Tag: healthy foods

Craving chocolate … 🍫

We all have cravings for certain foods or drinks at certain times. It may be for chocolate, biscuits, cheese, toast, wine – etc, whatever it is it’s usually perceived as a “bad” food.

If you’re trying to lose fat/weight then when a chocolate craving hits you may avoid it at all costs. Why? because it’s “bad”. It’s not a snack packed with protein or fats, or vitamins or all those things we know we should be eating. It’s full of sugar (omg!) so it is definitely evil and must be avoided at all costs…..So you avoid it and have some fruit and a yoghurt (because they’re ‘good’)… but that doesn’t really cut it…. So then you have a nakd bar (fruit and nuts so that’s ‘good’ too!)… but you’re still craving chocolate… so you end up eating the chocolate anyway. None of those snacks are an issue and in fact they’re all delicious but you didn’t want them – you wanted chocolate… and now you’ve ended up eating almost 600 calories.

Instead, if you are craving chocolate then just have it! You don’t need to earn it. You don’t need to justify it. Not every item of food you eat needs to be packed with vitamins, protein etc. If you have a balanced diet overall then it’s absolutely fine to have some foods in your diet that aren’t nutritionally great but that give you pleasure!

Funnily enough, the more you label foods as ‘bad’ and try to avoid these foods, the more power and the more the craving you’ll have for them. When you enjoy the foods you crave or want to eat without guilt, they begin to lose their power over you and your urge to overeat them diminishes. Over time, you’re able to eat anything, without eating everything.

Chances are that in most cases if you enjoy that chocolate for your snack, factor it into your day’s calories, then you won’t feel the need to inhale a giant bar later that day or eat loads of other things you didn’t actually want. So rather than creating rules about foods that are good or bad, try to view all foods as things you can have – in moderation.

Enjoy 🤗

Xx

Carbs make you fat…. 🥔 🍞

I actually lose count of the number of times people tell me it’s carbs that are making them fat, or stopping them losing weight, or that they just need to cut carbs and they’ll lose weight….

The rhetoric is usually something along the lines of – to lose fat/weight you need to cut or reduce carbs and focus on more protein and fat based foods (nuts are a prime example). Many new clients I meet have either tried eliminating carbs from their diet or that they intend to, by which they usually mean cutting out potatoes, bread, pasta etc. Many social media ‘experts’ have suggested that carbs are ‘bad’ and to be avoided – but this is based on very little actual evidence. In fact many studies have supported the fact that eliminating carbs has no significant impact when it comes to weight loss – it’s the total calories that have the impact.

No food or macro is inherently fattening. It all comes down to calories. Carbs do not make you fat – as you can see in this example – those high carb foods are actually far lower in calories per 100g than those high fat foods. Now eating fat-heavy foods won’t make you fat either – but this just illustrates the point re carbs quite nicely.

From a fat loss standpoint, fats are more calorie dense than carbs or protein. Fats contain 9 calories per gram, carbs contain 4 calories per gram and so does protein. Therefore, fat as a macronutrient is more than TWICE the amount of calories compared to carbohydrates or protein. This doesn’t mean fat is ‘bad’ it just means foods that are high in fat are also high in calories, so be mindful mindful of your portions! Often it’s what you’re putting on the carbs that make them higher in calorie – like cheese, butter, nut butter etc.

You CAN eat carbs and still lose weight when you are able to achieve a energy deficit. So stop believing that carbs are responsible for your weight gain. They’re not – whether intentional or not you were just eating more calories than you needed.

🤗

Xx

Why eyeballing amounts is hard… 👀 🥜

I’m always telling my clients to try to be as accurate as possible when they’re tracking their food and calories. This means actually weighing things – particularly anything that is calorie dense.

Very often people tell me that they’re “pretty good” at estimating/eyeballing the amounts they’re having, that they have the same thing each day so they know what it looks like now, that they can estimate pretty well etc. I’m sure some can, but I know I can’t. I can at first but then often amounts creep up without you even realising it.

In this example on the left is 30g peanut butter – measured. On the right is an estimated amount … looks almost the same

right (especially if they weren’t side by side), but it’s actually 75g!

As you can see they look pretty similar to the naked eye, yet the calorie difference is significant (and that doesn’t include the bread it’s on). It would be very easy to assume you were using around 30g peanut butter but actually be using closer to 75g or more! It may not matter now and then but these calories do add up. And if that’s just peanut butter, what about other things?

Now I’m not saying you need to weigh every gram of everything forever. With less calorie dense foods it won’t matter as much but with calorie dense foods (e.g. nut butters, spreads, cheese, avocado etc) when you get it wrong you’re adding a large number of calories. So it’s worth being more

mindful with these sorts of things. This is also why measure like “a scape of peanut butter are no good – what’s a scrape? my scrape may not be your scrape etc Licking that spoon of peanut butter or an extra slug of olive oil in your salad, can easily add up to hundreds of extra calories consumed per day!

So if you are trying to lose fat/watching your calories maybe it’s time to go back and get those scales out and double check those estimates and see if you really are as good as you think you are.

🤗

Xx