Do you ever find yourself roaming aimlessly around the kitchen searching for the unknown? Do you remember coming home from a long day at work heading straight for the refrigerator with no idea why? Have you ever been in a situation knowing the only thing that could comfort you was your grandmothers’ hot apple pie? Understanding physical hunger vs. emotional hunger is an important skill to learn. Boredom, stress, and sorrow are three strong contributors to mindless eating. During these emotional times, we want a quick fix. Food is NOT the answer. It’s only a temporary relief from reality, and when we finally decide to put the spoon down, our problems are still there, staring us in the face. The frequent use of food for love can cause a lot of different health issues, including; overweight, obesity, eating disorders, diabetes, & heart disease.

As Americans, we use food for everything; socializing, entertainment, pleasure, and even comfort. It’s imperative to realize that going long periods of time between meals, without snacks, can also lead to mindless eating. There are no rules saying you have to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, at certain times, each day, with no exceptions. If you decide to eat your favorite ice cream or overeat at your favorite restaurant it doesn’t mean that you have failed a healthy eating plan. Don’t let guilt overpower your thoughts, but most of all, don’t let emotions overpower your eating. Your GenoVive all-natural customized meal program can help you establish a healthy eating routine.

Remember, food is fuel. It has no morals. Food is neither good nor bad. It’s not compassionate or caring. Food is not a friend, a lover, or a therapist. Food is food. We need food to fuel our bodies and our minds. Without it we will not survive, but with too much we can jeopardize our future. A large percentage of people turn to food for comfort. A healthy balanced diet with positive thoughts toward food can be key to a healthy life.

Next time you’re bored, stressed or sad, try to find a coping mechanism other than food. Before you stick your fork in it, ask yourself, am I physically hungry or is my mind hungry? Try taking 10 deep breaths and refocusing your attention to something else, such as; reading a book or magazine, taking a walk, or journaling your thoughts. Motivate yourself to be aware of your body. Mindful eating is an important part of healthy eating. You’re the only you, so be the best you can be and fuel your body well. Every day is a new day; every meal is a new chance.

Tips for mindful eating:

• Eat with very few distractions.
• Take 3 deep breaths prior to starting your meal.
• Chew your food - digestion begins in the mouth.
• Taste your food - so often we just eat without tasting.
• Breathe between bites. Place your fork/spoon on the table and enjoy the flavors.
• Make mealtime last at least 20 minutes. Give your food time to digest and your mind time to notice.
• Eat when you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied, not full - recognizing hunger and satiety cues.
• Drink water with meals to avoid overeating.
• Always remember food is fuel.

If you’re over a certain age, it’s likely that you haven’t seen a food pyramid in several decades. The food pyramid was a government guide written by the USDA as a guideline for what types of foods Americans should be eating in their daily diet. The pyramid originally focused on a diet heavy in grains, fruits and vegetables while deemphasizing dairy, meat and sweets. This came from a belief that meat and dairy products were a primary cause of the vast increase in heart disease that America was seeing throughout the 1970’s and 80’s.

One of the main criticisms of the food pyramid is that it is difficult to understand. It’s natural for people to read things from top to bottom, so someone reading the classic USDA pyramid may be under the impression that sweets and fats are the most important part of the diet even if the intention is to make them the least important. The pyramid is also bad at conveying exactly how much each type of food should be eaten. People naturally think in terms of percentages and fractions. Figuring out what portions of a pyramid represent certain percentages of a diet requires complex geometric equations that most people aren’t willing to do in their head.

In 2011, the USDA dramatically improved its food recommendations by coming out with a new MyPlate. MyPlate showed recommended food intake through representation on a plate. It showed fruits, vegetables, protein, grain and dairy as roughly equal size on a dinner plate, suggesting how much people should eat of each food group as a proportion of their daily diet. The problem with these suggestions, as was the problem with the pyramid, is that these recommendations still ignore the facts about macronutrients that DNA diets  emphasize. They also ignore the fact that we all may have different challenges in metabolizing macronutrients according to our genetic profile.

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Up until only a few years ago, I considered fat my worst enemy. Not the type of fat that’s on our body, although I certainly didn’t like that either, but the dietary fat that is present in food. I was one of those people you see in the grocery store intently examining each and every food label and discarding any item that had any more than 2 grams of fat in it. In my mind, every gram of fat I ate would end up as a gram of fat in my body. To eat fat as a food was to become fat as a person. I bought most of the gimmick no fat products that were on the market at the time, even the products that later proved to be very unhealthy.

Even though I was avoiding fat almost entirely in my diet, however, I wasn’t losing weight. Not only that, but I was feeling constantly hungry. No matter how many low fat pasta dinners, snacks, crackers, chips and cookies I ate I felt constantly hungry. What I didn’t realize until much later is that by avoiding fat, I was consuming huge quantities of sugar, which was wreaking havoc on my blood sugar levels. Almost as soon as I finished eating an extremely low fat frozen dinner or snack I was hungry again, leading to almost constant eating. The plan I had put together to lose weight was actually causing me to gain.

This all changed when I finally found someone who knew something about food and they explained to me the magic of olive oil. At first I was put off, because olive oil is nothing but dietary fat. Then I learned that the fat we eat doesn’t just turn to fat in our bodies, it gets converted to energy and we use that energy just like we would from any other food. I also learned that olive oil contains a ton of really healthy molecules like antioxidants, monounsaturated fats and omega-6 fatty acids. These molecules help maintain a healthy body and studies show that they can lead to reduced risk of heart disease.

Even though fat is important to our diet, it’s important to remember that we should consume it in moderation. Fat from sources like fish and olive oil contain a lot of healthy things, but they still contain more than twice as many calories per gram than carbohydrates and protein. I’m glad GenoVive sees the importance of healthy fats and that they include these in their home delivered meals. They also know that these fats should be in the correct balance with the other macronutrient groups according to our unique genetic code. This allows us to reap the maximum amount of rewards from dietary fat without having to worry about gaining weight from it.

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School lunches have been a big point of concern in the fight against childhood obesity and effort to create healthy kids. Many school lunches of the past were ridiculously unhealthy, containing known sources of fatty foods such as pizza and French fries. Schools sold these products because they were readily available, kids seemed to love them, and they fit within their budgets. For these same reasons, unhealthy and high calorie food has enormous presence in the lunches of everyday working Americans.

Your average office break or lunch room is not much better than the school cafeterias of the recent past. They will often contain a vending machine full of sugar and fat as well as high calorie sodas and fruit drinks. The temptation to purchase these easily accessible treats is sometimes overwhelming on a busy or stress filled day, but when purchasing these items becomes a habit, they can mean a huge obstacle to our weight loss success. That’s why planning ahead and sticking to your home delivered meal program is such a valuable resource in fighting the temptations of the break room.

It’s not only vending machines that are a challenge during lunch, however. Office friends often love to go out to lunch to unhealthy local favorites or big chains that offer burgers, fries and overstuffed sandwiches. But going to these places with your friends doesn’t mean that you have to eat the unhealthy food.

You can bring along the all-natural GenoVive snacks or meals to keep you satisfied, or pick something from the menu that fits within your DNA tested macronutrient balance and has a reasonable amount of calories. Either way, finding a healthy lunch during your busy work day doesn’t have to be difficult.  You can also challenge your coworkers to a “bring your own lunch” day and use the time you would have spent traveling to a restaurant to take a walk outside, enjoy conversation, and get some stress relieving fresh air and light exercise.

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Technology has made our modern lives better in a lot of ways, but in a way it has made things worse. When it comes to the diet world, technology has proven to be both an asset and a detriment. Technology allows us to create vast amounts of food and transport it lots of places, but that makes the ability to over eat much easier. Some of us are especially affected by this, as our bodies tell us to over consume even when there is really no need to. Thankfully, technology has also brought us many tools to help fight our tendencies to gain excess weight.

One of the primary ways that technology has helped the dieting world is through the mapping of the human genome. Thanks to discoveries in molecular biology, we now know more than ever the role that genes play in the processing of food we eat. We also know that individuals metabolize food in different ways. What this means for weight loss and weight management is staggering; because a one size fits all solution to losing weight is no longer viable.

GenoVive is taking advantage of this knowledge in order to construct a diet that is catered to the unique genetic code we all have. Customization is the basis for this comprehensive solution including a home delivered meal program, nutritional supplements and an exercise program. These aspects of the DNA diet will be constructed to help maximize weight loss according to research done in the field of nutrigenomics. Even after you have lost the weight and transition out of the full meal program, you can use the knowledge you have gained about your genetics to maintain a healthy weight and body.

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The holidays are used as a major excuse for people to eat more than they normally would and cheat on their weight loss plans. But now that the holidays are over, the cheating is over, right? Not quite, because when it comes to indulging an appetite, some of us will use any excuse possible to over eat and cheat on our DNA diet. Whether it is positive things like birthdays, promotions, graduations, parties or negative events we will sometimes use any excuse we can muster to eat high calorie food and not pay attention to how many calories we are putting into our bodies.

Chastising ourselves for basic human desire, however, is not a good way to go about improving our diet success. The key to battling the cravings we get for “special occasions” is to recognize why we get these cravings and the best way to satisfy them without making things worse.  The first step is to recognize that using special occasion excuses to over eat is an emotional issue. Many of us who are overweight have learned to use food to subdue our erratic emotional states. Recognizing the times when we are doing this is essential to being able to stop it.

A DNA diet provides the structure and information to be able to make an informed decision while dieting rather than an emotional one. This is part of the reasoning behind a home delivered meal program. If we have ready to go healthy food already planned out for a meal, we are way less likely to go outside of the plan and overeat than if we just a generic goal of eating healthy. The GenoVive home delivered meal program makes it easier for us to substitute in things like socializing, hobbies and interests to satisfy our emotional states rather than over eating.

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Even though many people are not aware of it, humans have lots of tiny life forms living inside them that assist with the everyday functioning of the human body. These life forms are bacteria that live in the digestive system and they are known as probiotics. They help with the digestion of essential nutrients and without them our bodies would not be able to process much of the food we eat today. Humans are not the only animals with these probiotics. Cows can eat grass because of them and pandas are able to digest bamboo because of the probiotics in their systems.

Probiotics are highly beneficial to our health, so it’s important that we support their growth, which is where prebiotics come in. Prebiotics are non-digestible substances in foods that benefit the growth of the probiotics. The most popular form of prebiotics is called inulin, which is an insoluble fiber contained in lots of fruits, vegetables, herbs, whole grains and wheat.  Prebiotics have the greatest effect when they are ingested with the presence of soluble fibers that the body does digest, meaning they are best taken in the presence of food.

The GenoVive DNA Diet knows how important prebiotics are to people who are trying to burn fat and lose weight. That is why prebiotics are contained in many of the home delivered meals including:  Frappes, pasta, and several snack bars such as the Peanut Butter Cookie Bar, Chocolate Chip Cookie Bar, Double Chocolate Brownie Bar, Cherry Cashew Bar, Cocoa Coconut Bar and Cranberry Apple Nut Bar. Eating these items from the program will enable your digestive system to function better and can even decrease the body’s ability to create certain kinds of fats.

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It’s the holidays; I’ll go back on my diet in the New Year. It’s the weekend; I’ll start eating well again on Monday. I had a bad day today; I’ll make up for it with a big delicious meal. I had a great day today; I’ll celebrate with a huge greasy meal. If you haven’t used one of these excuses before while on a diet, you probably know someone who has. Our brains’ are powerful rationalizing machines, and they will make all the excuses in the world to eat poorly and as much as possible.

Overcoming this phenomenon requires strength, but it also requires a certain amount of preparation. We use excuses to over eat often because we do not have a stable option of healthy meals available to us. A home delivered meal program like the one from GenoVive can provide the stability of healthy meals right at your fingertips, reducing the temptation to eat to excess. In fact, one of the primary excuses we use to eat unhealthy is because we don’t have healthy meals available to us. With the presence of healthy home delivered meals in our lives, this excuse is eliminated.

Since the home delivered meals on GenoVive’s DNA diet are delicious as well as healthy, that reduces the amount of excuses we use to over eat as well. The meals in the GenoVive program are the same delicious meals you often see at restaurants, but with all-natural ingredients and lower calories. This way you can eat the kind of food you want without having to make the excuse to eat unhealthy take out and restaurant items. Our home delivered meals are filling as well, which means your desire to over eat will disappear while you are losing weight.

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If you’re like most people, you have probably made New Year’s resolutions in the past. You’ve probably succeeded at a few, and failed at many. The New Year is great a providing a psychological opportunity for replenishment, for fixing your faults and becoming the person you’ve always wished you could be. Many people will make the resolution in the New Year to lose weight. They will join diet programs and gyms and put all of their effort into finally becoming healthy and looking the way they have always wanted to look. But why do they so often fail?

In order to increase the chance of success on the New Year’s resolution of losing weight, it’s a great idea to go on a diet program that has a basis in science. A DNA diet like the one from GenoVive will develop a custom meal and exercise program that is based specifically on your genetic code. This means that what you eat and how you exercise on the plan will have the maximum effect on your weight loss, increasing the chances that you will be successful on your New Year’s resolution.

The time around New Year’s is a great opportunity to find partners in weight loss, as the New Year is a time when lots of people are starting their own diet plan.  Look for people in the gym and in online diet communities like Gen-V in order to find partners that will help keep you motivated and increase your chances for success on your home delivered meal program and customized exercise plan.

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Fish should probably be considered a miracle food when it comes to dieting. There is simply no better choice when it comes to getting essential omega 3 acids while at the same time loading up on lots of protein. Many people, however, find that they don't like the way fish tastes, or they find the texture unappealing. Luckily there is enough variety among fish species and cooking methods to cater to many different pallets. If you've tried fish before and didn't like, consider trying a different species or in a different presentation. Fish is enjoyed around the world and can be developed for almost everyone's taste. Below is a list of fish and/or presentations that you may find appealing.

Nigiri Sushi – this is typically a raw piece of fish placed on top a tiny cube of sticky rice and wasabi. Many people may find the idea of eating raw fish unappetizing, but don't mock it before you try it. Many people have been converted to eating sushi as soon as they try it for the first time. What's not to like. The texture and flavor are intense and buttery. Crowd favorites include salmon, yellow-tail and tuna.

Cioppino – okay, this dish is cheating a little because there is more than just fish here. Cioppino typically includes shrimp, scallops and muscles along with fish and perhaps other seafood items. This delicious low calorie tomato based soup is a great way to introduce seafood to those who may be turned off by fishy flavors.

Grilled Salmon with Lemon – salmon is one of the most popular fishes for cooking for a reason, it tastes great and goes well on the grill next to the burgers. Salmon has a rich buttery flavor that goes extremely well with the citrus flavors of lemon or lime. Cook it until it flakes easily with a fork. You can cook this fish in the oven as well for wonderful results.

Baked Tilapia – this fish is abundant and pretty inexpensive. It has a mild flavor and rich texture for those who may be weary about trying fish. Tilapia is very versatile and can used in tons of different recipes. A favorite application is to bake it in lemon juice and dill, you can then eat it by itself or use it to make delicious tacos with salsa and corn tortillas. Tilapia goes great with a variety of vegetables and sides like couscous or brown rice.

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