Eating for the best results in not a new concept, most everyone who changes their eating habits does it for a reason. Some are trying to lose weight, some and trying to gain weight and some just want to have more energy and feel better. It really does matter why you are changing your eating habits. What you need to understand is that "what you eat" and "when you eat" will greatly affect whether you succeed or fail.

Most people change their eating habits to lose weight. Just as we mention before what you eat and when you eat will make all the difference. First let's talk about what you eat, try eating foods that have low fat, preservatives, sugar and processed flour. Whole foods from scratch work best. Now I know this sound like you can't eat anything good, this is just not true. The more unprocessed the food is the more the body has to do to break it down into useable food.

There are several reasons for this approach;

1. If the food you eat is low fat, your body will burn the fat you already have.
2. Basic no processed food have more vitamins and energy for the body than processed foods.
3. Basic whole food take longer to process, thus, your body has to burn more calories to use the food, result you have more energy and lose more weight.
4. Since the body is a efficient machine and tries to process the whole food quickly it will use the easiest source of energy it has, and that would be the fat stored in your body.
   

While these 4 reasons are not all there is, they are some of the most basic and important reasons to consider when changing your eating habits.

Now let's look at when you eat. Your body has its own clock and schedule and it can change a lot depending on when you eat. Eating late at night can really mess with you bodies clock, it send mixed signal on what is should do with the food. Most people have a very set time to get up and go to bed; your body understands this time schedule. Eating too late and then dropping to the couch for some TV can put on more weight in one meal than everything else you ate that day. Your body knows it's bedtime and starts to shut down your metabolism so you can get sleepy and fall asleep. Since the body doesn't need much energy to do this it will store most of the food you just ate as fat for later use. If what you ate was fatty or had lots of sugar, these types of food can be converted to fat very easily and quickly and you gain the weight. When you eat the body will try and process all the food you ate within 3 hours or less. Try not eating any heavy amounts of food or high fat or sugared food 4 hours before you go to bed and early in the day is better. If you must have a snack, try to eat just enough to make the craving go away. Also try eating zero calorie foods or almost zero calorie foods like sugar free jello, watermelon, sugar free popsicle or any other low caloric food. Zero calorie foods are foods that have so little calories that it take more calories to process the food that the food has. If you like me and you have a problems with sweets, trying eating them at your most active part of the day. This will insure that