I love food. I love how it tastes. I love how it smells. I love how it looks. I love how it makes me dance when it’s really really good. Oh come on, I know I’m not the only one who does a happy dance when something is really, really good. My love affair with food makes it that much more challenging to give up or resist when a piece of my mama’s fried chicken is starring me in the face.
Here’s the thing, food is meant to be enjoyed. I thoroughly believe that! It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures to sit down to eat and enjoy what you’re eating. One of the reasons diets don’t work is because they restrict and deprive you of something that is naturally here for you to enjoy.
So, how do you balance losing weight and enjoying food at the same time?
The first thing to do is to know and understand how many calories you are taking in from day to day. I do this by tracking my eating using My Fitness Pal.
It helps to know what your deficit, maintenance and surplus numbers are. If you want to lose weight you have to eat at a deficit (cut down on your calories). If you want to maintain your weight, figure out what that caloric number is and of course eating at a surplus, above your maintenance number will lead to weight gain.
If your goal is to lose weight and keep it off forever and ever amen, then you have to figure out how to eat the foods you love and enjoy and to do so at a deficit. Don’t resist it, modify it!
Lifestyle vs. dieting means this is something you’ll do for the rest of your life. It doesn’t have a start and ending period. So if drinking 3 shakes a day isn’t something you’re going to do everyday for the rest of your life, granted in so doing, you will lose weight but you will not keep it off.
Making these types of choices is where we run into problems. We do the “quick fix”, “lose weight in 30 days” thing and then spiral into the vicious cycle of lose, gain, lose, gain because what we’re doing to lose it is not sustainable.
I say eat the foods you love and figure out how to modify them so that you create a caloric deficit, which will help you to reach your weight loss goal. That way when you reach your goal you’ll be able to continue doing what you’ve become accustomed to doing and it will be a piece of cake to maintain your weight.
Your Turn To Share
What are some of your favorite foods? How can you modify them to create a caloric deficit to help you reach your goal?
Lee-Anne Turley says
I’m with you! Life is too short to miss out on so many great tastes.
Lee-Anne Turley recently posted…Blue Moonstone of Sri Lanka
Stacey Strickler says
Hi Lee-Anne! Thanks so much for stopping by. I’m glad I’m not the only one who recognizes a good thing (and in this case I mean good food) when they see it. Continue to live a
littlelot and make it count!