Eating Tips From a Top Health Retreat
If you want to achieve your weight loss goals, check out these healthy eating tips from a top health retreat! Marsha Hudnall is a dietician and the Director of Green Mountain at Fox Run, Vermont - a healthy weight loss retreat for women.
Before you read her weight loss tips, check out this quip from Gwyneth Paltrow:
“Make your life good. Invest in what’s real. Cook a meal for someone you love. Pause before reacting. Read something beautiful. Treat yourself to something. Go to a city you’ve never been to. Learn something new. Don’t be lazy. Work out and stick with it. Make it great!”
I especially like the part about treating yourself to something - and an amazing treat would be to find the balance between accepting yourself as you are and losing weight. Click on the book cover for more info about Health at Every Size - which says that fat isn’t the problem. Dieting is. And, read on for Marsha’s healthy weight loss tips.
Eating Tips From a Top Health Retreat
Marsha, why don’t diets work?
For the vast majority of people, weight loss diets don’t work in the long run. And the long run is how we measure effectiveness. For the past half century, people have been ‘successful’ losing weight on many different diets, but when it comes to keeping lost weight off, it’s a different story.
A major reason weight loss diets don’t work is because a focus on weight loss backfires for most people. Weight loss diets teach people how to diet to lose weight, not how to eat for long-term health and healthy weights. Achieving your weight loss goals should include learning how to eat for long term health benefits.
Weight loss diets turn people into restrained eaters who manage their eating well when things are going well. But when difficulties arise, their eating falls apart. That’s because they learn to rely on self-control for eating and no longer use their internal cues to guide their hunger. They begin to ignore and/or distrust their internal cues, which sets up lifelong struggles with eating. This frequently leads to developing the habit of emotionally overeating, which won’t help you achieve your weight loss goals. Studies show restrained eaters tend to overeat in response to difficult situations or emotions such as depression, anxiety and anger.
We encourage mindful eating, which means eating mainly to address physical hunger, being thoughtful about our food choices (considering sensual and nourishing aspects of food) and paying attention while eating to fully appreciate food and identify when we are comfortably full.
Marsha’s Opinion on the Mediterranean Diet
Though Marsha believes most weight loss diets don’t work, she also says, “The Mediterranean Diet is one of the most effective diets out there today. Why? It’s not a weight loss diet.” To achieve your weight loss goals, stay away from diets!
This diet prescribes a healthy and tasty way of eating that people can adopt without feelings of restriction or deprivation, which means they are much more likely to be able to continue it over the long term - which will help them achieve their weight loss goals.
The Mediterranean Diet also provides the good nutrition that’s important to support a healthy lifestyle. The solution to healthy weights is eating well (Mediterranean diet-style, if desired) as part of a healthy lifestyle that includes regular physical activity and stress management, in particular to help control emotional overeating.
This type of diet educates Americans on how to eat well. We have in a sense lost our way with healthful eating in the face of busy lifestyles that don’t make a priority of feeding ourselves well. This has been complicated by weight loss diet rules that confuse people about what healthy eating really is. To achieve your weight loss goals, learn about nutrition and healthy eating!
Green Mountain at Fox Run is a healthy weight loss retreat for women only, and teaches how to eat instead of starving, moving bodies for pleasure and physical well-being, and managing stress and negative self-image for health and healthy weight loss.
Readers, what are your healthy eating tips - have you found what works for you?
Comment by Blogging tips and insight on 3 December 2008:
Thanks for the head sup. There are lot of things to do.