The food on your plate, in your mouth, and on your tongue all day is a powerful magnet for what your body needs. Not only does it feed you without any nutritional value, but it also puts stress on your digestive system and disrupts your immune system.
It’s also true that eating too much of the wrong kinds of food can lead to a variety of serious health problems. As you’ll learn in this book, it’s best (and easiest) to avoid eating too much of what you’re already eating. It’s also best (and easiest) to avoid eating too much of the junk that you’re putting in your body, because it’s just that much easier to put crap in your body and you’ll never know what’s in there.
I know. I was just having this discussion with my mom about the best way to use food and how to eat it. She just keeps going, “Don’t eat junk!” with an enormous grin on her face, and I can’t help but smile at her a little too.
The diet book we recommend, The Diet for Younger Moms, is not exactly the easiest to put together. But to be fair, it really is worth putting together. There are just too many easy to understand, and fun, recipes that show you how to eat and live more healthily.
You know what else is fun? Watching your kids eat. I love all the little mini-challenges that they can tackle with the help of their parents. The whole time, I am thinking, ‘I’m gonna need to get this on a whole new diet.’ I love the way they use food to distract themselves and to stay calm, and yet how they are able to eat just the right things at just the right times.
What I’m talking about here is the “eating-at-home” mindset. This is a mindset that many people have when they’re not trying to meet their daily calorie targets at school. Whether it’s eating a banana at 5pm or a bag of potato chips at 2pm, we eat these foods at home for the same reason we eat a snack in the car or at a restaurant.
With this mindset, we don’t think about the calorie count of what we are eating and the way it impacts us physically. We just assume that because it’s a snack, we are just going to get more calories than our body needs. As a result, we feel terrible about our bodies and our waistlines. And so we eat less.
How this mindset affects our diets is a more complex issue, but it affects both our physical bodies and the emotional aspects of our lives. When we eat at home for a snack or a meal, we are more likely to eat the wrong things in the wrong quantity. Eating for a meal is a much more complex issue, but we still have to think about it on a more physical level. I know this as I work with clients who are struggling to lose weight and maintain it.
When we eat during the peak hours of the afternoon, it can be hard to figure out what we should eat. What we consume at the dinner table is more than enough in terms of calories. However, when we eat at the start of the evening, we have less time to plan what we should eat, and we have more time to sit and be bored with the conversation of our parents.
I’ve heard this point made before, but my own experience with dieting was very different. When I was in my early 20s, I gained weight as a result of a food plan I ate. While I gained a few pounds, I didn’t gain a lot. When I started dieting again, I was starving, and I still gained a lot of weight.