Instead of buying the next fad diet book and getting all excited, but 6 months later you are back to square one again, you should rather think about your eating as a sensible structure. An easy way is to take the different food groups and put them into an upside down pyramid. Starting at the top (the foods that you should eat most of) would be vegetables, fruit, pulses and legumes. Next on the list are nuts, seeds, grains and cereals, followed lastly by meat, fish, poultry, eggs and dairy.
If you were to eat perfectly every day of your life, the food that you eat in a day would contain foods from these groups in roughly these quantities. This is how food should be thought about and you should never have to go on some fad diet ever again.
Carbohydrates – The Facts:
In the last decade or so, when it became obvious that one of the causes of obesity in the western world is over-consumption of simple carbs, the world went a bit crazy and went on a carbohydrate banishing rampage. A few nut cases, now discredited, sold the idea of getting into shape and losing fat by eating no carbohydrates at all. In reality, the problem was that many people were eating too many sugary, simple carbohydrates. This was largely caused by a ‘fast food’ lifestyle as well as food manufacturing companies making food cost less and last longer on the shelf.
This is easily corrected by eating more of the complex ‘slow burning’ carbohydrates as they are sometimes known, rather than simple carbs. So, if someone tells you not to eat any carbohydrates at all, they are wrong. Your body needs a sensible amount of the right kind of carbohydrates to function, and this includes the metabolic action which helps to reduce body fat.
A helpful guide to carbohydrate consumption is the ‘white vs brown’ and ‘smooth vs rough’ guide. For example, white bread is made of smooth, white flour which is a simple carbohydrate. Wholegrain bread is made from brown, rough flour which is a more complex carbohydrate. Try to eliminate as much of the white, sugary carbohydrates and replace them with brown, whole, rough carbohydrates. Do not eliminate all carbohydrates from your diet, just eat them in moderation and try to have the majority in the early part of the day and less in the evening. Also remember that it is not only starchy foods that contain carbohydrates. Even vegetables contain some, so does milk. Legumes and pulses also contain carbohydrates but they tend to be the good ones.
Aim For 6 Modest Meals Per Day
The old ‘three solid meals’ a day is not a particularly scientific way of thinking, and is based more on convenience since the industrialisation of the world which has moulded our eating habits. Our ancestors, going back hundreds of thousands of years (hunter gatherer days) ate opportunistically most of the time, eating what they could lay their hands on during the day. We have evolved to eat smaller meals frequently throughout the day. By doing so, our metabolic rate increases, and we crave less sugary and fatty foods. Six meals per day can be difficult to prepare, so using one of Sci-MX’s meal replacements between solid food meals is a good way to help you achieve this.
