Sometimes size matters!

Sometimes it is not what you eat that is the problem, but how much of it you are eating. There are hundreds of foods that are great for you but can also be very high in fats and calories. For example nuts, seeds and avocado are very high in omega 3 and 6 (look out for future post on fats). They are brilliant for your skin, hair, lowering cholesterol and even aids in weight loss to a certain degree however they are very high in calories so it is important that you are not eating too much of these and throwing yourself off course. It is also so easy to find a ‘healthy’ food that you think you can have as a guilt free treat and then eat ALL of them in one go just because they’re guilt free. I am certainly guilty of doing this before now.

Unfortunately this might be a primary reason that your ‘healthy eating’ is not seeing the results you wanted. Just because something is good for you doesn’t mean you can eat all of them in one go. You wouldn’t usually eat 4 brownies in one go (usually!) so why, just because they are made from sweet potato with no refined sugar do we think that eating the whole batch is a good idea???

It is also important to keep an eye on portion size, do you know how much you should be eating for a serving (see additional post on this coming soon!). Are you eating the right thing just a little too much of it? As a society our portions are usually drastically bigger than we need them to be, we are by nature a rather greedy nation.

Of course this is most significant if your own personal aim is weight loss as the way to loose wait is to consume less calories than you burn in a day. This is also important for other reason such as heart disease (excesses fatty acids, no matter how good they are for you) will essentially be stored in your fat cells if they are not burned off throughout the day.

In addition to weight loss, there is a hormone (SIRT1) that that helps promote survival by protecting cells during times when food is scares. It’s a ‘rescue’ gene as it repairs the damage done to cells preventing them from dying prematurely. I won’t go into too much detail but the short and short of it is that this gene can help promote a healthy lifespan and also assist with weight loss. This gene is activated when it does not need to digest food. It has been suggested eating slightly less every few days (not drastically just enough to give your body a bit of a break) will increase the activity of this hormone and thus increase the productivity of DNA renewal and production which with therefore help with the functioning and aging of your body overall. This is one of the benefits of diets such as the 5:2 Diet and some of the other benefits it has beyond weight management.

I am by no means suggesting that you stop eating the foods I’ve mentioned, or that you obsessively calories count (trust me that is NOT fun!), especially if a sweet potato brownie is your guilt free treat that keeps you away from indulging in the real deal to satisfy your sweet tooth! However when it comes to food, size matters! So be mindful of quantities you consume, it could be the little change that helps you to see a big difference.