Two Easy Steps to Start Controlling Weight and Improving Your Health

Millions of words have been written and thousands of products and plans are offered for weight control and weight loss. The holiday season, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years offer challenges to maintaining our weight. Good food, wonderfully tempting snacks, and alcoholic and non-alcoholic calorie rich beverages are everywhere. Although you can’t avoid all those calories everyday, on the non-festive days you can start to improve your diet. Here are two simple rules to follow that will help you get started on the right path to weight loss and health.

First, move your consumption of carbohydrates to the morning and mid-day. Eating a high carbohydrate meal in the evening just causes havoc with your body. Digesting carbohydrates and producing sugars late in the day when you are not going to burn them right away overwhelms your insulin systems and the ends up storing the sugars as fat.

On the other hand in the morning, when you have not eaten for six to ten hours or longer, you need carbohydrates to provide sugar that your body can easily utilize. Please notice nothing has been said about reducing calories or getting exercise. Those a both great things to do, just shifting to nutritionally balanced higher protein meals in the evening and higher carbohydrate in the morning will increase energy levels and start you on the path to loosing weight.

During the course of the day your meals should progressively include less carbohydrates and more vegetables, proteins, and good fats. Good fats are found in fish, walnuts, flax, olive oil, avocado, and organic-grass fed meats. Watch out for hydrogenated oils–vegetable, seed, and nut oils–and saturated fats.

Second, you should maximize the natural and fresh foods in your diet and minimize the processed foods. This is a complex issue, but to start try to select fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grain products and try to minimize sugar and processed grain products. This means eating oatmeal with fruit or granola instead of sugar coated artificially flavored box cereal. Select whole grain bread over white bread. Avoid high sugar beverages.

If you do these two simple things you will start on your way to controlling your weight and improving your health. There are increasingly more stringent steps that you can take to promote weight loss and regaining your health. These two rules are just the beginning.