Eat Frequently Throughout Your Day
Healthy Meals, Inc is a big proponent of eating at three meals and 2 snacks per day. This is exactly what our Optimal Meal Plan provides. Eating small meals throughout your day can keep you feeling full and reduce hunger. Eating fewer than three times a day often leads to overeating, choosing less healthy food, and slowing down your metabolism. The quality of food you eat will help with hunger management and help you lose weight. By eating foods with low energy density, like fruits and vegetables, you’ll feel fuller longer.
So, how do you lose weight? Everyone is different in the food they like, their health & medical histories, genetics and lifestyles. Enrolling in a meal plan with Healthy Meals, Inc. is an easy and affordable way to get started on your weight loss journey. You begin by completing a health questionnaire whereby we learn your physical specs, age, activity level and other key factors that play a role in meeting your goals. We then assess your needs and design a nutrition plan just for you. Here are a few foundational tips we believe in and employ for our clients’ successful weight loss:
- Eat foods that satisfy your hunger. These include fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean proteins.
- Balance your meals and snacks. Balance is key. We want you to have meals that are both healthy and satisfying with foods like vegetables that have many nutrients, fiber and few calories. This can help you eat smaller portions of higher-calorie foods, such as pasta, rice and meat.
- Keep track of what you eat. It is our job to keep track of what you eat. We design, manage and control your daily caloric intake. Further, we monitor your progress and provide our clients with our own mobile app that can be used to further track your weight loss progression.
- Be mindful. Learn to tell the difference between your physical hunger and hunger triggered by food availability or boredom.
- Avoid high-calorie beverages. Sodas, juice and alcohol provide a lot of calories, but few nutrients. Minimizing or even cutting them out of your diet is one of the easiest ways to lose weight.
Eat protein with every meal
Lean protein is important to your overall health, and you’re going to need more of it as you age.
There are 2 key reasons why you’ll want to have protein at every core meal.
- Protein can help you lose weight more easily, as well as build and maintain muscle. As you get older, it becomes more important to prevent loss of muscle mass, which in turn maintains your metabolic rate.
- Proteins help reduce cravings for more “sinful” foods. If you have a meal that contains protein, you’re less likely to go after those unhealthier things later on in the day. It’s going to be far easier to maintain or lose weight because you’re not craving those high-calorie carbs that we know take us directly off course.
Fiber
Getting enough fiber, 38 grams for men and about 25 grams for women, per day is required to aid the digestive system in breaking down food. Without enough fiber the result can be bloating, constipation, and or heartburn. Fibrous foods will help naturally reduce your calorie intake. They are both low in calorie density and are filling which naturally decreases your caloric intake.
Do you eat when you’re stressed?
Many people do. It’s very common. Often when people find themselves anxious or stressed their response is food. And the food choices you make tend to be very high calorie and are going to make it hard to lose weight.
Just being aware of your stress and realizing that you’re eating because of it is a big first step. Finding other options to deal with your stress might include walking or any form of physical activity.
Weight Training
Incorporating strength training into your weight loss plan is key. Muscle will burn more calories and increase your metabolic rate. The more muscle you build, the more calories you’ll burn. So you definitely want to employ some type of resistance training into your weekly routine if you haven’t already.
More importantly (and a good way to think about)…if you have more muscle, then you have more active tissue which means you’re dragging around less fat. Consequently, you’ll have more strength and stamina in which you’re going to naturally increase your calorie expenditure because you’ll feel more energetic.
Increase Your Physical Activity Level
Sometimes as we get older, and this is one of the reasons it might be harder to lose weight after 35, is that we don’t do those incidental things, those movements or activities that we used to do. It gets easier to be lazy after a long day of work because you’re just tired after a long day and maybe you just want to sit down and relax.
That means that your total calorie burn throughout the day is being minimized.
A lot of people kind of ignore that incidental movement and think they’re just going to head to the gym for a period of time, or just do a workout for 45 minutes. But really if you’re moving throughout the day, this can go a long way towards increasing your overall calorie expenditure. Being cognizant of this and aking an effort to keep active throughout your day will go a long way.
Here’s the Good News
These tips will work for you, no matter what age you are!
Although there are specific challenges that you might have when you’re over 35, but the basics of weight loss and energy levels don’t change. You still need to have your nutrition in check and you need to have strategies that make sense for your lifestyle.
As you get older, you’re still going to be following the same kind of plan. The basics that you need to use are always the same;
- Maintain a caloric deficit
- Keep active and build muscle
- Eat frequently throughout the day
- Eat lots of vegetables, get your protein, and get your fiber
These are all standard things that you can implement into your life on your own.
However, if you want to take all of the leg and guess work out of your diet…Healthy Meals, Inc is the perfect solution. Customizing your meal regimen, preparing your portion-controlled meals and snacks, and delivering them fresh to your door every day is exactly what we do.