After living in the Netherlands for several years, the military moved my family and I back to the United States. We were delighted to return home and get back to everything familiar to us. However, our health suffered because we had to find a place to live and get re-established. We spent almost a year eating take-outs and restaurant food, and the weight just kept piling on. I started to notice that my clothes weren’t fitting me properly, and I looked terrible in pictures. So I stopped going out because I looked awful, and I stopped taking photos with my kids because I was ashamed of the amount of weight I had put on.
At my heaviest, I was 203lbs, and I couldn’t believe I had let myself go like that. It was at this point that I made up my mind to lose weight, and I started researching diets that would help me. However, I didn’t want to go on a fad diet. I wanted to change my eating habits for life and keep the weight off for good. I eventually found the Cooking Light Diet, and it teaches you how to eat the right foods to fuel your body without depriving yourself of the foods you love. The main strategy was to:
• Limit my calorie intake
• Eat more fruits and vegetables
• Cut out processed foods
I noticed a difference in how I felt and my weight within the first couple of weeks. Within five months, I had lost 50lbs, and everyone asked me how I did it. One of the principles taught on the Cooking Light Diet is that weight loss starts with a mindset shift first. If you’re going to lose weight, you’ve got to change the way you think about food. It’s not about eating smaller portions and being hungry all the time. It’s about eating the right foods in abundance, so you’re never hungry. But the problem is that people don’t want to eat the right foods. Junk food is an addiction, and it often takes a major health scare before any action is taken.
My family and I eat the most delicious and healthy foods daily. The Cooking Light Diet plan provides nutritionist-approved recipes, meal plans, and shopping lists so that I am never at a loss for what to eat. They also teach on the importance of meal prepping to ensure there’s always healthy food in the house. One of the reasons I ate so much fast food was because there were no cooking ingredients, and it was easier to order stuff. Now I have six months’ worth of cooked frozen meals in the freezer. We also keep an abundance of guilt-free healthy snacks. Additionally, we eat out once a month, so we don’t feel like we’re depriving ourselves.
My advice to anyone wanting to lose weight is don’t go on a temporary diet. Change your eating habits permanently, and you’ll never worry about piling on unwanted pounds again.
