When it comes to losing fat, diet must be priority #1. Exercise is important but not nearly as important as your diet. Like I tell my clients, “you can diet and just lose weight, but you cannot out-train a bad diet!” It is so important that I will not accept any clients that want to lose weight unless they follow the diet.
If is very easy to tell what a person will look like just by looking at their shopping cart. Overweight people tend to have a lot of high fat, high sugar/carb foods. Lean people tend to have alot of protein and produce as the majority of the food in their cart. If someone only eats protein and produce it is almost impossible for them to be overweight. Unless of course you add too much fat.
The body is very bad at regulating foods that are high sugar/fat. It literally does not know when to signal when you are full. This is why you can eat 2, 3 or even more servings of something like pizza and will literally eat until you are stuffed, while on the other hand you will be full after a spinach salad and chicken breast. You might actually have to force to finish it. Even though the volume and calorie count of the salad and chicken breast is much less.
The best thing you can do when you start the diet is to totally remove any non diet foods from where you live. I know this is not possible in all situations, but for those who can it helps alot. Most of the hardcore and successful dieters do it and so do I. It is way easier to diet if you don’t have the temptation around you.
So for losing weight grocery shopping is actually really easy. Here is a simple checklist that you can use to get your diet started on the right foot:
- Protein-Anything that runs, flies or swims. So any kind of animal, fish or bird. You will want to get them non processed and pick the lower fat variety. Eggs also fall into this category.
- Vegetables-Try to get mostly fibrous vegetables. Spinach, broccoli, and cauliflower are some excellent choices.
- Fruits-Try to stick with berries as they are low glycemic. You will also want to watch your intake of fruit because too much fructose interferes with fatloss through its effect on the thyroid.
- Fats-Fish oil, coconut oil, olive oil, butter, nuts. ***Watch your intake on all of these as they are all very calorie dense***
- Condiments-Mustard, hot sauce, vinegar. Watch for condiments with hidden sugar in them.
All of these can be found around the perimeter of the supermarket. All of these should be fresh and not have any additives or extra ingredients added to them. Stay away from the middle aisles of the supermarket as this is where all of the foods are that you do not want to eat while trying to lose weight.
