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3 Simple Diet Hacks that Will Change Your Body and Life in 7 Days.
Want to know three simple nutritional secrets that will totally transform your body and life in just 7 days time?
Do you ever feel overwhelmed and just lost by the amount of nutrition and health information available on the worldwide web?
If you are like most, you may experience some degree of disillusionment as a result of the bombardment of daily emails, ads and experts telling you what you shouldn’t eat or can’t eat or the latest research showing the risk of eating certain foods. The blitz of information, some of which is better than others, can be almost paralyzing. Let’s forget all that nonsense and get back to the basics! Implement these three nutritional practices at every meal for the next 7 days and watch your energy soar, your body weight begin to stabilize and your confidence grow!
Restriction Based Programming DOES NOT work!
What do the Atkins diet, the ketogenic diet, south beach diet, the natural food diet, the Zone diet and just about every other popular nutrition program and diet have in common?
They are restrictive by nature.
To one degree or another they restrict and prohibit certain foods and food groups your body may already be accustomed to consuming.
Believe it or not this is one of the primary reasons they don’t work long term for most people. Often forcibly cutting out altogether (or even mostly), foods you routinely eat or like to eat causes an internal neuro-psychological backlash to ensue by your brain. This drastic imposed restriction often leads to increased cravings, obsessive food thoughts, and binge eating type behavior. And while you may be able to “resist” the urge or “fight” the cravings for those delectable foods you have all of the sudden removed temporarily, it will almost always be short-lived.
Your brain and body will rebel and have the last laugh. This is why the fundamental premise of the entire diet industry is completely flawed! Removing, banning, forbidding or even demonizing certain foods more often than not causes the opposite of the desired effect to occur long term.
Be flexible in your diet!
Studies demonstrate one of the keys in predicting long-term weight loss and maintenance of weight loss is flexible dietary restraint (1)
Believe it or not rigid dietary restraint, while demonstrating early temporary results, has a high correlation and association with weight loss struggles and weight regain long term.
Flexible eating restraint involves regulating one’s food intake so that no particular behavior is forbidden and thus subject to rigid control and scrutiny. Rigid restraint on the other hand is all about by the book absolute, all or nothing, caloric and “forbidden” food prohibition. Under the false assumption that will power is all that is needed the biological systems engineered to ensure survival and reinforce pleasure pathways in the brain will almost always win over willpower based effort.
Worse still, the metabolic suppression, appetite dysregulation, binge type of behavior and shaken confidence often leave ripple effects that are hard to recover from.
Stop Trying to Take Away and Focus on Adding In!
Well you may wonder: “If I am not supposed to remove ‘unhealthy’ foods (believe it or not all foods can provide some nutritive benefit) how am I supposed to lose weight?”
Instead of just picking apart what we eat and micromanaging every meal by focusing only on removing or siphoning certain foods what if we simply add in more of what our bodies need?
What if our focus is simply on making sure we give our bodies more of what they are genetically programmed to want for healthy function?
Believe it or not, science and personal experience demonstrate that if our efforts are concentrated on adding healthy and wholesome practices and foods the weight and excess in sugar or processed food often takes care of itself. Add these three diet hacks to your daily routine for the next 7 days and watch your body begin to change before your eyes without ever having to “restrict,” “take out” or “remove” supposed harmful obesogenic foods.
Diet Hack #1: You Simply Aren’t Consuming Enough Pure Water!
It is no secret to any health conscious individual that fluid homeostasis is not only critical for survival, optimal energy, mental clarity and cognition but also to every metabolic and physiologic process in the body. Our cells are dry and hold onto waste products longer, we feel sluggish, cathartic, irritable and our cells scream so loud for more water but we often interpret this as hunger pains instead.
Instead of worrying about getting rid of soda pop, alcohol, caffeinated beverages and energy drinks which are all well known to contribute to chronic dehydration, focus only on adding at least 8 ounces more of water before every meal. It isn’t rocket science but it works.
You will drink at least one glass of water before you eat anything else or drink anything else.
Science demonstrates water actually helps curb sugar cravings and intuition would indicate that you feel fuller and have less inclination to want to fill an already distended belly with sugary drinks. But again, don’t worry about getting rid of caloric beverages and focus only on adding more pure water.
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Diet Hack #2 Your Body is really Craving More Greens!
Would you believe that just 10% of the population actually consume enough fruits and vegetables a day?
A report from the Center of Disease Control’s (2) showed that only 1 in 10 adults actually eat the recommended amount of vegetables a day.
This just boggles my mind. And from a physiologic standpoint you need look no further for one of the main reasons 6 of 10 adults have at least one chronic disease. In our overfed but undernourished food culture our cells can often experience a chronic deprivation of vital nutrients and vitamins which can lead to a slow and painful cell death. These nutrients are found in concentrated form in raw fruits and particularly vegetables.
Raw Vegetables are BEST
Raw vegetables are medicine to the cells of the body. The phytochemicals found in green, leafy vegetables and deep colored plants has a direct anti-obsogenic effect via the induction of apoptosis (programmed cell death), lipolysis and inhibition of inflammation (3) Not only will the fiber content help normalize your gut bacteria, and make you feel fuller but it has been demonstrated that these types of cruciferous plants directly increase the release and turn on GLP-1 which is a protein that helps normalize insulin activity and decrease appetite. (4)
Now I am not asking you to be a raw food diet nazi who looks down on others who eat processed food and feels it a moral obligation to correct the world of their fascination with anything cooked or sugary. Quite the opposite actually. All you are going to do is have one additional serving of greens at meal time before you eat the rest of your food. A cup of spinach, a few pieces of broccoli, a handful of green beans, sprouts, peppers or any similar vegetable of a deep, dark rich color.
Don’t worry about cutting out sugar, removing fast food, over even counting your calories! Just focus on adding one extra serving of greens at every meal time, and preferably before you eat anything else.
It can be a challenge for some to eat so many fresh greens. If this is a struggle for you, try the concentrated form. This stuff tastes amazing and it is loaded with growth factors and stem cells to supercharge your weight loss and body transformation. Try this: My favorite Super Greens
Diet Hack #3: Snack on Protein and Healthy Fats
The scientific evidence is mixed and all across the board about the potential benefits or detriments of small frequent meals vs fewer larger meals. That discussion is beyond the scope of this article but the fact remains that the greatest biological reason for binge type overeating behavior is waiting to eat until hunger escalates to thought consuming proportions.
For this reason I am a huge fan of small snacks in the morning and evening. This could be a protein shake, some beef jerky or my choice–a handful of nuts. Another option is a hard boiled egg.
The monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats in the nuts and egg will help you feel fuller ,maintain lower baseline plasma insulin and leptin levels and actually help you not feel the urge or need to eat as much come meal time. Most who struggle with weight rarely consume enough healthy fats and protein. My experience is also that my energy is much higher during the day with less peaks and valleys and there is a nice metabolic boost that happens as a result of the snack. Don’t be afraid to snack!
Your 7 Day Challenge to Implement These Diet Hacks:
So for seven straight days forget about fretting and stewing over all the things you have to take out of your normal eating and focus only on ADDING these three elements:
1. An extra eight ounces of pure water before every meal and first thing in the morning.
2. An extra serving of greens or raw, rich-colored vegetables at every meal before eating anything else.
3. A serving of nuts, hard-boiled egg or comparable source of fat and protein between meals.
Take the 7 day challenge and see if you have what it takes! Your body and your mind will love you for it!
What is your favorite nut, protein, or green to snack on? Let us know in the comments below!
References
(1) Gorin AA, Pinto A, West D, Niemeier H, Fava J, Wing RR. Losing weight because you want to rather than because you feel you have to: Motivational predictors of weight loss outcomes. Obesity (Silver Spring) 2008;16(suppl):S214
2) Center of Disease Control (https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1116-fruit-vegetable-consumption.html)
(2) MartaGonzález-CastejónArantxaRodriguez-Casado Dietary phytochemicals and their potential effects on obesity: A review. Pharmacological Research Volume 64, Issue 5, November 2011, Pages 438-455 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1043661811002179
(3) Montelius C, Erlandsson D, Vitija E, et al. Body weight loss, reduced urge for palatable food and increased release of GLP-1 through daily supplementation with green-plant membranes for three months in overweight women. Appetite. 2014 Oct;81:295-304.
