This title was chosen carefully based on some suggested topics for my next blog. In response to these suggestions, I put this entry together to help those understand how important nutrition is when adopting a healthier lifestyle and how to realistically change your eating habits. As a way to put it into a realistic perspective, I'm going to briefly tell you my own story to changing my lifestyle.
All throughout my younger years until the time I was a senior in high school, I never paid much attention to optimal nutrition. Furthermore, I would scoff at anything that said "reduced fat" or something along those lines. I moaned and groaned at the idea of "skim" milk. My parents couldn't force feed that stuff to me! Needless to say, hot dog Mondays, Whataburger Tuesdays, DiGiorno Wednesdays, Domino's Fridays, and fried chicken Sundays didn't really contribute to a healthy nutritional profile, but it's what I wanted to eat. I don't blame my parents though, because I was a picky eater from day one. For the longest time, you couldn't get me to drink water unless it was before, during, and after football or some other sporting event, and of course, in my younger years, I would opt for a sports drink instead.
One day, as a senior in high school, I decided to give up sodas and start reading nutrition labels to be aware of what I was eating. Although I didn't make a lot of drastic changes, I changed what I ate at lunch to chicken based meals instead of getting the bacon cheeseburgers and cheese fries. As a way to cut the sodas, I started drinking sports drinks or sweet tea. Given, these drinks still have a lot of sugar, they lack the heavy carbonation, phosphoric acid, and caffeine content of sodas. I'd say after about a month or two of doing this, I started getting water everyday at lunch and rewarding myself on Fridays with a sports drink or sweet tea. After a couple of months of doing this, I was able to get myself to drink more water and cut the sodas completely. Since my senior year in high school in 2004, I have probably had five 12 oz. cans of soda to count. Basically, it's something I might have once in an entire year, and I typically don't even finish the soda before it gets warm.
So my food intake still hadn't changed a whole lot, but the summer before my freshman year in college, I finally switched from 2% milk to fat free (skim). I also started eating whole wheat bread instead of just wheat or white. One of my roommates got me into eating turkey bacon and choosing the lean ground beef instead of the full fat. By the summer of 2005, the changes started to come along (on a side note, every summer after graduation was spent doing a lot of physical activity and time in the gym; however, once school started back up in 2005, I dropped exercise until the spring of 2006, and it's been permanent since). Upon starting the 2005 fall semester, I started adding Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, Smart Ones, etc as my lunches and dinners. Although they aren't the absolute best, they were tons better than what I was eating back in high school. When fitness started to become a big thing to me, I started buying protein shakes and bars as meal replacements. I have to say, my body fat percentage went from about 20% to 15% just in a couple of months of small changes and more exercise.
By the fall 2006 semester, my diet started to go into full swing by adopting homecooked meals with things like chicken breast, lean turkey, brown rice, black beans, whole wheat or corn tortillas, egg whites, and many other variants of healthy alternatives. After getting to a body fat percentage of around 6%, I achieved what I wanted, and from then, I have been maintaining between 8-12% body fat. My diet currently consists of whole grain cereals, skim dairy products, fruits, vegetables (I won't lie, I still have a hard time getting these in, but I try), the healthier microwaveable meals, protein shakes, meal replacement bars, whole wheat bread, lean turkey, and when I cook, chicken breast, whole wheat pastas, etc.
Without adopting a healthier diet, I would not have achieved the same goals I did over that course of time. My weight and health has changed drastically in those times when my diet changes. I understand when my body is not reacting the way it should be because of years of conditioning the body to understand what homeostasis feels like. How could we ever know what's wrong if we haven't experienced what's right?
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