Lose Weight by Learning to Cook!
Welcome back to my Top 100 weight loss tips. This post brings you article number 22 in the series and provides another great tip that'll help you lose weight.
This post looks at the very simple fact that when you prepare and cook your own food, you naturally cut out so many of the bad foods that cause you to gain weight.
Healthy Home Cooked Meals
The message is really simple in this particular tip, which is to prepare and cook your own food. And if you can't cook, then its about time you learned, from scratch if necessary. That way, you do something that is fundamentally important to your health and that is you get to control exactly what you are eating.
OK, you might say that the supermarket has a great range of healthy diet meals that are easy to prepare in the microwave, saving time and effort. And who has time to cook these days? If you are affirming this idea to yourself, then you are missing the point completely.
If your life is so busy and you have so little time to do the very basics for yourself, then isn't it about time you re-evaluated what you are on this planet for? Hint: it's to live, not merely to exist.
Making Time for Yourself
There's the nub of the problem for so many people. They have forgotten that life is for living and instead rush their way through each day without giving any time to themselves, instead giving it all to their jobs or to other people.
That includes the family, but not on a sharing capacity, more on a total giving up of your own life in order to serve rather than to share. But enough of the philosophical debate on life. This is about your health and how to lose weight.
Make the time to cook meals at home. And if your partner comes home from work and slumps on the sofa in front of the TV, then get them to join in and share the load. Because, when you think about it, your health should never be seen as a "load" or a "chore" but should be the most important thing to you.
And living on a poor diet of supermarket ready meals, takeaway food and junk is really not good for your health. It is in all likelihood the very reason you are overweight and you're reading this in the first place.
Processed Food is Not Healthy!
All that processed food is not good for you, no matter what it may say on the label. If its been prepared and packaged by someone else, you cannot know for sure what's in it. There will almost always be preservative chemicals for starters.
High levels of salt, sugar and fats are par for the course as these food need to be made as cheaply as possible to make a healthy profit for the manufacturers. Otherwise they simply wouldn't make them. So don't delude yourself that they are made for your well being. They're not. They're made to make the manufacturer rich.
When you prepare and cook your own food from fresh, natural ingredients, you control what you eat and cut out a lot of that extra salt, sugar, saturated fat and additives like monosodium glutamate (MSG) with all the health risks associated with them. You can choose to cook without salt. Fresh vegetables steamed are much healthier than canned, frozen or processed.
Fresh cuts of meat have not been pumped full of MGS and hydrogenated vegetable (trans fats) oil to bulk them out.
Lastly, when you create your own meals, you also control the size of your own portions, which should be smaller than you are used to because that's another way you will lose weight rather than maintain your current overweight figure. Think about that!
100 Weight Loss Tips number 21 follows in the next post!
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Posted on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 1 Comments
1 thoughts on "Lose Weight by Learning to Cook!"
Lena says:
You know, I could not cook to save my life and relied on take out meals and stuff that I could microwave from the supermarket. I read your post awhile back about learning to cook to lose weight and it lit a fire under my backside! I went out and had some lessons and now I cook all my own meals with fresh ingredients. And you know, in two months, I lost over a stone in weight! Thank you for your advice and getting me to do something positive for myself for once in my life!