weight-loss

“We all can’t help everyone, but we can all help someone” is a phrase that I came across recently that really rings true for me.

I know that I can’t change the world or get everyone eating I talk to eating healthy, but I feel it’s really important to share knowledge and help others. I’ve always been an extremely inquisitive and curious person, and whenever I learn something new I just feel the need to share it.

So if I can make a difference for just one of you today with this post, I’m going to do it.

First, I’m going to start off with a basic assumption: I know you want to be fit and healthy. Who doesn’t? But it’s not very easy to be once you’ve learned some bad habits is it?

We really want to change and have more energy, lose the weight and feel great. But something happens along the way…

You may or may not know what it is, but I think I know.

We tend to get in our own way and kind of sabotage ourselves, whether it’s subconsciously or not.

Let’s take a look at the some the top reasons we prevent ourselves from reaching our goals when it comes to achieving health and weight loss.

-Bad Attitude & Negative Perspective
-How You Talk To Yourself
-Wanting to Look Good To Impress Others
-Lack of Preparation and Planning
-Lack of Motivation

Bad Attitude & Negative Perspective

Your attitude about diet and lifestyle can stop you from succeeding before you even get started.

What not to do:

As dieters, we can have this attitude that eating healthy isn’t attractive. That the food doesn’t taste “good enough” as what we’re used to, that we’re deprived from our favorite treats, and somehow we’re being punished for our sins until we can drop the weight or gain our health back.

Then once we’ve achieved our goal we hope we can have a few treats again and relax a little.

You might even be telling yourself or others “Oh I can’t have that any more, I’m on a diet!!!”

Let me tell you from personal experience, this approach does NOT work.When we look at our new food as “the enemy” or not as good as what we used to have, we start to feel upset and stressed and resent it. And this can leave you seeking solace in your old favorites, trying to comfort yourself to feel better or feeling depressed and frustrated day after day.

What to do instead:

Change that attitude into a positive one.

Say to yourself something like, “I want to turn over a new leaf and start choosing foods that are not only delicious but are good for me and make me feel good.”

You know some of your past food choices haven’t been ideal. That’s ok. Today is a new day and try to have a positive attitude just to try it out. If you have to, fake it til you make it.

Try to look at your situation as wanting to be kind to yourself in a different way, a better way that not only keeps you healthy but brings more to your life like energy, happiness and longevity.

Try saying to yourself “I can eat whatever I want, but I want to choose foods that are healthful instead”.

Turn the negative into a positive. You make the decisions for you. You decide what you eat, and you choose different foods that are healthy, they are not forced upon you. Keep it positive and avoid any negative talk or attitude about your plant based meals.

By the time you get used to eating new healthier foods, your tastebuds will have caught up with you and you’ll realize these foods do actually taste pretty good, better than you thought they would.

Wanting to Look Good To Impress Others

Let’s face it, sometimes we can be a little insecure and vain.

We look at pretty and attractive people on tv and in the magazines and we can start to envy them.

Surely we would be happier if only we looked like them right?

What not to do:

You try to convince yourself to eat better and start exercising so you can dress to impress and look good for your spouse or flaunt it in front of friends and acquaintances.You think having people envy you will make you feel better about yourself and that should be motivation enough to stick to a new plan.

The truth is you’re actually sending a really bad message to your subconscious.

That somehow because you’re not currently getting praised for your looks or health that you aren’t worth it and if you were that would mean you were a success and make you feel better about yourself.

This is a bad situation.

The person who should care the most about your health is yourself. No one can force you or motivate you better to get healthy than yourself. Trying to diet or lose weight for someone else will not work for very long and soon you’ll be back to square one and still feel pretty crappy about yourself.

What to do instead:

Realize that you are the best motivator for getting healthy. Tell yourself that you want to get fit and feel great because of what a positive effect it will have on your life.

Get excited about all the benefits you will have by getting in shape and eatingbetter.

Things like:

-more energy
-better mood
-clothes fitting better
-being more outgoing
-feeling confident about your body
-wanting to dress up and go out
-not feeling guilty about food

All of these things will be a much better at motivating you to get healthy than just to look good for someone else or impress acquaintances and strangers.

Feed your soul and not your ego and you’ll naturally feel this positive shift in your perspective and behavior.

How You Talk To Yourself

This will predominantly concern women as we tend to be very critical of ourselves and expect perfection.

What not to do:

You look at yourself in the mirror and feel hopeless and depressed. “How did I let it get this far?” you might ask yourself. You don’t feel worthy, you feel ashamed and suddenly you just want to sit around and open up a tub of ice-cream to console yourself.

If you ever feel like this please do not lose hope. The problem is not what you see in the mirror. The problem is what you are saying to yourself and how you are treating yourself. The mirror is only a reflection of your previous behavior. You’ve made yourself feel unworthy of health and success somehow turned to food to help fill the emptiness or sadness you feel.

What to do instead:

Realize that you are not the sum of what you see in the mirror. There is far more to you than what can be seen on the surface. But you need to look at that reflection of yourself as your friend, actually your best friend.

If you’re not your own best friend, don’t expect anyone else to be able to treat you better than yourself. Look at yourself and say “I accept myself unconditionally as I am right now.”

It helps if you can say this at least 5 times a day.

Even if you feel silly, even if you think it’s a lie, please just try it.

It helps to train your subconscious to associate your image with love and acceptance, instead of shame and guilt.

Visualization is highly beneficial for success. If you have any other conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer you can use positive affirmations to help
your body heal as well. Envision yourself at your ideal body weight and in perfect health. Try to think about yourself like this throughout the day.

It will send signals to your body that will help you achieve your goals.

Lack of Preparation and Planning

What not to do:

You buy a bunch of recipe books or you spend hours online looking at recipes you want to make only to let them sit there in the back of your mind “to try one day”.

You don’t make a shopping list of items to buy, and you don’t really think about when you’ll go grocery shopping or when you’ll have time to make lunches or dinner.

So you come home from work, stressed out and feeling guilty and you order take out or pull out something unhealthy from the freezer to reheat.

You tell yourself “maybe next week I’ll do better… but I don’t know if I can do it.”

What to do instead:

This is something I really had to work on myself.

When I have been most successful in eating healthy I’ve prepared all of my meals at home, and brought food with me wherever I went.

1. Find some recipes that you want to make for the week. Plan out some simple meals like smoothies or oatmeal for breakfast, soup, stews, wraps or sandwiches for lunch and some casseroles or entrees for dinner.

2. Write down all the ingredients you need to buy and plan 1 or 2 times that you can shop for groceries. If you plan on making a lot of green smoothies or salad it helps to go twice a week as sometimes you can run out of fridge space for those bulky items.

3. The last step is to schedule some cooking/prep time for meals. If you don’t make time for this you really won’t be able to succeed and you risk having your produce go to waste.

Even if you have a busy work schedule or family life, try to find 1-2 hours at least 2-3 times a week that you can dedicate to creating healthy meals. Just take it slow, start out with a few recipes until you get the hang out if it.

If you make sure you have healthy meals already prepared in the fridge you are more likely to eat them whenever you get busy and stressed. Don’t let yourself get to the point where you’re starving, cranky and there’s nothing ready to eat in the fridge so you go out and get some fast food instead.

Anticipate those situations that make it easy for you to feel tempted to grab take out or fast food and be prepared.

Every time you have one of your healthy meals instead of something else, smile and praise yourself a little. You’re on your way to success!

Lack of Motivation

You may feel a lack of motivation towards many things, exercising, grocery shopping, preparing meals, eating healthy
etc.

Try to determine the root cause of your lack of motivation.

If you’re just too tired, try to go to bed a little earlier and get a little more sleep. If you feel uninspired or afraid of trying something new, ask your spouse or a friend to do it with you for moral support. (This could be exercising together, shopping together, cooking together etc).

You can also meet like minded people on websites such as www.meetup.com if you’re looking for some activity partners or veggie enthusiasts to talk to.

If you feel like you don’t have any time to work out, look at your schedule and plan all your other activities out and then see where you have some time. Even if you just
make time 30 minutes 3 times a week before work or after dinner to go for a walk or a light jog it will make a difference.

The key is to make realistic goals and start out with what you can manage and stick to it.

Studies have shown that once you have created a new habit and stuck to it for at least 21 days, it becomes almost second nature and is very easy to keep up.

The hardest part is going to be getting to that 21 days. But just take it one day at a time and praise yourself for the little victories along the way.

So now that we’ve covered some of the mental blocks that might be preventing you from being successful at a health new life style, I want to encourage you to remember the important things I’ve covered in this post.

-Start having a positive attitude with healthy food

-Don’t change for anyone else, change for yourself

-Accept yourself for who you are today

-Plan ahead for success

-Make time and get motivated with friends
or loved ones

While I can’t personally coach everyone on living a successful lifestyle (I’m still working on myself too!) I can help you when it comes to making meals with my mouth watering plant based dishes.

My Low Fat Vegan Starter Kit is the perfect way to get started in this journey.

100% real food, with no oil, and no processed ingredients.

All with tantalizing photos to inspire you every day. Best of all they are omnivore and picky eater tested and come with a 100% 60 day money back guarantee so it’s risk free to try.

Get the Low Fat Vegan Starter Kit here:

http://www.plantbasedu.com/LowFatVeganStarterKit

And I want to say thank you for all that you do by reading my emails and blog posts because without you I wouldn’t be able to reach out and help the world.

So in turn we are helping each other. 🙂

P.S. If you’ve already bought one of my ebooks in the package you can definitely upgrade to the whole package at a discount. Just contact me and I’ll give you the
details!

Today I have a really healthy and easy recipe for you, especially if you’re interested in losing some weight, feeling better and eating more home cooked food. It’s a delicious spin on cabbage soup. No this is not the recipe from the Cabbage Soup Diet (which after looking at makes me think it kinda sucks…) Mine features whole homemade ingredients without any packages of soup seasoning, V8 or chemical flavour enhancers.

The point of the cabbage soup in the cabbage soup diet is to fill you up on broth and vegetables in place of one meal a day so that you can lose weight fairly easily without crash dieting or being hungry.

A Healthier Alternative To The Cabbage Soup Diet

If you wanted a healthy guideline to lose some weight a safe and manageable way it would be to just eat fruits, lots of vegetables (even baked potatoes, sweet potatoes and squash are ok) and homemade vegetable soup (should be oil/cream free). You want to fill up on lower calorie high fibre nutrient dense foods. You could also have some beans or homemade hummus to go with your meals if desired as well. People gain weight because they eat too many rich foods like fried foods, meat, cheese, cream, butter, pastries, and bread products with oil in/on them. Even eating a diet of just potatoes wouldn’t cause you to gain weight, but if you slathered every potato in butter, sour cream and bacon it would become far too rich to achieve weight loss.

Actually I put a friend of mine on a fat free (and also no bread or flour products) diet back in September and she’s lost 50 lbs already just by eating more homemade meals and making sure they were based on foods like potatoes, vegetables and even rice instead of meat, bread, pastries and dairy products. She’s doing great and still enjoys eating this way every day.

One thing people think when it comes to alternative “healthier” lifestyles it that they will always hate it, never be able to do it or even starve to death (maybe even get bored to death too!). Let me tell you that is not the case. I started eating more raw and vegan for health reasons, not because I didn’t like how steak or chicken tasted. (Hey I’m being honest!) But now I’ve been eating vegetable based dishes for so long that I actually don’t miss or crave any animal foods at all. I really couldn’t imagine eating them again. I actually enjoy the food I eat now even more than the food I used to eat. (Whatever you do most often now, you tend to like even more than what you used to do back then. It’s just the way the brain perceives things. Recent events tend to be better than past events a lot of the time because their more clear in our minds.) I like vegetables so much that if I go to a regular restaurant and get a pasta dish or soup that has hardly any vegetables in it, I get sad and want more vegetables! I could never just eat a big plate of plain spaghetti and sauce anymore, I love putting vegetables or lentils in it to give it more flavour.

People may think all vegans eat are carrots, broccoli and celery, but that is simply not true. In fact I eat a much wider variety of ALL plant foods now than I ever did before. I can’t even say I have a favourite fruit or vegetable. I love many of them like cherries, mangoes, watermelon, white peaches, Hawaiian papayas, pineapple, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, eggplant, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, Thai pumpkin, broccoli, asparagus, mushrooms and more. I wouldn’t be able to choose any of those as my favourite. I eat an even bigger variety than these, but these are some foods I really enjoy eating regularly and never get sick of eating. (This doesn’t even includes all the beans, legumes and whole grains I enjoy as well!)

I made 2 batches of vegetable broth and 2 batches of this cabbage soup last week, it was that good. One day I had 3 bowls of it for dinner! At 108 calories a bowl there’s really nothing to worry because you couldn’t possibly gain weight by eating this soup.

Fat Free Vegan Cabbage Soup Recipe

Serves 8

Ingredients:

2 medium sweet onions, diced (like Vidalia, Walla Walla etc. They have light coloured skin and a slightly flattened top and bottom)
5 cloves of garlic, minced
10 oz./283 g package of mushrooms, sliced
2 tsp fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dried)
6 large stalks of celery, leaves removed and sliced
4 large carrots, peeled and sliced
1 lb/454 g (1/2 head) of green cabbage, shredded or cut with mandolin
28 oz/793 g (or 2 16oz cans) fire roasted diced tomatoes (I use Muir Glen Organics)
10 cups/2.5 qtss/2.3 L fresh vegetable broth (my recipes are here) or low sodium packaged vegetable broth
Herbamare/Sea salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Saute onions, garlic and mushrooms in 2-3 cups of vegetable broth for 5-6 minutes until the onions are tender. (Mushrooms take longer to cook than the rest of the veggies, so we’re cooking them first.)
Add the rest of the vegetables, the thyme, the canned tomatoes, and the vegetable broth.
Cook the vegetables over medium heat for 30-40 minutes or low heat for 1.5-2 hours until the vegetables are tender.
Season to taste with Herbamare or salt and pepper. Add a little cayenne or chili pepper if you like the soup spicy. If you like your soup a little thinner you can add a little more vegetable broth or water if desired. But don’t add too much or you will dilute the flavour.
Serve!

Additional Tips:

This soup is almost like a cabbage stew because it’s so full of vegetables. I prefer to have lots of veggies in my soup and a little less broth. You can add a little more broth if you like really watery soups. (But this is already so low calorie you don’t really need to water it down if you’re looking for a diet-friendly meal.)

I found I didn’t need to add much salt to my soup as I made homemade broth that was naturally sweet from the sweet onions, carrots and thyme and the fire roasted tomatoes have enough salt in them already.

This is a great recipe that you can use for a soup base and just change out some of the veggies for different ones for variety. You can also experiment with different salt free seasoning blends. Just make sure you always add a little, let it cook for a few minutes and taste test before adding more, so you don’t end up with an over seasoned soup!

If you use a bowl or two of this soup with some fruit or a salad every day instead of your normal meal it will help you lose weight just like any other meal replacement plan. But this is much more nutritious because it’s homemade and packed full of vitamins and minerals from the veggies. Even more so if you make your own vegetable broth. There is no comparison for me between store bought and homemade broth, so give it a try sometime and you will enjoy homemade soups even more!

Even if you changed a few of the vegetables in this soup it would be around the same calories. Overall it’s a very low calorie nutrient dense soup.

Nutrition Facts
Servings Per Recipe: 8
Serving Size: 1 serving

Amount Per Serving

Calories		104.0

Total Fat		0.4 g

	Saturated Fat	0.1 g

	Polyunsaturated Fat	0.2 g

	Monounsaturated Fat	0.0 g

Cholesterol		0.0 mg

Sodium		254.9 mg

Potassium		562.3 mg

Total Carbohydrate		17.8 g

	Dietary Fiber	6.3 g

	Sugars	7.8 g

Protein		3.8 g


Vitamin A	97.3 %

Vitamin B-12	0.0 %

Vitamin B-6	9.9 %

Vitamin C	69.2 %

Vitamin D	6.7 %

Vitamin E	2.0 %

Calcium	10.3 %

Copper	9.9 %

Folate	12.6 %

Iron	10.5 %

Magnesium	5.5 %

Manganese	9.9 %

Niacin	10.4 %

Pantothenic Acid	7.9 %

Phosphorus	7.1 %

Riboflavin	11.7 %

Selenium	6.2 %

Thiamin	6.6 %

Zinc	3.3 %

How To Stop Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals

Bad Attitude & Negative Perspective

Wanting to Look Good To Impress Others

How You Talk To Yourself

Lack of Preparation and Planning

Lack of Motivation

Fat Free Vegan Cabbage Soup (Cabbage Soup Diet Recipe For Weight Loss)

A Healthier Alternative To The Cabbage Soup Diet

Fat Free Vegan Cabbage Soup Recipe

Have you ever made cabbage soup before or tried the Cabbage Soup Diet?