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Fighting Obesity: Eating to Be Healthy and Lean
Part 4 in a four-part series on obesity and weight loss

Everyone thinks that what you eat is key to controlling body weight. And that’s true … sort of. Americans are eating bigger portions and drinking more liquid calories than ever. There is no doubt that this bump in calorie intake has contributed to obesity.

But how many calories you burn every day can offset extra calories that you take in. And even though people may be eating more calories than they did 50 years ago, they are moving even less and therefore burning even fewer calories through activity than before sedentary, automated lives became the norm.

Studies on populations like the Amish and the Aborigines who don’t use much electricity have found that they move doing daily tasks for about eight hours a day. They aren’t training for marathons, but they are active during most waking hours. The point? It’s crucial that you move more all day, every day to offset what you eat.

Although moving more is the key message of this series, you do still need to watch what goes in your mouth. An excellent way to do that is to consume more good-for-you food. To do that it may be helpful to shy away from diet-think and look at what you eat from a whole new perspective…

A New Way to View Eating

One overlooked aspect of food you eat is its ability to nourish your body. So many people get fixated on how many calories or fat grams or carbs they take in that they fail to recognize what’s most important—whether they are getting the nutrients they need.

Every cell has a specific function. And how that cell operates depends on if it has vitamins, minerals and other biochemicals to help it do its thing. These are obtained or made from the food you eat. Sure, your body can cope when it doesn’t get everything it needs. But like a faulty engine or a leaky roof, it’s not working at its best and may eventually fall into serious disrepair.

Early signs that you may not be well nourished can be poor skin (acne, rashes, pale skin tone), slow healing, a tendency to bruise, headaches, feeling sluggish, cloudy eyes, poor memory and reaction times, heavy limbs and a multitude of other symptoms. If you don’t feel or look 100 percent, a major contributor may be a poor diet. You need to understand too that a vitamin and mineral supplement is not enough to cover your bases because there are nutritious components in foods that haven’t been identified by scientists yet. So you can still be missing out if you are not eating enough good food.

Eating Rules to Live By

You may be hoping for the perfect diet or eating plan. I’m not going to go into detail about calorie counting. Any diet will work in the short term. And whether a particular diet admits to it, all diets work based on cutting calories. But not all diets nourish you as they should.

Instead, you should “diet” without dieting by following five key principles for every meal. If you focus on nourishment rather than deprivation, over time, you’ll fuel your body with what it needs and automatically cut down on the bad stuff that keeps you fat. If you make these changes along with moving more, you will lose weight and you will keep it off forever..