The difference between healthy eating and ‘reclaiming your waistline’

For me, there are two different ‘levels’ when it comes to healthy eating.

While both aim to make to make life and food as enjoyable as possible, I think it’s important to make the distinction between whether your goals for healthy eating at the moment are towards weight maintenance OR weight loss.

In the Reclaim Your Waistline class, we focused completely on weight loss. And if that is your number one goal at the moment, I’d really suggest starting with that class.

In a nutshell, Reclaiming Your Waistline is all about keeping the carbohydrates in your diet to a low level. Whereas general healthy eating, or weight maintenance is more relaxed around carbohydrates.

We’ll cover more about the role of carbohydrates in Habit 4.

Here are the three key differences between healthy eating and ‘reclaiming your waistline’ (RYW):

1. Grains & starches
For RYW it’s important to avoid grains and starches to keep carbohydrate intake low. For healthy eating, I’d still recommend avoiding wheat, rice and corn because of their high carb levels.

Wheat in particular, also contains gluten which some people are extremely sensitive to, but causes digestion problems for most people to some extent.

I’m happy to include the occasional serving of wholegrain oats because of their high soluble fibre content. Quinoa which is technically not a grain and is high in protein compared to grains is something else I’m happy to eat from time to time.

Starchy vegetables like potatoes and sweet potato are another group I’d recommend avoiding for weight loss but including occasionally for weight maintenance.

2. Fruit
While fruit can be a brilliant source of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and fibre, it’s also packed with sugar.

Fructose, the main fruit sugar is particularly problematic from a weight loss perspective because it is broken down in our bodies in a different way to other sugars.

Fructose is broken down in the liver and tends to be stored as fat quite quickly. And it is for this reason that I recommend avoiding fruit if you want to lose weight.

From a healthy eating perspective, however, not all fruit is created equal.

I’d still leave the sweeter fruits such as mangoes, pineapple, dates and melons for special treats.

Bananas, oranges, grapefruit & figs still contain a healthy dose of carbs so I’d keep them to only one or two times a week.

The best choices for fruit include berries especially blueberries, apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, plums and cherries.

3. Cheat day
In RYW, because the diet is more restricted and weight loss is the goal, one of the ‘rules’ is to have one day a week where you ‘cheat’ or just eat whatever you feel like, regardless of the carb content.

There are 2 reasons for this. First and most importantly are the psychological benefits. It’s much easier (and more fun!) to think I’ll have a big bowl or pasta or that chocolate cake on Saturday than telling yourself ‘never’.

Secondly, there are benefits for your metabolism as well. If we start eating less, our bodies are designed to adapt to having less fuel to burn. Our metabolism ‘slows down’. By having one day a week where you ‘spike’ your energy intake, you reset your metabolism so your body continues at a ‘business as usual’ level which makes it much easier to lose the weight you want.

There is a problem with the ‘cheat day’ concept.

I found myself completely overdoing it and feeling ‘icky’ for a few days afterwards. Not something I enjoyed.

So these days I tend to have just 1 or 2 ‘cheat meals’ a week where I’ll have pasta and dessert. This more moderate approach works best for me. And I’m finding I get the benefits of cheat day without the icky feelings.

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