Food IS NOT the Enemy

When it comes to fat loss, people associate it with dieting hard, eating salads, drinking lots of water, and doing cardio until you can hardly stand up.

But what if I told you it didn’t need to be like this? What if I said you can eat great foods, exercise a regular amount, and still burn fat effectively?

While the initial thought process to fat loss can work, i.e. eating only salads and exercising for a prolonged period of time, it’s not an enjoyable way of going about your goals, meaning it’s not sustainable for the long term. Which will result in you most probably binge eating and reverting to how you were before you began this extreme diet and exercise regime.

Not only is it an unsustainable way for fat loss, it can also give us a bad relationship with food and exercise, which again, is not an ideal situation to be in.

Eating food is one of the greatest pleasures in life, and without it we will eventually die. The problem I have with strict diets, is that it removes one of life’s greatest pleasers and enjoyable activities. Eating food!

All of this can be controlled with one simple task. And that’s being aware of your calorie intake. Note I didn’t say ‘counting calories’ as I feel this can become a bit of a chore, but the least we need to be able to do is be aware of what we are consuming. That’s not too much to ask, right?

By doing this you will be able to determine if you are consuming too much, or too little food, in order to achieve your goals in a sustainable way. Too much food will obviously need to be revised and adjusted in order to achieve fat loss, (energy in vs energy out etc.), but too little food can leave you malnourished, hungry, and in a position where you are more likely to ‘crash’ and binge eat.

So, we need to find balance. Food needs to become your friend again. We need to repair our relationship with food and understand that it’s this that will help us reach our goals, and we can still eat some of the foods that we love.

In lemans terms, if you track and are aware of your caloric intake, you can see if some of the foods you love (i.e chocolate), can fit into your remaining calories for the day. If it does, then go for it. Eat a chocolate bar. If you’re still within your calories, then you can still reach your goals without depriving yourself so much that you pass out!

But be sensible with this. Obviously don’t have one bar of chocolate, cave in, and eat 12! Have 1, know that this is a fantastic way of ‘dieting’, and leave it at that. Allow the body 20 minutes to realise that you have eaten the chocolate, and the cravings will pass. But just let the food settle and satiate you.

So please don’t feel that food is the enemy if you want to burn body fat. It’s your friend, it’s just the amount that needs to be controlled.