste good. However, recreating the same thing at home gets pretty lengthy and difficult. Moreover, it never tastes the same. So, we have listed a few recipes that you can try and incorporate into your daily meals. These recipes are easy and can be altered according to the style of eating, some people like to add seasoning, others like to add the sauce. You can add whatever you want because they are quite easy. Additionally, with just a few step alterations you can change these recipes for weight loss and bodybuilding as well.

Power Pack Smoothie

This smoothie is standard and you can add anything you want and this will complement the actual taste. Just add a cup of milk and then add two frozen bananas. You can then add two dates, a small tablespoon of honey, seven almonds, and a small scope of almond butter. If you are trying to lose weight, you can skip the dates and add almond butter, or if you don’t have almond butter, peanut butter will work. Frozen berries or mango goes with it as well. You can make it a runnier consistency by adding water or milk. If you want to give it a bit of tangy flavor, pineapple can spruce up this smoothie!

Grill It All Up

We have seen people eating grilled chicken and fish for their protein intake. But many complain about how the chicken or fish might cook; being too tough to eat or too bland. If you are facing the same issue you can start with seasoning the chicken in a marinating sauce that you can prepare on your own, this will help keep the chicken tender, soft, and cook more tenderly. You can use one tablespoon of yogurt and add your desired seasoning like salt, pepper, basil, rosemary, red paper, and some chili flakes. Keep this mixture in the fridge for a few minutes and once you are ready to cook, just add a few tablespoons of oil and you should end up with perfectly tender and tasty food.

Easy Salad

The salad can be tricky and quite challenging for people to incorporate into their food regime. In our experience, we have seen people just relying on a garden salad because they think it will keep them healthy. But it doesn’t take long for this garden salad to get boring, thus resulting in switching back to their oily junk food diet.

To avoid relapse, you can simply incorporate different kinds of vegetables, fruits, and meat products in your salad. You can start by making a salad dressing with the help of olive oil, honey, lemon, salt, and paper. This mixture can be kept for weeks in the fridge but, of course, is always better if you make it fresh. Once you have the salad dressing, you can now start by adding the base of green vegetables like cucumber, avocado, cilantro, iceberg lettuce, baby spinach, and anything else that you like. Other healthy great tasting veggies to add on the salad are; for example, tomato, beet root, olives, and radish, etc.

If you really want to spice up your greens, you can add chickpea, peas, boiled potatoes along with few dashes of quinoa. Then top it off, with the home made salad dressing and mix it all well. Add more protein in with grilled chicken or salmon to make it more balanced and delicious!

Article by BornTough.com