Overeating Healthy Foods Causes Weight Gain, Too

It may sound obvious but overeating healthy foods can make you gain weight. It sounds obvious when it’s stated like that. However, when you’re focused on eating only the most nutritious foods, it’s easy to lose track of that fact.

After all, you’re eating only nutrient dense foods. Your meals are all perfectly balanced. Your body is getting everything it needs to function at its absolute best. However, overeating healthy foods might end up causing harm to your weight management.

Overeating Healthy Foods is Easy to Do

There are a lot of nutrient packed foods that are extremely low in calories. If you brought a salad bowl full of carrot sticks and ate them all, the odds are that you’d still be within your daily calorie limit – with room left. However, you could still end up overeating healthy foods.

Do you love avocado toast? Sliced or mashed avocado on a couple of pieces of sprouted whole grain artisan bread is delicious. It is packed with fiber, B-vitamins, vitamin E, healthy fats, and a spectrum of other nutrients great for your body. That said, your two slices of bread topped with that small avocado just racked up over 500 calories.

Just because something is nutritious, it doesn’t mean it’s low in calories. That’s why overeating healthy foods is so easy. Portion control is a major component to weight loss and management. This video from Cooking Light sums up portion control in less than two minutes!

How to Avoid Overeating Healthy Foods

The key to stopping yourself from overeating healthy foods is to understand portion sizes. Your best tool for this effort is a nutrition tracker. There are several great options available in web-based trackers and in smartphone apps.

Make a habit of entering everything you eat into your tracker. This will help you to be able to observe your eating habits more closely. It will help to familiarize yourself with the carb, protein, fat and calorie contents of your food. From there, you can decide where you are overeating healthy foods and where you have room for more.

Gaining a better understanding of what you’re eating – and how much – can also help to improve your nutrition. Avoiding overeating any kind of food is a learning process. That said, as you continually improve how much of each food you eat, you may start to naturally lose weight.

Furthermore, this type of lifestyle can help you to better naturally manage your weight over the long term. That way, you won’t need to struggle with gaining and losing weight like a yo-yo over time.