Tuesday, May 21, 2024

More Protein, Lass Carbs

While I highly admire those who advocate No-Carbs Diet, I am personally not cool to practice it.

Diets come and go but a healthy lifestyle will stay with you forever.

Based from my whirlwind sets of hits and miss on my perennial obsession to lose weight, I can scientifically deduce 2 things:

1. Eat more protein, less carbs AND

2. Do the # 1 principle 80% of the time.

Yup! Give yourself a little slack. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You don’t have to stick to healthy foods every second every single day of your waking life. 100% is impossible but 80% is definitely doable.

If you are like me who will go amok if I miss my dessert after meals, eating less carbs seem impossible. But it is actually NOT impossible. All it takes is sheer determination, unwavering perseverance and relentless commitment (hahahah . . .).

Seiously, here are some tips:

1. Instead of eating heaps of rice, settle for 1/2 cup. Do the downgrading very slowly so you won’t even notice the change. What I did was the opposite though. I completely abandoned rice but that gave me the “reason” to eat sweets. So now I am back to eating rice but limited to 1/4 - 1/2 cup and decreased sweets instead.

2. Try mixed nuts instead of sweets for dessert.

3. I used to eat 3 different types of chocolates after meals (which baffled my only son) but have reduced it to only 1 or none at all.

4. If you cannot live without junk food, try to remove them from your pantry and see for yourself if you will indeed die. If you survive, then don’t return them back anymore.

5. Always include protein in every meal. Filipinos (or is it only me?) have this nasty habit of putting pansit (noodles) inside a pandesal (bun) or turning it into a sandwich. Some people I know even eat pansit with rice! Normally, we eat more Carbs than Protein. So how do we shift to more protein and less carbs? Well, you can include 1 egg everyday for breakfast. For lunch, instead of 1 cup rice and 1/2 fish, eat 1/2 cup rice and 1 whole fish (as big as your hand). For snacks, have a peanut butter sandwich instead of donut. For dinner, have meat instead of pasta. Or tuna sandwich with lettuce.

6. Develop the habit of brushing your teeth immediately after eating. That will hopefully prevent you from eating dessert. If you regularly do this, then the only chance that you will eat sweets would be during snack time. Not bad at all.

7. Reschedule eating your dessert at snack time. That way, you reduce your sweets into just 1 instead of 4.

8. Instead of junk food, stock your pantry with cans of tuna, salmon, mackerel, sardines. They will serve you well during those days that you still lack protein in your food intake.

9. You know my first love: Coke. I struggled shifting from Coke Regular to Coke Zero but after one year, I finally got the hang of it. If a Certified True Coke Addict like me can do it, YOU CAN TOO!

10. San Miguel Pale Pilsen is my second love. It took me a while to divorce it but I won in the end. I now patronize San Mig Zero.

(Thanks for still dropping by my blog inspite of my consistent irregularity. Stay safe everyone!)