Weight Loss Tips
Posted on January 29, 2008
1.Set goals. You’ll be better able to make a realistic weight loss plan if you know how much weight you want to lose.
2.Identify your weaknesses. Are you a bread fiend? Do you have dessert after every meal and every snack? Is McDonald’s your second home? Find the weakness and throttle it. It does not own you, you are stronger and cooler than to allow some silly little craving to knock you off your path.
3.Throw away anything you know is tempting. Those cinnamon buns with 500 calories each? Gone. The ramen noodles in your cabinet? Gone. The problem is that this is not always feasible. Often times we are not the only ones in our homes and therefore the call of the food must be withstood. In this case, out of sight truly is out of mind. Put unhealthy, unfilling foods in a drawer or in a cabinet that you rarely use. Put them all together to make a particularly unappetizing sight. Don’t place them all in a decorative basket out on the counter. Place them in a drawer. A drawer heaping with pastries rarely looks like anything but a drawer of fat.
4.Eat less, but eat more often. If possible, eat 4-5 meals a day. This helps your metabolism and blood sugar to stay level as well. This does require a change in your schedule. Eat less within 6 hours of your bed time. You’re less likely to burn the calories closer to your bed time. It’s fine to eat a large breakfast and lunch because your body will be working on burning those calories for the whole day. Large dinners are likely to go unburned and converted into fat.
5.Do not skip breakfast. If you don’t have time to prepare breakfast, buy healthy breakfast bars or those smoothies on the go. It is important to eat breakfast to jump start your metabolism and give you energy for the day. Otherwise you will probably end up falling back on unhealthy foods during the day. Yogurt is also known to boost your metabolism.
6.Eat healthy snacks when you feel hungry between meal times. Healthy snacks would be things high in fiber, fruits and vegetables. Avoid high sugar and high calorie snacks. This will help you get nutrients as well as help lower your appetite so you won’t overeat during meals.
7.Increase your fiber intake. Fiber acts as negative calories. It’s also filling and healthy for your digestive system. Make it a part of every meal.
8.Eat slowly and chew more. Take time to enjoy your meals. This will help you to finish at the same time as others, and you’ll not be tempted by a second helping. Also, chewing more will ensure you get the most out of all the food and it will be digested faster. The more you chew, the more your appetite will be satiated.
9.Drink more water every day. Stay hydrated. While you don’t need 8 cups of water a day to stay hydrated, it’ll make sure you’re hydrated as well as cut down on your hunger levels and force you to get a little bit more exercise (trips to the sink, water cooler, water fountain, and bathroom). If you’re a heavy soda drinker, permit yourself to only one diet soda per day, maximum. Just one extra soda each day can add 15 pounds. Recently, fizzy drinks, even diet ones, have been said to slow down metabolism.
10.Increase physical activity. There are two ways to reduce net caloric intake: 1) reduce the number of calories in your diet and 2) Increase the number of calories that you burn in your daily activities. Both approaches are usually necessary and healthful and both are effective in losing weight. You can pick and choose which exercise you want to do, depending on your fitness level and drive. For example: walking, jogging, using the stair stepper, using cross training machines, swimming, tennis, and basketball. Weight training (and resistance training) can help reshape your body. The more muscle you have the higher your metabolism will be.
11.Find active friends. Find people that will drag you out to do more active things. It doesn’t have to be much, but any exercise even walking around the mall is better than none.
12.Don’t get discouraged. After one or two weeks of initial weight loss, it is quite common for your metabolism to slow down as it adjusts to the new calorie count. Stay on course and you’ll see results. In some cases, the scale will tell you your weight is barely changing, but you may be gaining muscle weight while losing fat weight. Also make sure to weigh yourself first thing in the morning to try to avoid the fluctuations in weight due to water.
13.Take all advice with a grain of salt. Everyone is going to have some tidbit of information for you. What worked for them might not work for you. Take it all in stride and work with what is getting results for you. Trying to do everything everyone says will only cause overload.
14.Eat more protein. If you choose to go this route, do not cut out all carbs. If you do so, as soon as you start eating carbs again you will regain your weight back. Instead of eating stand alone pasta, throw some meatballs or chicken in. Eat some beans, they are high in protein and very healthy for you. Increase the ammount of protein, but not by too much. The more protein you take in, the more water you should drink as well.
15.Eat less calories. The average woman should eat around 2,000 calories a day and the average male 2,500. There’s many ways to reduce the calories you intake. Try not to eat frozen dinners, pizza, or from fast food joints. There’s also certain drinks, such as Green Tea that are calorie reducers. Lettuce is another calorie reducer, but be careful because dressing tends to have the calories. Low fat/light vinnegette, balsomic vineger, red wine and vineger are pretty healthy dressings, but do not load it on
1. Once a week, indulge in a high-calorie-tasting, but low-calorie, treat. This should help keep you from feeling deprived and binging on higher-calorie foods. For instance:
- Lobster. Just 83 calories in 3 ounces.
- Shrimp. Just 60 calories in 12 large.
- Smoked salmon. Just 66 calories in two ounces. Sprinkle with capers for an even more elegant treat.
- Whipped cream. Just 8 calories in one tablespoon. Drop a dollop over a bowl of fresh fruit for dessert.2. Treat high-calorie foods as jewels in the crown. Make a spoonful of ice cream the jewel and a bowl of fruit the crown. Cut down on the chips by pairing each bite with lots of chunky, filling fresh salsa, suggests Jeff Novick, director of nutrition at the Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa in Florida. Balance a little cheese with a lot of salad.
3. After breakfast, make water your primary drink. At breakfast, go ahead and drink orange juice. But throughout the rest of the day, focus on water instead of juice or soda. The average American consumes an extra 245 calories a day from soft drinks. That’s nearly 90,000 calories a year — or 25 pounds! And research shows that despite the calories, sugary drinks don’t trigger a sense of fullness the way that food does.
4. Carry a palm-size notebook everywhere you go for one week. Write down every single morsel that enters your lips — even water. Studies have found that people who maintain food diaries wind up eating about 15 percent less food than those who don’t.
Last year when I lost 20kg (44 lb), I initially spent a lot of time counting calories - I do like to look at things from a technical point of view, so at the time, it was a comforting distraction. What I soon found though was that as long as you eat the right foods, it generally tended to work things out for itself.
Now, I do have quite a bit of weight to lose, at 131kg (289 lb) it’s pretty easy to lose weight by just eating the right foods, as I get closer to my goal weight, then a closer look at my exact calorie intake will be far more useful. For now, apart from a quick glance at the nutrition labels of foods I’m not that familiar with, I’m not going to stress about Calories all that much.
My five tips for making sure you avoid the Calorific Overload:
1. Check out the nutrition labels for foods you eat regularly. Learn to compare the number of calories for a constant weight of food. For example, in Australia, all our Nutrition labels have Kilojoules/100g (4 KJ’s is approximately 1 Calorie), so this makes most food easy to compare and you’ll soon be able to tell at a glance if something is a bit too ‘Calorie heavy’……more……
Weight loss does not have to involve drastic measures and endless hours at the gym. These 7 tips will help you lose weight with relatively little effort. See how well they work in your life.
1. Lighten the foods you eat now.
Take inventory of the foods that you eat now and choose lower fat versions. Switch from whole milk to 2% or skim, use low fat cheese and try whole wheat low fat crackers. Even these small changes in the way that you eat can make a big difference…..more……
Actually, I will not show you, what you should eat to lose fat! Instead, I want to show you my 5 tips to a healthy and fast fat lose by eating a regular normal food and a little-known secrets, that most experts will skip! This steps are the ones, that most people overlook!
Fat loss diet tip #1 - Avoid very low calorie diet!
Do not fall down in very low calorie diets! You can achieve some quick weight loss results and it can reduce your size dramatically but it can works only for a week or two. After the fourth or fifth week you will see the dieting becomes harder and the consequences will be decreased metabolism, in other words when you eat less, you will burn less……more……
Tags: appetite, digestive system, fruits and vegetables, healthy food, losing weight, Nutrition, resistance training, tips, Weight Loss, weight loss tips, weight training