Kristine’s weight loss challenge continues. She heads to the grocery store in this episode to stock up on some healthy food. Her goal to lose weight starts now!
While most people think losing weight is a task to complete, it’s actually a lifestyle to be lived. A healthy lifestyle will produce a healthy weight. Those who fail to recognize this are destined to yo-yo up and down with their body weight. If one loses 20 pounds with a short term fix, the weight is bound to come back. People end up returning to the same undesirable start line over and over again with this approach.
Habits & Routines for Weight Loss
The key to health and ultimately a healthy body weight is having good habits and routines. Weight is a lagging measure of the habits and routines you have with respect to eating and exercise. This is similar to how your financial success is a lagging measure of your habits and routines with respect to money.
One key to developing good habits is reducing the friction for desired behaviors. Humans behave much like water flowing down hill, they’re always looking for the path of least resistance. When there are too many obstacles for performing a desired behavior it’s likely that the behavior won’t happen. This is the exact reason why Kristine is headed to the grocery store.
Having healthy food available is paramount to health and weight loss. The key word in the previous sentence is available. People generally know what’s healthy to eat and what’s not. Not having healthy foods available when you’re hungry is the problem. Hungry people don’t wait to eat until there’s a healthy option because it’s too hard to fight biology. Go watch the movie Alive, which is based on a true story, if you don’t think hunger is a powerful of a force.
Grocery Stores
The grocery store is the best option for consuming healthy food. Restaurants and convenience stores are more shaky when it comes to healthy options. Restaurants tend to add a little extra flavor to their dishes. Extra flavor usually equates to fat and sugar. Restaurants and convenience stores have a place in everyone’s life but they shouldn’t form the foundation of anyone’s diet. They certainly won’t facilitate weight loss.
Grocery stores allow you to control almost all the variables when it comes to your food. Foods that are in their natural state give you the most control because they are in their fundamental form. Think about how atoms are the building blocks of matter. Whole foods in their natural state are the building blocks of healthy eating.
Whole Foods
A whole food, plant based diet is the gold standard for nutrition. Processed foods contain excess sugar, fat, salt, flavor enhancers and dyes among other things. Diets heavy in processed foods are inherently unhealthy. Processed foods not only contain extra bad ingredients but they also tend to strip food of its natural nutrition.
The most overlooked and easiest whole foods to work into your life are fruit! A banana comes perfectly wrapped in its own yellow packaging. There’s no need to refrigerate a banana. Bananas have a long shelf life and are cheap. The average size banana is about 100 calories. There is not an easier way to cut hunger than a banana because of all the reasons mentioned above. Apples, pears, plumbs, peaches, oranges, and grapes are also great examples of cheap and easy whole foods.
Whole foods don’t necessarily need to be fresh. Frozen or canned fruits and vegetables are great options too. These are often picked at peak freshness and packaged in a very short period of time. Frozen and canned options have a long shelf life and therefore cut down on food waste due to spoilage.
Shelf Life
A food’s shelf life is an important attribute. Stocking your pantry with foods like this will increase the probability that you will have healthy foods on hand. Nuts, seeds, and grains are all great examples of foods with long shelf lives. You don’t need to head to the store every week to pick up something like rice or oatmeal. Those foods should be readily available to you at all times. Once rice and oatmeal are cooked they tend to last a long time in the fridge as well!