I Ate Healthy But Still Gained Weight - Find Out Why!
Guess how you gained so many unwanted pounds? I am not sure whether you were eating fatty or healthy foods before your weight gain, and I won’t even ask you about that either, because the type of food you eat doesn’t always determine whether or not you would gain weight! Case in point: almost everyone would tell you that if you want to lose weight or avoid weight gain, you should steer clear of junk foods! But if that were true, I would have been overweight by several pounds by now, because I am a self-confessed junk food addict! If someone tells me to avoid junk foods, I won’t be able to follow his advice!
Hardly a week goes when I don’t have chocolates, cakes, white breads, etc. -all high-calorie junk foods supposed to make you overweight, but they haven’t affected my body weight over the years (yes, I have always been like this). I also find it hard to resist the temptation of going into a fast food restaurant and taking a bite!
Now, here is a second scenario: I know a friend who ate nothing except fruits and vegetables. He would eat the fruits raw and the vegetables roasted or fried in olive oil. You would think that he is thin and fit, right? Wrong!
Recently he was fired from a lucrative job, thanks to the economic downturn which is affecting the world like never before. As you know, he soon got depressed and began to eat more than before. Again, he was eating only ‘healthy’ foods, just more of them than before. A few months into this lifestyle and now he flaunts a very big, fat belly in place of his original flat belly!
Were you surprised? Don’t be. It is all about controlling your food portions. In my case, what I didn’t tell you is that I ‘control’ my junk food intake. I don’t visit fast food restaurants more than once or twice per week; as far as chocolates are concerned, I have a small bar every week but no more than that. I usually have white breads and cakes every two or three days, but both the bread and cake are half the size of what my brother has!
In essence, I have learnt to control my junk food intake in a way which lets me enjoy my favorite foods without the additional headache of weight gain.
My regular food habit is something I should tell you about too. Unlike most other people, I don’t have two or three large meals per day. Instead, I split those large meals into several smaller meals, usually no more than five or six. I eat each of those small meals every two or three hours.
Of course maintaining a healthy diet comes easy for me since I work from home. I also make sure that I snack between two consecutive meals, and contrary to what you might believe, my snacks are anything but junk foods! I usually have a carrot or an apple as snacks; sometimes I even cook popcorn at home using low-fat oil and then store them in my refrigerator to serve as snacks!
In case of my friend, he followed healthy eating habits all along, but he erred on one count: he increased his food intake drastically owing to depression. Hence, his body received more calories than required, and consequently deposited those extra calories as fat, thereby making him bulky!
There are people who believe that the source of calories DOES matter when it comes to maintaining a slim body; however, as you saw from the above article, weight maintenance is all about exercising portion control. Give your body exactly what it needs at a particular time; that way, it would never have any extra calorie left to deposit as fat and you would always be able to maintain your lean, slim figure!