Are you REALLY eating correctly?

Are you eating correctly??

The answer is you probably think you are, but you are not. Lets first chat about “eating clean” and metabolism.
Eating a clean diet is a health conscious way to improve your health and rid your body of unnecessary toxins and other elements that are bad for you. Clean foods are generally considered those to be natural, free of added sugar, trans fats and hydrogenated fats and any other unnatural substances. This type of diet can be used to lose weight as well as to improve your health and energy levels. Generally, a clean diet is combined with a healthy diet approach of eating 6 small meals a day. This would include breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as three healthy snacks.

**THE MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION YOU”LL EVER READ** You should eat every 2 to 3 hours throughout the day to promote increasing your metabolism and curbing your hunger. Portioning is also important when eating. A meat portion for lunch should be a fist size serving and a diner portion should be a first and a half. A vegetable portion for lunch should be half a fist and for dinner a whole fist. A starch or carb portion should be half the fist at all times. Snacking on fruits, vegetables and nuts throughout the day is also recommended. Eating 2 breakfasts, 1 lunch, 1 snack, 1 dinner and 1 snack is the ideal eating to increase metabolism and bettering weight-loss results.

Your body reacts to fewer calories by slowing down your metabolism -- burning fewer calories each day just to maintain your body functions. If you don't add exercise along with the diet, you will lose lean muscle mass as well as fat and water weight. When you lose muscle, your metabolism is slowed even further and you would have to eat even fewer calories per day to continue to lose weight. It takes a conscious effort to increase exercise when on a diet.
If you don't exercise and then you fall off of the diet, the weight will come back on even faster, as your body is burning fewer calories per day. Even worse, the weight will come back on as fat rather than as the muscle you lost. Your body will look even less lean and healthy.

Of course, the diet advice we'd all love to hear is "Eat more and lose more weight!" But what really works is "Eat more often, and you'll lose more weight." Small, but frequent, meals help keep your metabolism in high gear, and that means you'll burn more calories overall. Your best bet for keeping metabolism revved: Build muscles, snack on low-calorie, high-protein foods, eat often, and keep moving!

If you are excersising as well as dieting it is important to replace the calories you burn. If you choose not to eat them, you may experience quicker weight loss to start with but will then experience tiredness, fatigue and increased injury rates, and a longer harder to push over platue. You will also see a slowing of weight loss as your body tries to conserve every calorie you put in. Replace what you burn! Myfitnesspal is a great tool use it!