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The 80/20 Rule and Its Benefits


Who has heard about the 80/20 Rule? This rule can be applied to several things in life: economics, time management, the quality of food and the relationship between exercise and diet. In this post I will write about the latter two. So, to start with the first one: the quality of food. Usually health care professionals advise you that 80% of the amount of food should be good and healthy food and 20 % of the amount of food "less" healthy food or the food which you crave. This way it sounds pretty easy: you don't deny yourself of anything and your food will mainly consist of healthy food. However, people get easily distracted by this if they are not keeping track at what they eat. People know how they should be eating but the problem is that when they allow themselves to eat by this 20%, it can get out of hand. By this I mean that when people allow themselves to eat unhealthy food, the cravings and addictions, especially to sugar, can stay so that when it is time to eat according to the 80%, it can be hard to resist your cravings. I have experienced this myself: at one point in my life I allowed myself to eat candy during the weekends. But I noticed that allowing myself some treats (in this case candies) during the weekends I became addicted to sugar. Mondays or Sundays were hard for me: all I could think about were candies and the coming Friday when I was able to eat them again. It was hard for me to stop eating candies after consuming them. Accordingly, I stopped eating them. I no longer bought them when I had "cheat meal" days. Instead, I allowed myself to eat something else which I craved. I changed sugar into healthier versions of desserts: raw chocolate and raw treats. I will do a separate post on how to get sugar out of your life. Getting back to this 80/20 rule, I still follow this but I don't divide these days into weekends and normal work days. Instead when I crave something sweet, no matter if it is Tuesday or Saturday, I´ll have it and I don't feel guilty about it. I listen to my body and it has worked for me.








The other rule about the relationship between exercise and diet goes something like this: if you want to lose weight or maintain your ideal weight, the most important thing is to watch what you eat and the other part is to exercise regularly. The key to success is to understand the parts of these two and how significant they are compared to each other: food or diet plays about 80% part and exercise plays about 20% part. Ultimately what counts is what you eat. So you should sort out your diet and after that support weight loss by exercising. I can fully agree to this. As I was sick for 6 weeks, I ate healthy and nutritious food but I also had some treats. As I wasn't allowed to exercise or even walk more than 2000 steps per day my calorie expenditure was very low. However, I was able to maintain my weight (and I even lost weight but that is due to loss of muscle mass) without any exercise. This goes to show how important your diet really is! If I had eaten all sugary and processed food, I bet that I would not have recovered this quickly and I would feel awful now when I have started to get back in shape again. It is easy to start exercise again when I have fuelled my body with healthy and nutritious food.


More about economics and 20/80 rule on Forbes and more about time management Entrepreneur.


 Lots of love,

                                                   Jennikatja

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