It shouldn't be any surprise poor nutrition is a BIG factor of weight gain. 

There are 3 things that can be culprits of poor nutrition. 

1. Poor planning, Spoiled Taste Buds and the wrong Mindset.

Let’s start with not having a good PLAN in place for eating healthy food. Poor planning sets you up for failure – and when you don’t plan ahead, you commonly will find yourself having to settle for something you really know isn’t the best thing for you.  This is pretty common place for many working women.  Instead of having a good lunch prepared from home, you might end up eating fast food or quick meals or eating on the run.   Then with the same lack of planning it’s common to end up going out for dinner too frequently, and everyone knows what that means.  It’s pretty hard to get healthy, low calorie, high fiber meals in a restaurant, even when you are really careful. 

Planning also has to do with what is in your pantry.  You may have a lot of unhealthy foods in your pantry if you haven’t planned ahead and shopped for healthy food that is fast and easy to fix.  One night of ordering pizza or snacking on junk food in the refrigerator can sabotage an entire week of healthy eating if you get home tired and your cupboard isn’t filled with easy healthy choices that you carefully planned long before the moment you actually need it.

So plan ahead and avoid getting stuck eating yucky fast prepared foods!

2. The second cause of poor nutrition is Spoiled Taste Buds, and not knowing the facts about the taste buds on your tongue.  You see, if you’re set on eating only what you think tastes good, you might be setting yourself up for poor nutrition.  The reason for this is that your taste buds only like what they know.  

Many women during midlife love carbohydrates like pasta, bread and sweets.  I know you don’t want to hear this, because you already know it… but carbs break down into sugar and sugar just isn’t good for you.  Carbs and sugar increase inflammation, feed cancer cells and cause weight gain.  This just sets you up for the snowball effect because weight gain just causes more inflammation and hormone disruption, which causes even more weight gain. 

So what you need to know about taste buds is that they are adaptable, pliable, trainable.  These little bumps on our tongue are super flexible.  They don’t care what you eat.  They are only transmitting the signal to your brain so your brain can actually determine what type of food it is.  It’s your brain that decides and determines what the food tastes like.  And here’s the really cool thing about that.  It only takes 21 days to change what your brain senses from your taste buds.  That’s it.  By sticking with a new food, or a new group of foods or spices for only 3 weeks your brain recognizes sweet or salty or bitter or sour on a completely different scale.

Here's an example that you probably have some recollection of and can relate to.  Maybe you used to drink whole milk, but later heard that you should decrease your fat intake, so you changed to a lower fat milk or a milk substitute like almond milk or cashew milk.  And now when you happen to have a little whole milk it tastes far more rich and creamy than you recall.  Or maybe you decreased your salt intake because you heard it wasn’t good for your blood pressure.  And now, if you used only half the salt you once used, you’d dislike it and think it was too salty.   But these tastes used to be normal to you.  Your brain does this with the sweet stuff too.  The more sweet stuff you eat, the less you recognize the taste.  But if you rarely eat a treat, the sweetness of the sugar is going to be powerful and even more enjoyable. 

So the key here is that it only takes 21 days to change your brain’s perception of what your taste buds are communicating.  It’s pretty cool, and gives you a lot power, and a light at the end of the tunnel when you’re retraining your brain.

3. The third and last thing that sets you up for poor nutrition is your Mindset.  Imagine food healing your body, and what the food is doing to your body as you prepare it and eat it.  If you think about how the vegetables you are washing and cutting are going to get absorbed into your body and feed each of your organs with all the healthy nutrients you need, you actually start loving the process of preparing them.  And the opposite works, too.  When you see greasy french fries or even a juicy looking brownie sitting in front of you, you can imagine the fat traveling through your blood stream and clogging up your arteries. 

We owe it to ourselves to decrease our toxic load.  So eating foods that are organic and minimally processed is our best defense when it comes to protecting our gut and immune system.

And did you also know that your gut actually makes more hormones than your brain and other hormone organs like your ovaries and Adrenal glands?  That’s right!  Our gut is a powerful hormone producing organ that plays a huge role in keeping your body hormones balanced.