Eat Breakfast
When you’re sleeping, your body still needs energy to sustain itself at rest. Bodily functions such as breathing, maintaining muscle mass, and digesting food all require energy from calories acquired by food eaten prior to sleep. As you sleep, you are fasting (unless you’re one of those sleep eaters), but in most cases, people are usually fasting when sleeping. The meal that you eat in the morning right after you wake up is called “breakfast” because it literally breaks your fasting. When you eat breakfast, it jumps starts your metabolism, meaning burning more calories at rest. It also curbs your hunger when it comes to lunchtime. Skipping breakfast deprives your body from getting necessary macronutrients (carbs, protein, fat) at the start of the day. So, if your first meal was lunch at 12 PM, and the last time you ate was last night’s dinner time at 8PM, you have been fasting for 16 hours. At this point your body thinks its starving, so when you eat lunch, it will go on survival mode and try to store as much calories from that meal as possible.
Portion Control
Changing you’re eating style from a fast food eater to a healthy balance diet isn’t the easiest thing in the world. CHANGE is HARD, period. However, there are no bad foods, just bad diets. Eating cheese cake once in a while will not kill you. If french fries is your weakness (because they are mine, =P ), then having some every now and then won’t make you obese. Having cheese cake every night and french-fries every lunchtime however, will add up and cause weight gain. The key to reducing calories and having a healthy eating style is controlling how much you eat at every meal. You don’t need to go on any crash diet, just start controlling your portions and you’ll start seeing the lbs shed. Here is a tip: Have your hand, left or right, face you palm side up. Open that hand as wide as possible, fingers out and everything. Now the size of your palm should be how big your meat portion is at every meal. The five finger area around the palm should be carbohydrates. So your meal should be around the size of your open hand.(Obviously not like the picture above, that's just for sh*ts and giggles. lol)
Eat a Rainbow Every Day
By this I don't mean eat a bag of skittles every day. Foods that usually come in colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple are fruits and vegetables. Apples, oranges, bananas, salad, blueberries, egg plants are samples of “rainbow” type food. The variety of the colors of these foods gives you a diversity of vitamins and minerals your body needs. The problem is that most people usually don’t eat these types of food often. Incorporating these foods into your diet will help the body not only function healthy, but give you the nutrients needed to sustain lean body mass. These foods also help curb hunger and help raise energy levels, leading to eating less and moving more, which causes the shedding of excess fat from the body.
