But what you should avoid is that massive chocolate cake after dinner that will add 450 calories to your diet and leave you feeling sick. It provides zero nutrition and it sets your diet back in a way that can sometimes be hard to recover from psychologically.

But don’t worry – there’s a trick!

What is CBT?

CBT stands for ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’. This is a psychotherapeutic approach that involves training the brain to overcome negative thoughts. The belief is that your thoughts can reinforce negative beliefs and can have unwanted effects on your behaviour.

For instance, if you’re trying to get over a phobia of heights, the thing you need to change is the thought process that involves imagining falling or telling yourself it’s not safe!

What Does This Have to do With Eating Clean?

So what does all this have to do with eating clean?

Simple: it gives you the ability to reprogram your thoughts and thereby to remove the desire to indulge in cakes etc.

To do this, you simply need to think ahead and focus on how you’re going to feel after the meal. Focus on the cake and the taste and you’ll produce the reward hormone dopamine. Instead, you need to focus on the last time you made yourself feel sick from eating too much cake. You probably felt bloating, stuffed and guilty and most likely you couldn’t finish it. Concentrate on that sensation and suddenly the cake doesn’t seem so appealing.

Now instead, imagine how good it would feel to have a refreshing dessert that would perk you up and leave you feeling good about yourself. How about a hot drink? Or maybe you could get an ice cold lemon sorbet that will cleanse your palette without adding too many calories!

This makes all the difference to your desire for pudding and you’ll find that you actually would prefer the fresher dessert. If you do this regularly enough, then you will actually create new associations to the point where you actually don’t want to eat that huge cake.

The same goes for reprogramming your diet in every other area too!

Serious – low energy is probably responsible for a huge proportion of our problems! It’s low energy that makes it hard to wake up in the morning, it’s low energy that makes us not really want to exercise and it’s low energy that prevents us from performing our best or really enjoying life.

The problem is that it takes energy to start changing your lifestyle and to do things like exercise more or sleep better to improve your energy… so where do you begin? The answer is simple: you begin with your diet!

There are tons of ways that you can improve your energy levels through your diet, here are just a few!

Glucose Hit

One way you can add more energy using your diet is just to consume more glucose. This won’t give you long-term energy but will instead help you to improve your energy in the short term and give you a small kick when you’re struggling.

And interestingly, one of the best ways to get that hit of glucose is to ‘cheat’ and have glucose from man-made, processed sources. A glucose tablet is one option, another is to eat Wine Gums!

MCT Oil

Using glucose on a regular basis is not a recommended way to keep your energy levels up though. Instead, it’s better to use MCT oil, which comes from coconuts and other natural sources. This type of oil doesn’t get absorbed by the body in the same way as other fats and it encourages the body to produce ketons – a type of energy that has a lot of particular uses for the brain.

Chia Seeds

If you want an example of someone with high energy levels, then look no further than the Tarahumara tribe! This group of indigenous people are able to run hundreds of miles in a single go and they accomplish this at least in part thanks to chia seeds – seeds that are capable of absorbing several times their weight in water!

Iron

Iron is used to create the red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body. More iron = more oxygen where you need it – meaning in turn that you’ll have more energy.

Vinpocentine

Another way to get more oxygen around your body when you need it is to cause vasodilation and widen the blood cells. This can be done with any food containing nitrates – including garlic. But vinpocetine is a natural ingredient that goes one step further by ensuing the vasodilation occurs mainly in the most important regions of the brain.

CoQ10

Meanwhile, anything that can increase mitochondrial energy metabolism will greatly enhance energy levels – CoQ10, PQQ and creatine all being very good examples (and all being found in organ meats).

And the best way to make that successful is to focus on just the smallest things that will cause the smallest change to your feeling of fullness and energy throughout the day.

Here are some very easy ways to cut calories and reduce the amount of junk in your diet!

Get Rid of Soda Drinks

One of the very best things that anyone can do for their diet is to remove soda drinks from their diet. That means no more Coca-Cola and no more 7-Up. Why? Because these drinks are absolutely packed with simple sugars while offering nothing healthy in return. They’ll make you feel hungry and they’ll add lots of calories while contributing to lipogenesis (fat storage).

Choose the Right Coffee

What’s just as bad or arguably even worse is when you stop by Starbucks on the way into work and grab yourself a large Americano. There’s nothing wrong with the coffee – rather it’s the large amounts of cream, full-fat milk and chocolate sprinkles that get added. Simply switch that morning beverage for an Americano or a black coffee/sea and you’ll instantly save yourself the damage – cutting your diet by 100-200 calories immediately.

Stop Adding Sugar

Another tip is to stop adding sugar to your tea. Once again, this adds unnecessary calories and then creates hunger pangs following your release of insulin that will suck up all of your sugar and leave you shaky.

Moreover though, adding sugar to everything makes gets you accustomed to things tasting sweet. In other words? You develop a sweet tooth. And now nothing you eat is going to be as satisfying unless there’s sugar on top!

Remove the Butter

Butter isn’t unhealthy for you as such, but if you’re trying to reduce your calories specifically then lathering this onto everything you eat really isn’t going to help! Get used to eating your sandwiches with just the spread and you’ll find it easier to lose weight!

Share Dessert

Even when we’re dieting, it can be hard to turn down a nice dessert when everyone else is indulging – especially because we may feel as though we’re being boring or preventing others from enjoying their food.

The simple answer? Offer to share with someone! You’ll save money and calories!