Weight Management
Healthy Eating
Eating a healthy, balanced variety of foods is far more satisfying than following a strict weight-loss diet that leaves you feeling deprived and hungry. And healthy eating paired with increased activity is more likely to get you to a healthy weight—and keep you there—than dieting is.
Dieting is not healthy eating
Dieting may make you feel like a failure if you can't lose weight or stay on your diet. Instead of blaming the diets, people who are overweight tend to blame themselves. You may think, "If I could just stay on that diet, I would be thin." This doesn't take into account that your body has powerful regulators that affect your weight—things you can't do anything about. And if you've dieted again and again without success, you can get into a cycle of negative thinking—and even gain more weight.
When you go on a diet, you deprive yourself of food. For many people, that means being hungry most of the time and not having enough energy. It also can lead you to think about food all the time. So you're much more likely to overeat when you finally give yourself permission to eat. It's important to make healthy eating changes that you can keep doing, instead of dieting.
Many different diets and programs, such as the ones below, promise rapid weight loss, but they rarely work for the long term. Some might even be dangerous. Learn more about:
- Rapid weight-loss diets.
- Low-carbohydrate diets.
- Food combination diets.
- Over-the-counter diet aids.
But what does healthy eating mean? Everywhere we turn, we get conflicting advice on what foods are good for our health. It can be hard to know where to start after you've decided to make a change.
- First, start paying attention to your body signals and to your hunger triggers.
- Then get smart about eating healthy foods and controlling your portions.
First, learn to pay attention
Before you tackle the subject of what you should eat, it's important to start paying attention to why and how you eat.
One Woman's Story:
"I used to just eat automatically, not think about it. If I liked something, I put it in my mouth. Now, it's like being on a budget. It isn't mindless. I have to be mindful of how I eat."—Maggie
Read more about how Maggie changed her life and lost 50 pounds.
- Know your body signals
Young children are good at paying attention to their body signals. They eat when they're hungry. They stop when they're full.
But as we grow older, and fast food, huge portions, and delicious snacks are everywhere, many of us start to ignore our body signals. We eat for other reasons—or sometimes without thinking at all.
You can ignore those body signals for a while, but they are powerful. And if you ignore them for a long time (by dieting, for example) you lose your ability to pay attention to them. You get out of practice.
One Woman's Story:
"I was way overweight, and I was out of control with my eating. I could not say to myself, 'That's enough.' "—Maggie
Read more about how Maggie changed her life and lost 50 pounds.
Here are the body signals that tell us when and how much to eat:
- Hunger is a normal sensation that makes you want to eat. Your body tells your brain that your stomach is empty. This makes your stomach growl and gives you hunger pangs.
- Fullness, also known as satiety (say "suh-TY-uh-tee"), is a feeling of being full and satisfied. The body tells the brain that it is full.
- Appetite is a desire for food, usually linked to the sight, smell, or thought of food. It can override hunger and fullness, such as when you keep eating even after you feel full.
- Know your eating triggers
It's important to figure out what keeps you from getting to a healthy weight. This includes finding out what causes you to eat when you're not really hungry. These causes are your triggers.
If you know what your eating triggers are, you can avoid them.
- Stress is a very common trigger. Learn how to manage stress and eating.
- Other common eating triggers include certain smells or sights, certain social situations, and emotions like boredom, loneliness, anger, and even happiness.
- Your environment—the world around you—affects what you eat, so it also affects your weight to some extent. Take a look around, and see what causes you to eat more than you need. For example, if you have high-fat, high-sugar snacks in your house, it's tempting to eat them whenever you see them. So move those foods out of your kitchen or to the back of a cupboard where they're not so easily seen. You can still plan to have those snacks once in a while, but you may not eat them as often if they're out of sight.
Identify your eating triggers by keeping an eating journal for a week or two. Write down everything you eat, plus the time of day and what you were feeling right before you ate.
Choose sensibly
After you understand why and how you eat, it's time to look at whatand how much you eat.
Many people classify foods as "good" or "bad" based on their calorie or fat content and, sometimes, on how nutritious they are. But a healthy diet has room for all kinds of foods.
A healthy, balanced diet means getting the right amounts of:
- Fat. Choose unsaturated fats like olive and canola oil, nuts, and fish.
- Carbohydrate. Choose carbohydrate that comes from whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and low-fat dairy products.
- Protein. Choose lean protein as often as you can, such as all types of fish, poultry without skin, low-fat dairy products, and legumes (peas, beans, and lentils).
- Fiber. Fiber comes from plant foods, like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts.
- Vitamins.
- Minerals.
For more information on food groups, see the topic Healthy Eating.
Keep a food diary
(What is a PDF document?), writing down everything you eat for a week or two. It will help you see which foods you need to eat more of and which foods you're eating too much of.
Tips for choosing your food sensibly
- Limit high-fat, sugary, and high-calorie foods. They taste so good that it's easy to eat too much.
- Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables.
- Plan your meals
Control your portions
Most of us are so used to the portions handed to us in restaurants that we think those portions are normal. But they are usually much larger than we need.
Just cutting back on the size of your portions
can be a great way to get to or stay at a healthy weight—without giving up any of your favorite foods.
One Woman's Story:
"Before I gained the weight, I wish someone said, 'portion sizes.' If you're not thinking about it, you go to a restaurant, you think you're getting a portion size. You're not thinking they're serving you six plates of food."—Jaci
For more information on food portions, see the topic Healthy Eating.
How do you get started on a healthy eating program?
If you want to eat healthy foods, you may need to make some lifestyle changes first. If your habits include eating portions that are usually too big or eating when you're not hungry, you'll need to work on changing those habits. Go to the section Getting to a Healthy Weight: Making Lifestyle Changes.
Changing your eating habits will be easier if you have a plan. Putting together a plan means setting goals, tracking your progress, finding support, and rewarding yourself.
Identify your barriers
There are lots of reasons why you may have trouble changing your eating habits. These are called barriers.
Barriers can range from "I only like foods that are bad for me" to "I'm too old to make big changes."
Figuring out your barriers and how you will respond to them is a big step in planning the lifestyle changes that will lead you to a healthy weight and help you stay there.
Healthy eating: Overcoming barriers to change
How do you turn healthy eating into a habit?
Most people don't think about how and what they eat as a habit. But it is. And it's affected by many things: your work schedule, your home life, eating out, your family history, and your social life.
When something becomes a habit, it means that we don't think about it much. And if our eating habits aren't healthy, it's hard to change them.
Starting new, healthy habits takes practice and patience. But you can do it if you take one small step at a time.
Experts say that it takes about 3 months of repetition to form a habit. For some people, even 3 months isn't enough. So start small, and keep doing it until you no longer think about it as something "extra" that you have to do.
When you slip up, don't get mad at yourself or feel guilty. Figure out what happened and how to keep it from happening again. Get right back into your healthy eating routine, and don't look back.
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| Author: |
Caroline Rea, RN, BS, MS
Cynthia Tank |
Last Updated: March 6, 2008 |
| Medical Review: |
Adam Husney, MD - Family Medicine
Ruth Schneider, MPH, RD - Diet and Nutrition Rhonda O'Brien, MS, RD, CDE - Diabetes Educator |
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