There's a lot of good and bad dieting advice out there, isn't there? Sometimes I just don't know which way to look anymore, so I end up looking at everything and trying for hours to figure out just exactly what is going to work for ME when it comes to losing weight.
When it comes to reading about the debate of when it's the right time to eat, how much we should be eating, why we should be eating or not eating, my head can sometimes spin. The one thing I know about myself is that I will get HANGRY (that's hungry + angry) if I don't eat regularly and sometimes, without realizing it, I'm all of a sudden starving. That's why I agree with a recent article in U.S. News about the worst dieting advice, ever.
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In their Eat + Run health blog, author Yoni Freedhoff argues that the most common and absolutely WORST piece of advice when it comes to a diet is to "wait until you're hungry to eat." He argues that the reason this is a terrible piece of advice is because, no matter what, hunger always wins.
If you've ever gone to the supermarket hungry, then you know exactly what he's talking about. There have been a million times when I've gone to the grocery store with my tight little list of products that I needed to buy and thought: oh, I'm hungry, but I can wait till I get home. Then what happens the minute I step inside the store? I buy EVERYTHING.
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Well, okay, maybe not everything… but I definitely load up my cart with a lot more than I had originally planned to buy! And usually all those extra goodies are not things that I should even be eating on a diet, anyway. The reasons for me going off track are pretty simple, though, as he explains:
We choose differently when we're hungry. No surprise there, given that in the grand scheme of things, our genes have been forged through hundreds of millions of years of extreme dietary insecurity. For the vast majority of human existence, hunger was death; satisfying hunger was life.
So what's the solution to this advice? Two words: scheduled eating. Now, I don't mean that you have to time every single meal perfectly but I have found that, when I regularly schedule healthy snacks throughout the day and know roughly what time I'm eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, I feel MUCH better. I certainly never reach the point where I'm starving and hangry, which makes it all that much easier for me to make sensible choices when it comes to healthy eating. And, if you're dieting, then that's pretty much the best scenario you can hope for, isn't it?
What's the worst piece of dieting advice that you've ever heard? Do you try to eat on a regular schedule to avoid starving? Share with us in the comments below!
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