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| Erica Mesirov Food Coach http://www.ericamesirov.com |
Eating nutritiously can be a drag…well that is how it seems
at first. You know you want to be
healthy, but you also know that you don’t want every meal to be a tasteless,
bland, unimaginative ordeal. Eating is
one of the joys in life. So how do you balance being in tip-top shape with some
type of joie de vivre?
We often begin a diet after a period of less than desirable
eating. With our stomachs full of
pastries, pizza and deep fried decadence, we decide it is time to make a
change. Starting TOMORROW, we will eat
nothing but nutritious, wholesome and slimming sustenance.
In my humble opinion, this is the set-up for failure. When making a diet change, we shouldn’t do
anything that we can’t see ourselves maintaining for a lifetime. Otherwise, our exciting, new healthy eating
plan has failure built right into it. Can
you really see yourself resisting cookies, cream sauce and macaroni and cheese
for the rest of your life? Then you
shouldn’t set up that type of expectation from the get-go.
A better way to request change from ourselves is to ask
ourselves to transition away from the bad for you foods and towards better
quality diet choices. When eating a
plate full of sugary, oily, refined carbohydrate-rich indulgence, our taste
buds become dulled. Healthy options are
tasteless and diet feels like deprivation.
Give yourself time to transition to a better way of eating, and you will
eventually taste all the crisp, fresh, naturally sweet goodness in a plate full
of lightly steamed vegetables or a big chicken salad with olive oil and lemon. You
will also have the opportunity to balance your blood sugar which will help keep
cravings at bay
Here is how transitioning works. Let’s say that you begin every morning with a
big bowl of granola. The problem with
most granolas is that they have tons of added sugar. They also have a good deal of refined
carbohydrate which quickly turns to sugar in the body. Therefore, you may want to transition to a
more nutritious option. First you may
choose a more natural granola made with whole grains, nuts and fruit and only
lightly sweetened with agave or honey.
You will eat this for a week while you get used to the taste of lower
sugar. Then the next week you will instead
make a big bowl of oatmeal with nuts and just a small amount of maple syrup or
maybe some granola sprinkled on top. Again, you are transitioning towards a low
sugar, whole food option. Then finally the next week, you will remove
the maple syrup and granola completely, keep the nuts and add lots of fresh
berries. You will have given your taste
buds time to transition away from a sugary breakfast and appreciate the subtle
sweetness of fruit sweetened whole grain cereal.
You can do this without setting up the false expectation
that you will never eat your favorite foods again. As you transition to a wholesome diet, you
will increasingly enjoy the taste of vitamin and mineral-filled health
supportive options. When you eat what
used to be your favorite sugar filled cereal, you will notice that the blood
sugar rush makes you feel kind of crappy.
When you have achieved stable blood sugar, you can eat your former
favorite foods without them throwing you off your game. Instead of making you want to binge, now the
sugar cereal will make you feel depleted, leading you back to your fruit and
nut oatmeal the next day. You’ll enjoy
your favorite foods, but not to a point where you WANT to eat them everyday.
Be kind to yourself when changing your diet and make sure to
get all the support that you need. Diet
isn’t something you start Monday. When
we slowly adjust our meal plan, our taste buds steadily change and adapt, our
blood sugar normalizes and “diet” becomes something that makes us feel good. Now is that worth taking the time for?
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