Dieting is rarely an enjoyable experience, but there are ways to skirt the rules. You can continue losing weight while eating your favorite meals and snacks. I was at least chubby most of my life. For a portion of it I was obese. Since realizing that I needed to be healthier, I have lost over 100 pounds. What may surprise you about my weight loss is that all along the way I continued eating some of my favorite foods. I still ate things like pizza, lasagna, and burgers. I did not give up on my snacks or treats either. I still had ice cream, pie, and chocolate as well. Normally a person would not lose weight if they consumed those types of food items. The calorie count would get out of control in a hurry. I would like to share with you some important information on this subject.
The first thing that must be understood is that junk food does not make you fat. Too many calories make you fat. Eating a cheeseburger does not immediately place an extra 15 pounds of fat around your hips. Likewise, enjoying a delicious, fresh brownie does not make love handles instantaneously appear. The human body creates these pockets of fat from bad, prolonged eating habits. If you create a healthy eating plan and stick to it most of the time, you can easily absorb the less healthy food choices on a daily basis. This means that if you make reasonable food selections most of the day, you can fit that candy bar into your daily routine. You can scarf down that slice of pizza and not worry about the consequences. This is ideal for those of us that have particular foods that we love most of all. For example, in my case I have no trouble skipping cookies because they are not a particular favorite junk food choice of mine. However, I absolutely love ice cream. I usually manage to fit a nice bowl of ice cream into my day by choosing to eat wisely at other parts of the day.
The second thing to consider builds off of choosing the correct junk foods and how to make changes. I mentioned that I am not that crazy about cookies. This does not mean I never pigged out on cookies. I most certainly did. When I began losing weight I sat down and gave hard consideration to my food choices. This is when I realized that there were only some junk food items that I truly liked. Other items I ate just for the sake of eating them. This is something you should also do. Separate your junk food. Decide which items you truly like and focus on working those into your eating plans. Dump the rest. This is also a good opportunity to introduce new food items that are not junk, but can give the same enjoyment. For example, watermelon is sweet and delicious. It is also only 9 calories per ounce. That is extremely low compared to almost all processed sweet treats. You can have a large bowl of watermelon slices and only consume a few hundred calories. That is very hard to beat.
Frank Smith
