Eat MORE, Feel FULLER, Lose WEIGHT?

You heard right. There is a way to eat more food than you eat now, feel full and content, and lose weight. No more starvation diets! The diet is based on these 3 principles:

Eat foods that are: 1) high in water-content, 2) high in protein, 3) high in fiber.

1. Eat foods that are high in water content. What does that mean? Foods that have water in them. Like fruits and vegetables. Foods that have high water-volume are greater in mass, and generally low in calories. You can eat more of these foods without building up tons of calories, which means you get to feel full. For example, let's say you plan to eat 1,600 calories today, and you only have two foods you can choose from. butter or strawberries. If you choose butter, you can only eat 1 cup of it, and you've consumed your 1,600 calories for the day. But if you choose strawberries, you can eat 57 cups. Now, obviously, no one would choose to eat a cup of butter, but look at the principle. You can eat a few energy-dense foods, or you can eat LOTS of nutrient-dense, low-calorie foods, like fruit.

2. Eat food that has protein. This includes meat (preferably lean meats), cheese, yogurt, beans, nuts, soy, lentils, and eggs. Protein is digested slowly in the body and therefore keeps you feeling fuller longer. Carbohydrates (especially the over-processed flour and sugar carbs we eat a lot of) are broken down quickly in the body, causing a spike of blood sugar that is met with a surge of insulin. The surge of insulin causes the sugar to enter the cells quickly, leaving your stomach and blood stream empty and wanting more food again.

3. Eat foods that are high in fiber. Fiber also makes food digest more slowly and keeps you feeling fuller longer. Fiber can be found in whole wheat, fruits, vegetables, beans, soy, lentils, barley, brown rice and oatmeal. Fiber is also unique because your body actually doesn't digest it at all. It just travels through you, helping your digestive system to run smoothly. It can also bind onto fats in your diet like cholesterol and keep you body from digesting the fats.

  It worked for me! Here I am at 180 pounds...
  and here I am at 152 pounds. :-)
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You Asked: What to Eat? What to Avoid?

Today I will be answering another question posed by a fellow ward member...what foods should I eat and what foods should I avoid? The ultimate question, yes? Now, I could take this opportunity to dive into a full-blown lecture on antioxidants, B vitamins, cholesterol, diabetes, enzymes, fiber, glycemic load, high fructose corn syrup, iron, joules, the krebs cycle, lipoproteins, manganese, nitrogen, olive oil, potassium, quadriceps, riboflavin, sodium, theobromine, unsaturated fat, valine, water, xylitol, yellow fever, and zinc (that's right, friends, I just listed one nutrition-related thing for every letter in the alphabet!). But I'd surely leave you more confused, and the honest truth is, you don't actually need to know that much about food to have an awesome, healthy diet. After all, how much did our ancestors know about food? Relatively little compared to what the scientific world knows now, yet our ancestors were much healthier, less overweight, and relatively untouched by chronic disease like diabetes and heart problems. So what was their secret?

They ate REAL FOOD. Like fruit, vegetables, meat, grains, milk, oats, fish, and eggs. But in our day, we have taken all these real foods and processed the goodness right out of them. The result is....food-like substances. These are some examples of food-like substances:




What are the differences between real food and food-like substances?

Real Food:
Looks like its ingredients
Has 5 ingredients or less
The processing it underwent did not destroy its nutrients (example: freezing is a form of food processing that does not drastically harm nutrients)
Has vitamins and nutrients to keep your body running the way it should

Food-like Substances:
Have lots of ingredients and don't resemble any of them (there is corn in a donut, but would you guess by looking at it?)
Have ingredients that you cannot picture and/or pronounce (what does maltodextrin look like?)
Have to have man-made nutrients blasted into them so they can make health claims like "Excellent source of calcium!"
Are low in natural nutrients and vitamins but HIGH in calories
Your great great grandmother wouldn't recognize them as food
Underwent damaging processes in order to have longer shelf lives (anything with trans fat in it has been tampered with to make it nearly non-perishable)

So here's your challenge for the week. Try to make the majority of your diet REAL foods! It's REAL good for your body!