This is a Guest Post by Tyler Hess who blogs about practical and spiritual applications of faith. You can follow him on twitter.
Blogging is such an exciting journey, but if you aren’t careful it is easy to let other important things in your life slide, including your diet.
Three years ago I came to the not so shocking realization that weighing 310 pounds wasn’t to my benefit, so I had to make a choice to make some dietary changes.
I’ve learned a lot of lessons while whittling my way down to 230 pounds (losing 80 pounds with a goal of 40 more to go) over that time and I’d like to share them with you.
Here’s 10 of my best practical tips for bloggers who want to eat healthy!
1. Define Your Goals
Not everyone needed to lose the kind of weight that I needed to lose, but most people who aren’t already health conscious can use some improving. For some it may be weight loss, for others it might be increasing your energy levels, turning fat into muscle or even weight gain. Whatever you need to accomplish, you won’t do it unless you determine what it is you want to do and make it a point to achieve it.
2. Drink Water
If you’re like me, you have spent much of your life consuming the wrong things, starting with what you drink. If you have a steady diet of soda, coffee or alcohol, replacing it with water will drastically help you increase your metabolism, energy, weight loss and overall health.
For those who have heard of the 64 ounce rule (8 cups of 8 ounces) per day, that is only a general rule that doesn’t consider exercise or weight. I suggest working your way up to half your weight in ounces. Example: I weigh 230 pounds, so I drink 115 ounces of water per day.
3. Count Your Calories
The kinds of things you eat matter a lot, but what matters most is that you eat the right amount of calories. Eating too many or too few calories will harm you either way, so make sure that you find your happy medium. You should be eating at least 1000/1200 (female/male) calories a day so that your body doesn’t think you’re starving.
To find out how many calories to eat to lose weight, you can find a calorie calculator at calorie.co.
4. Eat Small Meals
To keep your metabolism functioning, I suggest eating several small meals throughout the day with water at each meal, so that you’re never too hungry or too full. For example, I try to eat four to six meals a day of 300-400 calories per meal with 16 ounces of water.
5. Schedule Blogging Breaks To Eat
You can only effectively blog for so long at any given stretch of time, so why not schedule out your breaks evenly throughout the day to eat your small meals? It gives you a nice break to refresh your brain and body for more blogging!
6. Find One Thing That You Can Cut Out
It’s tough for a lot of people to go cold turkey on everything that they love, so why not start with one thing that isn’t helping you reach your goals that you can live without? The worst diet killers are breads, soda and sweets, so you might want to start with one of those.
7. Don’t Cheat, Optimize!
Imagine writing six great posts a week for your blog that follow all the great SEO rules, but then writing something awful and counterproductive once a week? That not only doesn’t help your goals, it hurts them, right? Dieting isn’t any different and cheating doesn’t help you stay sane, it just keeps you away from your goals.
8. Keep Track Of Your Progress
Just like keeping track of your daily stats to see if more people showed up to your blog on any given day, checking in on your diet’s progress lets you know what is working and what isn’t working, so make sure that you see your results!
9. Don’t Let One Day Bum You Out
One day doesn’t mean anything. With the human body, levels fluctuate like crazy, especially with water being held in the body for one reason or another. Take a look at your progress over time and ignore the bad days, they usually don’t mean anything unless you broke tip number 7.
10. Make A Commitment Out Loud
If you’re the only one who knows about your goal, you won’t feel the need to keep it. Let your family, friends or even your readers know about your goals. They care about you, so when you tell them about your progress they can be happy for you and they’ll be encouraged to follow you.
If you have any tips of your own or if you want to share your own health goals or questions, please leave a comment!
[Image via Stock.xchng]
1) Calorie counting is an eating disorder.
2) If you have to eat frequently to maintain productivity, it’s because you are eating an unhealthy high-carbohydrate diet, with insufficient fat. Probably including “healthy whole grains” (hint, there is no such thing as a healthy grain, whole or otherwise).
1) Calorie counting is an eating disorder
2) If you need to eat that frequently, it’s because you are eating an unhealthy high-carb diet, with insufficient fat.
I eat when I get hungry. Sometimes that’s once a day.
Nice tips Tyler. I’m a personal trainer, so I’m very much an advocate of losing weight in a healthy manner. On #3, I would suggest a caloric minimum of 1200/1600 for female/male. Slow and steady wins the race. A crash diet results in binge eating!
Thanks for the info!
Thanks Johnny, I think anyone who has done even a little bit of research knows that crash diets are really counterproductive. Everyone seems to have a slightly different minimum number, but I try to eat about 1700 calories, personally, so I’m just a little above where you’d advise me haha!
One thing I would add: MOVE. I “graze” on small meals/healthy snacks at my desk while I work, then use scheduled breaks and lunches to go walk around the block or over to the neighborhood park. It’s not a lot of exercise, but it’s exercise.
Totally agree and goes along great with tips 4 and 5…take breaks to eat small meals and stay active! It helps keep your energy and focus levels up throughout the day, even when working out isn’t an option!
Great tips! I especially like the one about finding one thing you can do without. My husband is always telling me that small things make a difference. I know they do but we all want to do BIG things, you know!
Good tips. Having spent the last 5 months rebuilding my health through diet and exercise, I’ve lost 49 pounds, with 5-10 more to go. The best thing I ever did was give up soda though the headaches the week I gave it up nearly were my undoing. I started out with about 1000-1100 calories/day and I ditched nearly all processed foods in favor of vegetables (something I avoided the first 46 years of my life) and foods as close to natural as reasonably possible. Having lost the bulk of the weight, I’m experimenting with bouncing my daily calories back up to between 1300-1400 to be sure I’m taking in enough calories to do cardio 6-7 days a week and 3 days/wk of strength training, which I really enjoy.
Living a healthy lifestyle is both expensive and very time consuming but I cannot tell you how much better I feel and how much more energetic I feel with a steady diet of healthy food and exercise. Best of all, in January my endocrinologist was threatening me with diabetes medicine. In August I shocked his socks off by coming in a new woman, blood sugars back in normal range, cholesterol good.
Being healthy takes commitment, but it’s well worth it.
Counting calories looks like a troublesome work.