Healthy Diet Plans | Healthy Weight Loss

The Reason Why a Healthy Weight Loss Diet is Important Even If You’re Not Fat

Choosing a Healthy Diet Plan is Your Best Bet for Many Reasons

There are plenty of reasons to choose a healthy diet plan when you make the decision to live healthier. First and foremost, you’ll be looking and feeling better, of course, but the real benefit of losing weight with a healthy weight loss program is because you’ll be making major improvements in your future health considerations.

Making sure that your diet is healthy is as easy as figuring out how many calories you should be eating a day, and then figuring out what foods you need to eat to eat that calorie goal each day while maintaining the nutritional values you need to fuel a healthy weight loss program.

Losing weight too quickly with a fad diet isn’t good for your health and can result in losing water weight and muscle instead of fat. Most healthy diet plans consider a 1 to 2 pounds lost a week a healthy approach towards long term weight loss. That ideal is easily obtainable with the many healthy diet websites available or you can discuss your weight loss plans with your physician who can refer you to a nutritionist. A nutritionist can give you a specific plan for your caloric intake and suggest what foods to eat in order for you to get the nutrition you need for your specific health needs.

Some other reasons it’s so important to follow a healthy diet include the importance of re-learning old bad eating habits while developing new healthy eating habits over time. Remember, it takes 21 days to develop a habit, good or bad, so give yourself plenty of time to ditch the old unhealthy eating habits and learn to reinforce new healthier eating habits.

While many people begin a fad diet or subject themselves to weight loss surgery, many of those people don’t take the time to relearn poor eating habits and they end up gaining the weight back within a short period of time. With a healthy diet plan, you take the weight off slowly but surely while building up your arsenal of healthier eating habits.

As the weight begins to melt away little by little, you build up a different attitude towards food and become healthier in your weight loss journey. It’s a great feeling to know that you have not only lost the weight you wanted to lose but it’s icing on the cake when you know you did it with your health first and foremost.

Why cortisol destroys your healthy weight loss diet

What you eat and what you do can influence your hormones dramatically. When this happens you can either gain weight or lose weight. Avoid these key areas to make sure you lose weight with your healthy weight loss diet. Don’t take for granted just how powerful hormones like these are in determining your weight loss success.

This one hormone that can cause so many problems is called Cortisol. Excess cortisol will stimulate your appetite and prompt more calories to be stored as fat, so it is very influential in your weight loss plan. These are 2 things you don’t want when trying to follow a healthy weight loss diet. Cortisol also increases protein breakdown within the muscle, which means a slower metabolism and less calories burned. A key to successful weight loss is keeping your metabolism running at a fast rate so that you are always burning calories.

It decreases glucose utilization and increased insulin resistance, which means the glucose or sugars in your body are not used for energy as much as they should be. Instead they float around and eventually get stored as fat. This is strike two against your healthy weight loss diet and healthy eating plans.

One thing that directly increases cortisol is stress. Stress is the culprit in increasing cortisol levels and resistance to insulin and leptin. Stress can come from work issues, family issues, medical problems and even unhealthy foods. Higher cortisol levels come from stress-induced insulin resistance and increased leptin. Well, when you have higher cortisol levels your leptin and insulin resistance get worse. It is a vicious cycle that keeps feeding on itself until you are overweight or obese. Despite all your healthy eating plans and healthy diet plans if stress is dominating your life then your healthy weight loss diet may be for nothing.

Those with extra fat in your belly, a round face, high blood sugars or high blood pressure most likely have elevated cortisol levels. These are tips for how to lower your cortisol levels.

Eat every few hours. When you wait longer than five hours between meals your body may start to release extra cortisol, which then increases your appetite. By eating every few hours not only are you going to keep your cortisol levels low you are going to stimulate other hormones that help you feel full for a longer period of time and reduce that urge to keep eating. Also, eat lean protein at every feeding opportunity to trigger certain hormones that will help you to eat less food and burn more calories.

Of course you need to make sure that you also control your stress as I have discussed how important this is to controlling your cortisol levels. Reduce stressors in your life, set a regular sleeping schedule, and get plenty of exercise to maximize the benefits of your healthy weight loss diet.