Here's why eating like a Millennial could help with weight loss
It turns out all those trendy, "basic"-sounding millennial food fads are actually as good for you as they claim to be. Here's what they are, and why they could help you lose weight.
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Instagramming every meal, snack or cocktail might not be as "basic" as one might believe. Neither, apparently, is spending a few extra dollars on healthy nut butters, eating avocadoes like it's nobody's business or regularly swapping out beef patties for chickpea burgers.
An article published on Forbes.com in December of last year predicted that millennials (adults between the ages of 19 and 35, roughly), would shape food trends more than any other age group this year. That includes an emphasis on "good, healthy food" and "more "eco-friendly foods like cage-free eggs," in addition to "the rise of the meal preparation companies that send customers nutritious, fresh ingredients that they can quickly make into a cooked meal."
the trends to adopt
Instagram your food: Technology is one reason to account for millennials' broad influence on food trends, specifically the photo-sharing application Instagram. Many young adults have adopted it as a way to account for their daily food intake. Instead of the meticulous and often discouraging method of entering every single nutrition fact of every single morsel of food they consume in a day, they can use Instagram to simply track the food choices they're making. If they find themselves photographing pizza and burgers for dinner for days in a row, it becomes immediately obvious where their weight loss efforts are being compromised.
And because Instagram allows users to create multiple accounts, they can even maintain a sense of anonymity in the process, coming up with a different name and using hashtags, such as #fooddiary or #foodjournal to garner support from other Instagram users. This, of course, is vastly different from the instagram food photos that are posted purely for likes, with impeccable lighting, perfect arrangements and settings. That's just unabashed #foodporn.
Eat your avocadoes: Back in your folks' day, the saying went "eat your greens." It was probably something like broccoli, asparagus or spinach. That's like, so 1957. If you're a millennial and you're not eating avocado at least once a day, then you can't really claim being a healthy eater...
In all seriousness, avocadoes are literally everywhere these days, whether you eat them in your pasta sauce, on your morning toast, chopped up in a salad or in your post-workout smoothie. And if you're trying to lose weight, the monounsaturated fat in them is actually the good kind. Not to mention they're loaded with fiber, a wide variety of nutrients and even more potassium than bananas.
Eat less meat (or stop eating it entirely): Going full-stop vegetarian or vegan might seem like a daunting task for hardcore carnivores. If that's the case, simply nix your meat intake a few times or even just once a week. The astounding number of quality food blogs in the US makes it quite easy to find delicious, easy-to-prepare meatless recipes. Not to mention, if you are replacing meat with grain-based proteins such as quinoa or high-protein legumes such as chickpeas and black beans, you're still going to hit your nutritional goals, while consuming less fat and fewer calories overall.
Become obsessed with food: There really is no other way around it. Millennials are thinking of food around the clock and taking the expression "You are what you eat" not with a grain of salt but with a heaping helping of seriousness. They often plan and prepare their meals ahead of time to deal with busy schedules, which leads to consistently healthier eating choices and less temptation to grab high-calorie takeout options. They also have more tools at their disposal than ever to become healthy, self-taught cooks. Everyone knows that it's easier to lose weight when you know what's really going into your food, so cooking meals at home is an absolute must.
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