How to Simplify Your Diet
Video | Simplify Carbs | Sugar Intake | Add Volume | End of Eating Day
When you start a diet, it’s easy to overcomplicate things. When your diet is complicated and complex, you run the risk of not following through and returning to your old habits. In this post, I’ll share a strategy that you can use to simplify your diet.
Simplify Your Diet – At-A-Glance
- Avoid the worst carbs and fill up on the best carbs.
- If a food has sugar listed as one of the top three ingredients, don’t eat it.
- High-volume foods take a lot of time to process helping you feel physically and biochemically filled up.
- Not eating in the evening hours improves sleep, regulates blood sugar, and eliminates snacking.
How to Simplify Your Diet [Video]
In this video, you’ll learn…
- Tips on how to simplify your diet.
- Specific guidelines that will help you make wise eating decisions.
- A strategy for getting on track!
Tip #1 Simplify Carbohydrates
Fewer choices make life easier.
For instance, if you go to a diner and they offer you black coffee or coffee with cream, it’s an easy choice. But if you go to Starbucks, you’re faced with a menu board of strangely named coffees. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and reluctant to order.
This idea of simplifying your choices is a good strategy to get your diet up to speed. We can start by looking at simplifying your carbohydrate choices. If you follow my blog, you know that I promote a low-carb diet for weight loss.
Carbohydrates are a type of food that has a wide range of choices available. A scoop of sugar and vegetables are all classified as carbs, but they will affect your body very differently.
With nothing to slow it down, sugar will quickly spike your blood sugar, setting the stage for fat storage. Vegetables, on the other hand, require a lot of enzymes and time to digest, setting the stage for long-term hunger control.
A simple mindset to have when it comes to picking carbs is to avoid the worst and fill up on the best.
Tip #2 Drop Your Sugar Intake
Sugar is the worst and should be avoided, however, sugar finds its way into many seemingly healthy foods.
My sugar rule is that if a food has sugar listed as one of the top three ingredients, don’t eat it. When you have this simple rule in place, you don’t have to make a decision because the decision has already been made for you.
For example, is it ok to have packaged granola? Turn the package over and take a look at the ingredient list. Is sugar listed as one of the top three ingredients? If the answer is yes, it goes back on the shelf.
When you start living by this rule, you’ll find that many foods that you used to include in your day get eliminated, so you need to fill up with the best carbs for weight loss, which are your non-starchy vegetables.
Tip #3 Add More Volume
Non-starchy vegetables like leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, cucumbers, and celery have a lot of volume and micronutrients.
These vegetables take a lot of time for your system to process helping you feel physically and biochemically filled up. That has the wonderful side-effect of controlling hunger without the fear of a sugar crash that makes you irritable and in need of a nap.
When you’re having trouble getting your diet on track, consider adding more volume to your diet.
I recommend having a large salad every day and cooked non-starchy vegetables with dinner at night.
When you combine those non-starchy vegetables with fat, the fat helps your body absorb the fat-soluble vitamins in the meal and further stave off hunger. Don’t feel bad about adding nuts and seeds and other healthy fats to your salad and cooking your veggies in butter.
Tip # 4 Declare an End to Your Eating Day
A final tip to help simplify your diet is to set a daily time at which you stop eating. I recommend that you stop eating three hours before your typical bedtime.
Not eating in the evening hours does many things:
- It improves your sleep because your body is not shuttling blood flow to your digestive tract, which elevates your core temperature and interferes with sleep.
- It also allows the level of glucose and insulin in your blood to remain low overnight, which is a state that promotes fat burning.
- Finally, it eliminates mindlessly, late-night snacking, which can save you hundreds of calories.
The tips I shared in this post are the basis of my free 0,1,2,3 strategy. I have a guide that you can download with the strategy on it that you can print and post on your refrigerator, just follow the link above.
About the Author
Dr. Becky Gillaspy, DC graduated Summa Cum Laude with research honors from Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1991.
