Follow Proper Diet Plan

You begin your typical day with a croissant and a coffee. By mid-morning, you’re a bit overwhelmed with work and so you eat some potato chips. At lunch, you’re starving again so you eat a few slices of pizza and more potato chips. By mid-afternoon, you’re bored again, so you decide to sneak in a candy bar. Dinner means a multi-course meal of steak, potatoes with sour cream, some pasta, and strawberry ice cream. Right before bed, you decide to sneak in another candy bar.

Of course, there are obvious problems with this kind of diet. But, aside from the questionable nutritional value of the food, there’s also the problem of the timing of the meals and snacks. When dieting, it’s not only a question of what you eat. When you eat also matters. But, if you’ve been conditioned to have three square meals a day and as many snacks as you want, how can you go about changing your behavior?

To begin with, you should only eat when you’re actually hungry. This means you should not eat out of boredom, sadness, fear, or for any other emotional reasons. Food exists as fuel to help rev up your body for the challenges you face each day. You should not look upon food as a means of comfort or a path to love.

At times, you may notice that you reach for a snack because you just want a break from your routine. Maybe your work is getting to you, or your children are trying your patience. You have to recognize the fact that eating for emotional reasons is a learned behavior; so, in order to reverse course, you simply have to unlearn the behavior. It may take some time, but eventually you’ll find that you are able to limit your eating to those times when your hunger pains start.

But you should also know that just because a person eats often, that does not necessarily mean that he or she is overeating. A number of reputable diet plans recommend eating five or six small meals a day in order to keep your metabolism humming and to ward off hunger. However, these meals should be carefully planned in advance. Otherwise, you could find yourself packing on the pounds because of your frequent snacks. For instance, you might plan to eat bran cereal for your first meal of the day, a bowl of strawberries for your second, some light turkey on whole wheat bread and some apricots for your third, a cup of yogurt for your fourth, some low-fat cheese and crackers for your fifth, and lean roast beef, green beans, and jello for your sixth meal of the day.