Before we show you what foods to eat to lose weight let us show you something interesting.
The average calories per day that an average, active adult male requires is around 2500 – roughly.
Most of us eat at least 3 meals per day, often more by the time we include snacking.
Just one meal at a fast food, take-out style restaurant can easily be 1500 calories by the time you include sides, drinks, fries and all the other crap they try to upsell you.
Now for the day you are left with 1000 calories to play with, just a couple of chocolate treats, a couple of slices of cake and a soda could easily total way over that, but the thing is that often these foods just make you more hungry because they have so little nutrients in them, so you end up binging later on in the day, again.
The human body is a pretty logical being – if we eat too much, it stores it as body fat (energy) for later on when it thinks we may need it. Sounds sensible enough, especially when you consider we used to go days without eating anything substantial when traveling and hunting back thousands of years ago.
However, now days the closest we get to hunting is operating the sniper rifle on Gran Theft Auto or checking out night clubs for a potential mate on Saturday night.
With 24 hour fuel stations serving luke warm pies and bags of M&Ms and ice creams, it is way too easy to eat the wrong types of foods, and they are so high in calories that we are discovering that we can’t out exercise a bad diet.
One of the real ironic things is that when you are consuming these kind of foods, you actually have less energy, sleep more often and get shitty – real easily. When you are eating right you feel more alert, want to workout harder and feel 1000% better.
The reason that sugary foods, energy drinks, lollies and chocolates, crisps and that kind of thing make us worse off is because they spike us up then bring us crashing down.
It is like using nitrous oxide in a weak motor – you get a quick surge in power, but the poor internals of your motor will suffer and you will do immense damage every time you active the nitrous.
You need foods that give you a sustained energy release, high in nutrients and vitamins, but not high in calories.
These are the kind of foods that will create powerful, fast weight loss.
Energy drinks are a major flunk on the test – they are full of sugar and guarana, taurine and caffeine – all of which are just like putting nitrous into a weak motor – they will just ruin you.
In the biography of Stone Cold Steve Austin, he stated that energy drinks were a major part of his downfall and actually landed him in hospital for a stint. Now he swears against using them – and a guy like Stone Cold is no pansy, he is bad ass to the core whether you enjoy wrestling is irrelevant.
Weight loss and being healthy are what you should be aiming for – not just weight loss.
If you end up losing weight but are weak, fragile, always getting sick and feeling like crap, it won’t be worth it because you won’t be able to truly live and show the world your sexy new body!
The best foods to be eating are those that come naturally, the kind of foods your mama told you that you should be eating.
Here is a breakdown:
Vegetables
Okay they aren’t as exciting as skulling Red Bull cans, but give them a chance.
Anything green (that is legal) and grows in your garden will most likely be good for you. Okay, maybe only green vegetables. Most vegetables are great for you and give you a staggering amount of powerful nutrients to fuel your body and create amazing weight loss through their low calorie count.
With the exception of potatoes, most vegetables are extremely low in calories, but very dense in fiber, vitamins and minerals, which all help to make you feel full. You could eat a couple of plate fulls of mixed vegetables and still only be consuming a few hundred calories at maximum. Just add some delicious herbs and spices – show some love to your meals and your spouse and include some crazy ‘erbs to make those vegetables a bit more fun.
Fruits
These are a bit easier to eat.
You do have to be careful with fruits though as they contain a lot of naturally occurring sugars which can get high in calories if you aren’t careful. However you can eat a few bits of fruit a day and be safe and healthy, but focus the majority of your meals with meat and vegetables – these will be the backbone of your weight loss.
Meats
The manly meal.
Okay, there is no denying that lean meats and fish are a great tasting meals and make every one of us salivate, except for the odd vegan here and there.
Fish is one meal that is amazing for you – it is high in protein and essential Omega oils – something that a lot of us struggle to get adequate amounts of. Chicken, turkey and other lean cuts of meat are great for fat loss too – and meats are quite filling so you won’t feel like dessert if you have enough and a bit of restraint.
Thoughts on other common meals
Rice
Rice is a great energy carb but is like potatoes, quite high in calories. However you do need energy for your day, especially if you train hard and/or have a physically demanding job. Not all of us have the luxury of going on a 3 small salads a day diet – we actually have to put some steam into our lives.
Bread
Our thoughts on bread are that it is totally unnecessary for the human race except for convenience. In saying that, I have a wheat intollerance so I guess I am bias. However bread is one of those things that is so cheap that you eat heaps of it, it is just flour, gluten, yeast, water and maybe a few seeds if you are lucky.
Cheap bread doesn’t fill you up so you can over eat it really easily. Plus there is an incredible number of people out there who are sensitive to bread and if they stopped eating it then they would discover their allergies, skin, stomach or blood problems would cure themselves.
About a month after we stopped eating bread our eyes starting going pure white, our skin condition has vanished and anxiety problems and insomnia have disappeared…
We hope that you have taken a few tips from this article and will decide to try this style of eating even just a few days a week – plan out a few meals and eat them over and over again, then for a treat go out for meals once a week of make something delicious.
We find that if we plan all my meals out for the week and take that list shopping with us, it also saves a lot of money as we only buy things we know we will eat. Eating healthy meals also stops you spending $15 a pop at fast food restaurants, curbs your 3 chocolate bar a day habit that equals thousands of dollars a year over time.
Just remember – tomorrow you will wish you did it yesterday and then you either start a good cycle or a poor cycle of habit.
