The Importance of
Preparing Your Own Meals!

by Steve
(Perth, WA)

When I was out on the road seeing clients the other day I needed to buy my lunch because I hadn't prepared anything to take with me.

When lunch time came around I was in Subiaco, an up-market suburb of Perth. I walked into one of the local cafes there and since they had some very healthy-looking salads I decided to get my lunch from there. After making my selection of a combination of two different gourmet salads, after the owner listed some of the ingredients in each, I went over to a bench to sit down and eat my lunch.

When I opened the container I realised what I had done. The salad was literally dripping in oil! Now, since it was purchased from a cafe in Subi, I assume that it was very healthy oil, perhaps an organic, extra-virgin olive oil but nonetheless, it was oil and lots of it! Almost all of which was about to go to my waistline!

I wanted to mentioned this to really emphasise the importance of preparing your meals yourself. When you prepare your own meals, you decide what goes into them. Your idea of 'healthy' may be completely different to someone else's idea of 'healthy'!

In my case, these salads may have contained a range of healthy ingredients and used a healthy oil (for the salad to swim in!) as well. However, this salad certainly did not fulfill my criteria of being low-to-moderate in fat.

This is one of the main reasons why I believe that meal preparation really is the secret to losing weight.

In saying this, I will admit that the salad was very tasty and I made sure I did some extra cardio the next day to try and make some inroads into the extra fat I had gained from the meal!

There is no question that eating high-fat foods occasionally is okay, in fact, it is actually beneficial from a fat-burning and weight-loss perspective and this is discussed in the Treat Day article.

However, it is certainly not something you should do on a regular basis if one of your goals is to burn fat, lose weight and keep it off!