When you think of eating “healthy” food to lose weight, what do you think of first?
Chicken? Broccoli? Protein Shakes? Avocados? No, I’m not a mind reader, we just encounter many people with a similar view on healthy eating.
Granted, there are many foods that CAN provide more physical benefits to us (within context), but the issue remains that having a pre-conception of particular foods that you NEED to consume in order to lose body fat and build lean muscle, can often set you up for failure. Especially if these foods are ones that you’re not used to eating and won’t realistically fit into your lifestyle.
Health has many components, and we can actually define it into 3 main categories:
- Physical health
- Emotional
- Psychological
As you can see, just one specific diet couldn’t possibly fulfil the requirements of each category, for every person and for a sustained period of time. Therefore anytime you attempt to follow a set type of diet plan that hasn’t considered your lifestyle and history, comprises in daily life have to be made which may lead to your dieting attempts being unsuccessful.
So let’s look at some of the benefits we see when getting clients to eat foods that specifically work for them and fit around their lifestyle.
Digestion
Everyone has foods that don’t particularly sit well for them. Regardless of intolerances, even the concern about the food you’re going to eat can be enough for your body to respond poorly. That’s enough of a reason not to want to eat it, regardless of how healthy it may be.
Yes of course we may look at replacing it with an alternative so that we don’t’ miss out on the nutritional benefit that certain foods bring. For example, replacing salmon for another lean fillet of fish because you hate the taste of it to compensate for protein intake.
Relationship with Food
Subconsciously, a lot can impact our relationship with food; from the last diet, you tried, to the remarks you receive from co-workers about your lunch and even your childhood (” no dessert until you finish that plate”!).
Subconsciously, a lot can impact our relationship with food, from the diet you last tried, to the remarks you receive from peers growing up about your lunch and even friends telling you what particular foods you should eat and ones to avoid.
By taking some time to increase awareness of behaviours around food, you can start to make better choices around meals as well as respond with positive feelings and thoughts around this. This is one of our favourite ways to increase clients knowing of foods that work well for them – their ability to make choices they’re happy with, rather than be reliant on the coach.
Adherence
Adherence is undoubtedly the underlying factor in any physical change journey, transformation or otherwise. If there is no adherence, then there are no results from lack of consistency.
Adherence doesn’t have to mean that you must have superhuman willpower, instead, the journey should be made easy by creating an environment for success. This may include having foods you enjoy whilst still remaining in a calorie deficit, for example planning your highest calorie meal to be in the evening – when eating with family.
If you’ve unsuccessfully dieted before, consider whether you included foods in your days/weeks that worked for you.
Would you like to find out what works for you from a training and diet perspective? Get in touch to find out more about our packages for Personal Training today
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