Ways to make eating right easier....

Today's post:  Thursday, 9-15-2016

Whether you are working to eat right for good health or for losing fat you keep off, upgrading what you eat and drink can be challenging at first.

This has three parts:

1.  What to do when you have a craving or urge for harmful or fattening foods or drinks or for eating too much right away.

Surprisingly, there are ways you can usually overcome this.  This post has several.

2.  The second part is to do things that make you less hungry and get far fewer such cravings or urges.

This one works well; and this post lists several.

3.  The third one is ways to make it easy and doable to eat right that you can set up or use ahead of time.

This one also works well; and this post lists several.

1.  What to do when you have a craving or urge for harmful or fattening foods or drinks or for eating too much right away.

Often temporary urges strike when you see harmful foods or drinks displayed when you are going to a movie or to a restaurant.   A health writer I get emails from, Ben Ong, gave a very good one recently:

Focus on the people you are with and conversing with them.  If you are going to a movie, focus on your thoughts about it and watching.

He also makes a good point, that unlike cravings, urges are often very temporary.  So making this change in focus for just a couple of minutes is often successful.  Then too, good conversation and interesting movies can really engage you and keep you occupied!

Also, research shows that if you learn what the harms of the unhealthy food components are and focus on NOT wanting those results you can simply not ingest those things.  I find it also helps to feel  good that you know to protect yourself!

But if you focus on how good it tastes, you'll likely have some.  (Researchers actually proved that to do this you literally use different parts of your brain to do these things.)

And, I've found that self-talks like these are helpful, "I used to eat that or drink that; but mercifully I know better now!"  "I used to really like that.  But now I know what eating it does to people, I know to never eat it!"

2.  The second part is to do things that make you less hungry and get far fewer such cravings or urges.

a)   One is to have some fruit or dinner recipes using healthy foods and spices that taste good so you DO have some foods you like to eat every week – and on most days! 

b)    Eating several kinds of organic vegetables also fills you up enough to be less hungry.  

c) So does eating health OK protein foods as the man Dave Ben Ong is coaching does. 

Savory grass fed lamb slow cooked after using a needle style tenderizer using spices you like works well!

Even just cooked and still warm plain boiled eggs from hens fed on pasture works when you are hungry.

And there are dozens more using wild caught salmon and sustainable seafood and pasture raised chicken and beef from cattle fed only grass.

d)  Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey has also gotten good results by having people take just a bit of his MCT oil, Brain Octane, that tastes bland and gives your brain power on its ketogenic system.  (Your brain can run on glucose; but it can run on MCT oils too.  The MCT oil fraction in Brain Octane is quite effective for this.)  The bit of fat reduces hunger; and the brain power allows your brain to work well and not order up more carbohydrates for fuel.  

3.  The third one is ways to make it easy and doable to eat right that you can set up or use ahead of time.

The other meaning of the question "How can we make healthy eating easier?" has to do with convenience, time efficiency, and  finding doable ways to fit healthy foods into your life.

a)   Use frozen and bottled foods so all you have to do is serve them.  If it's a choice between bad eating or using canned foods, I think canned foods solve this also.

(I put my frozen organic wild blueberries in a glass container as soon as they thaw in the refrigerator.  A company called Eden makes an organic sauerkraut in vinegar which I find by eating a few servings a week each week, I can store on the shelf without putting it in the refrigerator. 

 And, Whole Foods carries wild caught Alaskan salmon in cans.  I eat two cans a week. And, my wife eats Beach Cliff water packed  sardines a few times a month.)

b)   The other technique that I and fat loss specialist Isabel De Los Rios use is to always have the same weekday menu for each meal.  

Once you set that up, it makes it simple to eat meals. You just set up and eat what you have for that day and meal on your weekly menu.  And, it saves time shopping also since you always buy the same things and just buy what you need to get through the upcoming week.

She and I also do some prep work on weekends.  So all you have to do is serve the food -- or warm up the food and serve it -- during the week.

I buy broccoli and cut off the florets and put them in a glass container.  They then take up a lot less space and I can just take out a serving each day during the week.

As I remember it, she cooks the week's dinners ahead to be warmed up on each weekday while she sets up the salads and spices for the chicken on those weekdays and assembles the vegetable casseroles and salads which are more varied.

That way her meals are tasty and varied; but the base menu and protein dish is the same each weekday.  And it’s set up ahead of time.  So making dinner is fast and quite doable!

Conclusion:

If you know how to stop urges and cravings for harmful and fattening things; you know how to make them happen far less; and you know how to and use the methods to make good for you foods taste good and fast to fix, you CAN do it yourself!