There are so many options to lose weight available these days, and some of them are 100% nutritionally sound and well thought-out. However, the majority of them are completely unrealistic for busy people with lives and daily schedules that are always subject to change, i.e. when your day suddenly becomes upended by a last minute invitation to dinner with a friend or your kid is sent home sick from school.
Success in your plan to lose weight comes from simplicity. My clients get to their fitness goals by keeping meals on a schedule, sticking to my no-calorie-counting portioning method (see my AND/life app for more on this) and following what I call “A/B Eating.” The A/B strategy makes it a breeze to lose weight by making no-brainer, non-decisions out of meals you don’t share with others or eat on the go -- times when we are most likely to “just grab something,” graze or skip are all recipes for dietary disaster.
A/B Eating means alternating between two nutritionally optimal choices for your breakfast and lunch every day until you get sick of one and officially switch it out. Same thing for snacks, but I suggest you alternate 4-6 choices for those until you get the urge to make a swap or two. The key is picking “go-to foods” that will both support your journey to lose weight and gain muscle… and also be delicious so you’ll look forward to eating on your personal plan. Dinners are usually social, so you can change those as often as every day if you want. Easy, right?
This may strike you as an almost too simple way to lose weight, but that’s exactly why it works. Most likely, it’s how you’re living already - just not strategized for your fitness goals. Look at what you ate last week and the week before. You’ll most likely see a lot of the same things - which makes total sense: we’re creatures of habit and we’re busy! By limiting the number of foods and recipes we rely on in a given week, we save ourselves time, money and all-important mental energy. Make your go-to foods well-thought out and nutritionally optimal and you’ll find it very easy to lose weight and stick to your plan. Even when you’re grabbing something out on the run, all you need to do is order something as close to what you would have made yourself as possible.
And here’s the fun part: when you A/B eat optimal foods in controlled portions for meals you eat alone, at ANY and EVERY social occasion, you can literally eat anything you want - again just be sure to stick to reasonable portions and on schedule as much as possible. A/B eating means saying hello to a optimal choices when you’re alone, and bye-bye to a “no thank you” lifestyle when it comes to indulgent meals with family and friends. In other words, you can absolutely have your cake and eat it and lose weight too!
To get a personal A/B eating strategy and tons of awesome, super-simple recipes based on foods you tell me you love, check out a 14-day free trial of my AND/life app.