Weight Loss Tips: Three Simple Rules For Healthy Eating

Pretty much everyone these days are looking for ways to lose weight and eat healthier. For many people, simply eating a healthy meal really isn't all that simple. Life gets in the way, people get busy, and the drive through fast food restaurant becomes the new kitchen. Even for people who do spend a lot of time cooking, it may be difficult for them to recognize when ingredients should considered healthy or not. In the end, we are faced with a wide variety of food choices which can cause confusion and make eating healthy more difficult than it should be.

Fortunately though there are three simple rules that you can use to determine if a food is healthy or not. To keep things simple, all you have to remember are the following three rules:

1) Is the food high in sugar?

2) Is the food high in fat?

3) Is the food high in calories (calorie dense)?

And that's it. The more rules a food breaks the less likely it is that it will help you to reach your weight loss goals. By remembering these three rules when you go grocery shopping, cook or eat at a restaurant, you will automatically avoid unhealthy and fatty foods that can be detrimental to your success.

However, there are some noted exceptions. Obviously many fruits are high in sugar but they are definitely not bad for you. First of all, fruit sugar (fructose) has a different chemical makeup than the refined sugars (sucrose) used in things like soda pop, desserts, and candy. Fruit sugars are more easily digested by your body as well. In addition to this, fruits are neither high in fat nor are they calorie dense. In fact some fruits contain as much as 95% water. After all, I doubt anyone has ever gotten fat by eating fruit.

Another exception to the rules are nuts, if eaten in moderation. Many nuts are indeed high in fat and calories, however they also contain many important nutrients that your body can use. As long as nuts are eaten in moderation, they can actually help you reach your weight loss goals.

Let's test out the use of the three simple rules on several foods that people all over America eat everyday. Below is a table containing a variety of foods showing which rules they break as well as their calorie density. Foods are listed in order of most to least healthy on the basis of calorie density. It's interesting to note that calorie density generally increases as a food gets more unhealthy.

And now here is a neat graph showing the relative calorie densities of these foods.

As you can see, ranking foods in this fashion pretty much confirms what doctors and health experts have been saying for years. Isn't crazy to think that chocolate has more than five times the calories per ounce than a banana does? It's fun to think about. This is why remembering these three simple rules will help you to get healthy.

If you can remember to apply these three simple rules (-there's only three of them!) to your daily eating habits, then I believe that you shouldn't have a problem losing weight or reaching your health goals. Besides eating healthier, the best thing about these three rules is that its pretty much the only thing you need to remember when eating out, grocery shopping, or preparing a meal.

There is no need to count calories or measure your food and there is definitely no need to starve yourself. In fact, you can eat pretty much every time you are hungry if you follow these rules. This is because foods that meet the three rules will much lower in calories and generally be more filling than foods that don't. In addition to this, it's already well known that healthy eaters eat 4-6 times a day. By following these three simple rules you can to (and still lose weight).