More Complementary & Integrative Healthcare Articles
Nourish Your Body For Weight Loss
Most people have heard the basics of weight loss eat more fruits and vegetables, drink more water, and eat less sugar.We all know this, so what keeps us from putting this knowledge into practice? Eating a diet of whole foods tailored to the individual is the key to health and incidentally, losing weight.
What barriers keep us from doing what we know we should do?Well, food is more than the stuff on our plates.There is also nourishmentthat comes from”primary foods,” which include relationships, your career, spirituality and exercise. I have heard that “a person can eat all the broccoli in the world, but if their marriage is falling apart, they cannot be healthy or lose weight.”This is how important primary foods are.
Just giving someone a dietary plan to follow is not enough.We must make an exploration into the primary food areas of ones' life to see what is really blockingthe road to ahealthy diet.
Health coaching is the key ingredient for a person to get on track to a perfect eating system.Exploring issues and working through them with baby steps is how a person learns to modify behavior.
A diet full of whole, real foods is nourishing, satisfying, and health-giving.This diet also leads to weight loss because processed food is minimized (processed food is difficult for the body to digest and often gets stored as fat or toxins).To get to a point of true health, real food must be the basis of what one eats.
What about treats?Of course we can have our treats, but we must learn to be discriminating with them.We cannot think that we could never have an ice cream sundae again.We just can't have a sundae every day and need to know what we can eat to satisfy our craving for sweets.Sugar cravings can be very strong, however a diet rich in whole foods where all of the flavors are eaten, is one way to avoid the irresistible craving for sugar.
Coaching a person to obtain and maintain a healthful food intake is the most valuable tool for lifelong health.
