The biggest mistake that I see most women making is that they start with, can you give me a good food bad food list’ Can you give me the clean food list’ And I get that, and for years, I handed it out, said lists.
I get it we LOVE rules. Rules keep us safe; rules are certainty. How many times have I heard a client say to me just tell me what to do and I will do it. I hear you, you want to follow rules. Guess what every ?diet? has a rule book.
Have you ever read any of Gretchen Reubens, work, she talks about the four tendencies’ I’m a rebel.
I don’t like rules. I look at a rule and try to find a way to make it work for me. . While if you are an obliger you are all about following the rules. For obligers diet rules are your BFF.
Whether you are a rebel or an obliger diets make it easy to fall into that diet trap that if I follow these rules, I’m going to be safe, we all want certainty in our lives. You feel like if you follow this diet you are going to live your best life, and you’re never going to gain the weight. But let’s be honest, how many people including me, have followed the diet till life got hard and you couldn’t do it anymore’ Or you follow the diet until like you are I can’t eat this shit no more. At some point, you want to break free!
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can break free! You can create your own rule book and still LOSE THE WEIGHT!
How do you create this rule book’ It starts by looking at the nutrient density of your food. Fancy talk for what your food is made up of You really don’t hear most other health coaches talking about nutrient density.
The industry would rather have us vilifying a food, instead really learning what your food is actually made up of. How many years, have carbs have gotten a bad rap. When I first started dieting it was fat! Now it’s anything from sugar, gluten, and there’s so many things that we’ve been told to fear about food versus really understanding what the food is made up of, and how it affects my health. And so, what nutrient density is, is really looking at for the amount of calories in a specific food vs how much actual nutrition you are getting from that food.
How do you think junk food, got its name’ It’s because it has little to no nutritional value.
Think about those 100 calories packs, you’re getting like minuscule amounts of proteins, carbs, fats, and other micronutrients that you need to function in your body. So last blog post, we talked about calories, read it right here. And you know, for many people, it’s very eye opening, and I will be the first person to say I didn’t, I didn’t count calories for years. And it was until about six years ago that when I first started kind of trying to figure out why my body gave me the finger, at the time the functional doctor that I was working she’s like Kim, you you’re eating way too much healthy food. None of my food was shit food, it was healthy. But I eating too much of it, it was too dense for where I was in my health cycle.
So, what I want you to look at is if I am not eating in a caloric deficit, I don’t care how great the food is, I don’t care if it’s organic, I don’t care if you bought from Whole Foods. If I’m not eating in a caloric deficit, I am not going to lose the weight, bottom line, period. Do not pass go do not collect $200.
Start to eat in a caloric deficit. In the last lesson, we talked about how to calculate your calories.
Today’s lesson, I want us to start by saying okay, what the heck is in my flippin food. And it starts by reading the label. Many of us get caught up in the front of the package. It’s shiny, it feels so good. It looks so good. It tells me that it’s whole grains, but I want you flip that package over. And I want to start by reading the ingredients, right’
The first five and the first ingredients are what the product contains the most of all right’
Can I pronounce half the shit that’s going in this particular product’ And if I can’t pronounce half the shit that’s going to the particular product, it’s telling me that it is very processed. Alright, and so we want to minimize the processed foods that we are having in our diet and when I say processed foods, think of it like this.
Okay, let me break this down even more, an apple right, fell off the tree, boom, it’s mine. Then that Apple turns into apple sauce. That’s one step process removed from what an apple is. And then I have apple juice, they’ve literally pulverized the shit out of that apple and turns it into juice. Okay, so those are like that’s the quickest way to explain the difference between process food.
Once I flip it over and I see what the ingredients are, then I look at it and I say okay, how much protein does this have in it’ How many carbs, how many calories, grams of fat does it have in it and then I look at the sugar content
So how I can tell if a product is more a protein than a carb than a fat is by whatever the highest number is. That is what the product is. So, I’m making these numbers up off the top of my head, so if it has 20 grams of protein to 12 grams of carbs and 30 grams of fat, it is a fat. Okay, so those are the things if you have further questions about foods do me a favor Put a link of a food you are loving right now but not sure what it is in the fit girl magic Facebook group. We can go through it from there.
To second piece is how does that food make me feel’
This is critical to breaking up with the damn list! One of my clients Mandy was following a vegan lifestyle because she thought it was better. When we started working together, she mentioned she didn’t have any energy. I looked at her food log and found that she was grossly under eating.
I asked if she was open to be a little bit more of a flexitarian so she could increase her protein and fibrous veggies. She adopted a more flexible vegan approach and added some more protein to her diet and some more fibrous veggies and now she has the energy to keep up with her 4-year-old.
Take a look at your food,
Does it make me feel energized, tired, bloated, cravings’ How does that food make me feel because if it makes me feel in a negative way, that food is not for me, right’ Or if that food doesn’t satisfy or make me feel satiated. I love eggs, eggs are never going to be on anyone’s bad food list. But when I eat eggs, they don’t fill me. They make me very snacky. The same with protein shakes.
There is nothing wrong with these foods, but they just don’t work for me!
Do you have a food that does this to you’
The final thing I will say about nutrient density is that if you aren’t losing weight, and you are not in a deficit.,
Now the first place most will go is to reduce their food, by reducing number of meals or dramatically dropping their calories. Instead, you are going to really take a look at what you are actually eating. If you want me to take a look at your food log, tag me in the Fit girl magic Facebook group and I’ll tell you more about how to go about it.
One of the biggest questions I get is how many meals should I eat’ For years you were told that you had to eat at least 5 meals/day in order to lose weight. You had to stoke that metabolic fire.
Instead of focusing on a set number of meals, we need to learn how to feel hungry. So instead of focusing on I need to eat every few hours, do your food choices keep you full for at least three to four hours’ Can I let my digestion really go through the entire gamut’ Before I eat again, right’ Can I feel that true’ hunger cue before I eat again’
One of the biggest questions I get is about breakfast and what are my thoughts on intermittent fasting.
Regardless of what you call it, breakfast or meal one. The first meal of the day sets the tone. So what I mean by that, so think about this, back in the day breakfast was cereal and juice, or a bagel and cream cheese or toast with butter or jam or toast with peanut butter on it. Quaker instant oatmeal and two coffees, how soon after you ate that’ Did you get hungry again’ Could it last you an hour, two hours before you got hungry again’ For many people, that’s how they normally start a day. I challenge you to add protein to your breakfast have at least 20 to 30 grams of protein to breakfast so that you can at least get through three or four hours of your morning without feeling hunger.
As for intermittent fasting ? see if it works for you. For some waiting too long to eat sets them up to eat MORE. What intermittent fasting helps some to some stop eating at a certain for those who like rules.
Again, you can still overeat while intermittent fasting. It all comes down to your choices.
The other question I get is about having protein post workout. For years, I was old that I need to eat my get protein in my system anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes after my lifting workout or I was screwed. I was missing the window for protein to be taken into my system. I believed that for years, I’d literally drop that final weight and sprint to my car to drink my drink my protein shake.
What research is showing is that we have a little bit bigger of a window than that, many of you can get in your car and drive home and have a normal meal without worrying about getting in a protein shake.
With all the questions I get about how many meals should you have in day or pre/post workout meals, the biggest question is what you can do consistently. It’s consistency that will get you the results that you are seeking. So, it won’t matter the rules that you follow.
Instead of worrying about the shake post workout, focus on getting your protein throughout the day.
The other method I want to bust about nutrient timing is carbs at night, right’ For years, I believe this too, you shouldn’t have carbs as your last meal. Now, first, let me just back up. The thought about not having food after 6pm. Let’s stop the line of thinking right now’ Right, your body doesn’t have a clock, your body has no idea what time it is. And I have guys who are shift workers, and they work the overnight shift. If they believe that they couldn’t have food after a certain hour, they wouldn’t make it through their overnight shift. Right’ So I want you to really think focus on just how does food make you feel versus these food rules, your body determines the food rule, you’re not some random on the internet, or some you know, you heard, you know, some bro science bullshit about eating after certain time.
So long winded way of saying, yes, you can have carbs at night. And so, for someone who is having difficulty sleeping, having a carb and a good fat as your last meal could be just what you need in order to help you sleep through the night.
So, think about it like this. I don’t know if any of you who have had children. And as you were trying to get your children asleep through the night to get them, you know, most kids wake up. Most kids wake up because they are hungry. So, you used to be used to just stuffed them for food to get him to sleep a little longer, right’
Now, I’m not asking you to stuff yourself, but I’m saying have more food. So that way you can have more carbs. And so that way the food stays in your system, and it’s digesting overnight. Now, this is something you have to experiment with. So if you know you typically eat, you know, pretty late at night and then go to bed, this might not be a solution for you. But again, everything’s an experiment, right’
There’s no hard and fast rules, we are going to just play but okay, if I have you know, maybe it’s only two tablespoons of carbs. And that helps me sleep better. Maybe it’s a quarter cup, right’ So play with it. Or if you have a quarter cup, you wake up with heartburn, right’ So it’s figuring out what’s gonna work best for you. And, you know, when also when, like, you know, as I wrap this up as it comes to meal frequency, you know, it’s all about experimenting, seeing what’s going to work for you like, how long can you go before you are hungry’
What are the foods that you need that help you feel full, you know, like I said, protein is the backbone of what, where most of us should start our plate with protein and then fill it up with vegetables’ And then we start adding in the starchy carbohydrates and the good fats. I don’t want you thinking that you have to do this all by yourself in the Fit Girl Magic Society, I work with you to figure out what makes sense for you, right’
You send me a food log and we figure out where are your gaps, we figure out what where you need to fill in your gaps. We also talk about what are the foods that you know, satisfy you and satiate you. If you are ready to take a deeper dive, be sure to grab my #foreverfatloss Mini Course.
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