Superfoods: The Key to Sustaining Weight Loss

February 14, 2013

Superfoods: The Key to Sustaining Weight Loss

I grew up in a family of serious eaters who struggled with weight issues. We love food in all of its incarnations, home-cooked, take-out, high-end restaurant, ethnic, and everything in between.

When I hit my early 20’s I was already well on the path to becoming a morbidly obese adult, like many of my dearly beloved family members who passed from weight-related issues.

Being overweight as an extremely shy, young college girl kept me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do, but I just didn’t know how to deal with the two issues that had the most impact on my weight and my self-confidence.

For one, I had a deep emotional attachment to food and second, knowing how to eat/prepare tasty foods that were good for me.

The turning point came one day during a very hot summer when I was walking up a hill, huffing and puffing after taking a summer class. I was almost to the top of the hill, wiping my forehand - debating in my mind about that afternoon’s daily candy bar.

Then I made a decision to make a change, a small one, and just skip that candy for a few months to see what would happen.

Three dress sizes smaller, I understood that small changes can mean big outcomes when it comes to health.

And with that change, I became more curious about nutrition, how the body works, dealing with cravings, and how to conquer negative attachments to food.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve been able to free myself of bad feelings surrounding food, maintain my 30-pound weight loss, and still work with one of my biggest passions in a healthy way. As a trained chef, certified health coach, and healthy cooking celebrity - I celebrate life through healthy cooking and eating that is both delicious and incredibly nutritious and there is only one way to do that, it’s through superfoods.

Superfoods are nutrient-dense, whole foods that have high amounts of micronutrients and other unique compounds that have incredibly healing potential.

Baby Kale

Superfoods might sound like they are impossible to find, or extremely costly, but many of these superfoods live in your local groceries, like kale, broccoli and spinach. Superfoods can have serious impact on your weight since they are filling (high in fiber), extremely low in sugars, and very low in calories, and high in nutrients that can refresh your body and recharge your energy levels. They are also high in the “magical” compounds as I call them, that affect brain health which is huge when it comes to breaking bad habits, calming cravings, and getting rid of brain fog.

Clear Brain Fog

When your mind isn’t sharp and you’re feeling tired, it’s harder to stick to your resolutions to eat better. Superfoods are full of compounds called polyphenols that boost your memory, sharpen your mind by slowing or stopping cell damage in the body, because cross the blood brain barrier.

Improve Mood

Apart from these powerful antioxidants, choline helps in brain development. Folate, is another mood booster and you’ll find high levels of it in leafy superfoods like kale and spinach. Folic acid deficiency causes serotonin, a hormone responsible for feeling positive, to drop.

Calm Sweet Cravings

Fiber feeds the natural bacterial colonies in your gastrointestinal tract, and people going through bouts of sugar binges and spurts of feeling low usually don’t have healthy probiotic cultures - not to mention enough fiber - to feed the bacteria in their gut that keep them healthy.

So now we have arrived at my last point: How do you turn superfoods into delicious meals that will make you feel satisfied - body and soul?

I have created hundreds of recipes on my skinnychef.com site and for magazines (like SELF and Prevention) that show you just how to do that. But I wanted to take it a step further, to help people who don’t know much about nutrition and have minimal or no cooking knowledge.

Skinny Chef Superfood Sauces

That’s the reason why I’ve created my new line of sauces, Skinny Chef Superfood Sauces. As a special thank you to Obesity Help and all the readers, I’m raffling off a bottle each of one of my four flavors, Cherry Chipotle, Goji Espresso, Pomegranate Cayenne and Blazin’ Blueberry. There’s three ways to enter the raffle:

1) Post this to your Facebook page:

@skinnychef has a new line of sauces: http://igg.me/at/skinnychef/x/2217161

2) Or tweet this:

#skinnychef has a new line of sauces: http://igg.me/at/skinnychef/x/2217161

3) If you don’t have a facebook or twitter account, enter your email at http://skinnychef.com/blog/enter-raffle

Visit The Skinny Chef’s website here.

Meet The Skinny Chef video here.

-Feature photo courtesy of Vegan Feast

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Iserloh launched Skinny Chef in April 2003. Jennifer is CEO of Skinny Chef, a passionate advocate for delicious and amazing foods, and a recognized healthy cooking expert. As a trained chef, author and health expert, Jennifer has created thousands of delicious recipes, articles, and blogs posts for TV, print and web publications.

Read more articles by Jennifer!

Superfoods: The Key to Sustaining Weight Loss