A healthy diet is a must for both health and weight reasons - so let's start there. Yet unfortunately, these days having a healthy diet is often so confusing that many people don't know where to start. So, let's move the focus from calories and carbohydrates (which you often need a chart to find!), and plotting in advance how many meals to have each day to something much more user friendly. After all, eating is something we do everyday, so really it shouldn't be that complicated.
In fact, I'm going to give you a new definition of healthy foods and it's very simple. Healthy foods are foods from the earth that have not been or have only been minimally processed. These foods are in the produce section of your organic grocery store and they should make up the vast majority of your diet. That's it, it's very simple.
Now eat as much and as often as you like. Eat when you're hungry, and don't eat when you're not hungry. Don't worry about being on a clock, just give your body some credit for knowing what's it's doing. Know that hunger and not being hungry actually have biological purposes, so we should head them. And keep the healthy foods you enjoy around for when you are hungry, so they're easy to grab.
Use dressings and flavorings for taste, but choose healthy and chemical-free options. Choose unprocessed sea salt, which is full of minerals, over processed table salt (and encourage your favorite restaurants to make the switch too!). Use coconut oil for sautéing and seasoning your veggies. Coconut oil is a wonderfully healthy oil (that once had a bad reputation) and is actually the only oil that can withstand the heat of cooking, without creating free radicals. You can also use coconut oil in most places you would otherwise use butter and it's absolutely delicious. Plus coconut oil raises the metabolism for those with weight to lose and helps maintain weight for those who don't, so when people call it a miracle oil, they're not exaggerating. Obviously, foods with lists of chemicals on the labels don't make the cut by any stretch of the imagination. Quite simply, the best foods are the ones that don't have ingredient labels, and are organic.
These steps alone would constitute a giant leap forward for most people, but natural diet choices are more important for weight loss than because natural choices generally have far fewer calories than processed foods.
The reason eating natural foods regularly is so important is also simple: Your liver is your body’s prime detoxification organ and its prime fat burning organ. Your liver actually has over one thousand jobs in the body, but daily detoxification and fat burning are two of its primary ones. So, when you consume foods that don't require your body to direct large amounts of energy to detoxifying incoming chemicals, your body's prime fat burning organ will then be able to direct its energy towards burning fat!
Yet, the truth is that most people's diets contain large amounts of unnatural chemicals which are require the liver's attention to detoxify them. Of course, when your liver is overworked and overwhelmed by detoxifying the enormous amounts of chemicals in processed foods (look at the labels on what you consume), non-organic foods (think pesticide residue), and other common environmental toxins, it simply doesn’t have the time or space to burn fat.
In fact, because most people have been consuming large amounts of chemicals though foods and lifestyle habits for years, most people’s livers have also become generally congested with toxins, which adds to the weight loss and weight maintenance problem.
When your body's main fat burning organ is congested with toxins, weight loss, and even weight maintenance can absolutely be very difficult. So, in addition to significantly reducing your incoming toxic load, you can do a body cleanse, with liver cleansing, to cleanse away existing stored toxins from your liver and your body. When you do, weight loss and weight maintenance can be very easy, because now you'll have your prime fat-burning organ working on your side.
If you've never done body cleansing or liver cleansing, they are just a way to clean the inside of your body. Imagine if you didn't clean your home for even five years, aside from taking out the trash and doing the dishes. How would it look? Would you even want to live there? Disgusting might be your word choice and it would be hard to argue! Our internal bodies are similar in their need to regular cleansing, because while we have organs for detoxification, they often need a little help - especially with common, yet highly chemical, 21st century diets and lifestyles.
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