6 Principles of Healthy Eating for Weight Loss
Have you tried – and failed – to lose weight in the past? Following these 6 simple eating principles can help make sustained, healthy weight loss easy.
If you’re trying to lose weight, you’ve probably tried a variety of diet programs before. But one model that is showing great promise in helping people to lose weight and keep it off is a method called “Whole-Person Integrative Eating.” While this sounds like a mouthful, it is actually a fairly simple program that may help treat our current epidemic of overeating and obesity.
Despite the modern-sounding name, the program is based on “a wide range of guidelines on food and eating from ancient food wisdom from Eastern healing systems, world religions, and cultural traditions, as well as Western nutritional science,” according to an article in Integrative Medicine from October, 2015.
The WPIE model has formulated these guidelines into 6 simple principles. But simple as they are, they run counter to our Western eating habits, so they may be harder to implement than you may expect…
To put these principles into practice, you will need to change some habits you may already have in place – habits which most likely have led you to become overweight in the first place. These habits include emotional eating, task snacking, and eating alone, among others. All of these habits are related to overeating, and being overweight or obese, so the sooner you can break them, the better!
To break your diet/weight gain cycle, ditch your old habits, and instead, practice these healthy eating habits daily to acheive success in your weight loss efforts:
(1) Eat Fresh, Whole Foods – The kind that you can grow in your own garden, or find around the perimeter of the grocery store.
(2) Eat With Positive Feelings – No guilt allowed!
(3) Eat With Mindfulness – Listen to your body, and pay attention to what it is telling you about the food you are consuming.
(4) Eat With Gratitude – Enjoy and appreciate your food!
(5) Eat With Loving Regard – Think about how good the food tastes as you eat it, and how good it is for you – how your consumption of it is nourishing your body, and view your eating of it as an act of love for yourself.
(6) Eat With Others – Multiple studies have shown that eating in a group, or as a family unit, helps curb overeating when compared to eating alone.
Once you make these 6 healthy eating principles a habit in your life, you may find, like many others have when following the practice of Whole-Person Integrative Eating, that weight loss becomes a lot easier for you.
