How To Eat Healthy For Heart Patients #66

We were talking about you choosing between dieting to lose weight or changing to a eating healthy lifestyle.   Very early in this blog, within the first 5 postings,  I described pretty well why and how I changed to a eating healthy foods lifestyle.  I am going to review how I did it, made the healthy change.  First, I was ready to change lifestyle and committed to myself it was time.  Next, I gathered as much information concerning foods, healthy and unhealthy, to begin the process of eliminating bad and adding good foods to my diet.  To eliminate unhealthy foods, I had to take an honest look at myself.  My eating habits, what I liked to eat, and what I should not be eating.   That was the hard part, and some of my earliest postings document more specifically what foods I ate and why I changed.  Once I honestly determined what I was eating that was bad for my health, I stopped eating it.  Did you catch what I said there?  "What was bad for my health."  I didn't base what I ate or stopped eating on weight loss goals, it was for health.   I knew the weight loss would come as a major benefit of changing eating habits.  I wasn't jumping on the weight scales every day and counting the lost pounds.

I could determine losing weight by how I felt and looked, you will too.  Now next I did something which was very important to getting started.  I bought some books on foods.  Calorie counting, fat content, and cholesterol.  Books which, including foods you prepared in your home, fast foods, restaurant foods, and processed for you foods.  Everything you drink should be included also.    From that information you can determine what foods fit into your categories of bad for you, and foods good for you, that you are going to add to your healthy diet.   Some quick personal examples.  I was a big time snacker.  Chips, dips, cookies.   I replaced those tempting snacks with fruits.  Strawberries became my snack food, with a banana or orange as a heavier in between meal hunger pain snack.

The idea is for you to develop what works for you based on your eating habits.  You will find it more difficult to change if you take the approach of weight loss being your ultimate goal.  It is harder to stay with a diet over an extended period of time. Also, going on a diet to lose weight does not mean you necessarily are eating healthy.  An extreme example, the guy who went on the Twinkie diet, supplemented by all other sorts of pastry snack cake foods to prove you could lose weight eating sweet snacks only.  But you also send your cholesterol levels through the roof.... If you are a heart patient and your cholesterol is high, you need to change to a healthy eating lifestyle, to get to, and maintain heart wise cholesterol levels.  To do that there are foods you should eat to improve HDL and others to avoid to lower your LDL.

Once you start eating differently and it becomes more of a routine and habit you will also begin to enjoy the benefits of weight loss.  In the beginning I would not be very concerned about watching how much weight I was losing, that will come as you progress with changing what you eat.

Okay, I hope you get the idea, and I don't want to get boring here.  If you want some specifics, read the earlier posts or let me know and I will post some more specifics on healthier foods.  Also, if I were you, I would make oatmeal a daily part of my diet for the health and weight loss benefits.  Oatmeal is one of the healthy foods that works on improving cholesterol, and is a satisfying food which aids in weight loss and contributes to overall health.  When you start multiplying  the number of similar healthy foods you begin to eat, and  you  eliminate some of the bad habit foods, you will quickly begin to feel a difference in yourself and the difficulty level begins to lessen.