The first thing we have to do is take control of what we eat.
Initially, you’ll want to greatly reduce the frequency of when you eat out and carefully choose the restaurant when you do go out. When we eat at a restaurant, we don’t control what goes into our food. Yes, we can make good choices, like salads with some salmon and a healthy dressing on the side. But we don’t know how much sugar is in the dressing, or how they prepared the salmon. Also, the temptation to eat two or three of those dinner rolls will be there. And then the dessert tray will come around to tempt us at the end of the meal. Remember, restaurants are a business. They want you to eat a lot and to come back often.
So, if we’re serious about taking control of our diet and losing weight, we’ll need to cook more at home, take prepared meals with us to work, and certainly avoid fast food restaurants.
Healthy choices begin at the supermarket. It doesn’t matter what we say our diet is if the wrong foods are in our house. In other words, you’re less likely to eat a whole bag of potato chips while watching television if you don’t have potato chips in the house. But isn’t it true that you didn’t plan to buy those potato chips? They just ended up in your shopping cart.
So if I were to give you a diet that will change your life, making sure you get everything you need to not only lose weight, but also to become healthy, along with avoiding all the bad stuff that’s causing you to be sick, I’d have you do one thing. Yes, just one thing. Here it is:
When you go to the supermarket, only shop around the periphery of the store.
That’s it. If you do this one thing, your life will change.
You might be thinking, “Dr. Peters, that’s too simple.” But know this, all the good foods, everything your body was designed to eat, are on the periphery of the store. In the middle of the store are all those things that contribute to the Clash.
If you stay along the periphery of the store, you won’t be purchasing sodas, you won’t be buying cookies, and most important, you won’t be taking home all that processed food that is full of sugar and other empty calories.
The Shopping Plan
When you enter the supermarket, you’ll start with the produce section, frozen and fresh, work your way to the butcher area, then on to the dairy sections, and hopefully exit without noticing the sugar waiting for you at the checkout. The other temptations you’ll encounter before the counter will be the bakery and whatever major food companies place at the end of the aisles to tempt you into the center of the store.
The middle of the supermarket is the scary place. That’s were all the bad stuff is. The food in the middle of the store has sugar, lots of sugar. In fact, 82% of all processed foods have
added sugar, even those chips and cans of soup. As long as you stay along the outside walls, you won’t have to worry about getting the “wrong” items. You’ll also be avoiding all the temptation from the middle of store. The main thing we’re after is making a change that you can continue the rest of your life.
See, too often we think of a “diet” as a short-term fix. We deprive ourselves, watch the pounds drop off, and then reward ourselves. But the one-time reward becomes a habit, and next thing we know, we are right back where we started, maybe even a little worse off.
My goal is to accommodate your biology and present some weight loss choices for you. If you simply stay on the outer edge of your supermarket, you’ll be well on your way to maintaining your weight, and probably even losing some pounds. Better yet, you’ll be healthier, happier, and you may even begin enjoying foods you haven’t considered in the past.
Now that we have established your shopping routine, we have a few other issues to address and some suggestions about what you should be eating from the periphery of your supermarket, how often, and how much.