10 Ways to Start Losing Weight Now

August 13, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Miscellaneous

Losing weight is hard for everyone. If you want to lose weight and you’ve ‘tried everything’, try the following tips. Don’t do all of them. Don’t do them in order. Just pick one and give it a try for a few days. Then try another one. If you can do all ten, you’ll be shedding pounds in no time.

1. Don’t Go on a Diet! Stop thinking of ‘diet’ as starving or depriving yourself or as a new and interesting approach to eating. The dictionary’s first two definitions for ‘diet’ are ‘food and drink regularly consumed’ and ‘habitual nourishment.’ So don’t ‘go on a diet’. You’re already on a diet. You just need to modify your diet so that you’re eating more healthy foods than harmful foods. And if you make just one small change each day or each week and make it part of your regular eating pattern, you’ll lose weight.

2. Eat six meals per day. You may have already heard this before but it’s worth repeating and it’s easier than it sounds. If you’re overweight, chances are you’re skipping regular meals and eating a lot of calories through random snacking throughout the day and lots of liquid calories (soda, mocha choca lattes, chips, chocolates). Instead of foraging all day long on whatever comes near you, try to eat three square meals and three scheduled healthy snacks. For example, eat breakfast before you work and then, midway between your breakfast and lunch, have a planned snack. Nothing fancy but keep it real. An apple with some peanut butter is a great choice or keep a stash of protein bars handy and have one for a snack. When lunch rolls around, you won’t be overly hungry so you’ll be more likely to make a sensible choice for lunch. Have another snack midway between lunch and dinner and you’ll find the same results. After dinner and before bedtime, have one more snack for the day. Make it a small one and keep the carbs low.

3. Stop drinking soda. Period. That’s it. Each 12 oz. can of soda has 7 and 1/2 teaspoons of sugar in it. If you grab any 24 oz bottle or get a medium or larger soda from any fast food restaurant, you’re consuming 15 teaspoons of sugar! Think about ordering your coffee with 15 sugars in it. If you want to see a visual measurement of the sugar in soda, check this out. You won’t believe how much sugar you’re getting.

4. Drink more water. If you stop drinking soda, you’ll be looking for a substitute. Water is the best. Since water contains no calories, it can serve as an appetite suppressant, and helps the body metabolize stored fat. It’s fat -free, cholesterol-free, low in sodium, and has no calories. Also, drinking more water helps to reduce water retention by stimulating your kidneys. Dehydration leads to excess body fat, poor muscle tone & size, decreased digestive efficiency & organ function, increased toxicity, joint & muscle soreness, & water retention. Water works to keep muscles and skin toned. Try to drink 8 glasses of water a day. This is an easy and effective step towards losing weight.

5. Hold the Fries. Have a salad or a vegetable (or a baked potato) instead of those french fries or chips. Even though many fast food chains, restaurants and the makers of snacks (chips, etc.) are voluntarily switching from ‘trans fats’ to better oils like canola oil for frying, avoiding fried foods is best.

6. Eat Breakfast. This is actually a tip included in ‘eat 6 meals a day’ suggestion but for those who want to take smaller steps, this is probably the most important meal. Skipping breakfast means you’ve been starving your body since you went to sleep for 8 hours already, plus however long it is until your next meal. What does your body do when it’s starving? It slows down your metabolism and holds on to fat. On the other hand, eating breakfast consistently signals to your body that there is no need to store fat and your body begins to process your food and fires up your metabolism to start your day.

7. Eat More Protein. Protein is the building block for healthy muscle and roughly a third of your meals should consist of protein. If you eat meals without protein (think coffee and donuts, a bagel with OJ, pancakes with fruit), you’re body begins to pump out insulin to keep your blood sugar levels under control. You’ll get a sugar rush while your body converts the sugar to fat and then you’ll crash. Eating protein with every meal in addition to carbs and healthy fats allows your body to regulate this process.

8. Make better choices. Very few people have time to prepare all of their meals and be ready for healthy snacks and meals all day long. Business travelers, busy moms, working moms, all have too much to do and few hours to do it in. So, we grab food that is available. Having meals prepared or at least a plan is ideal. But when you can’t, make the best choice you can, with what’s offered to you. Substitute a chicken sandwich for a burger. Add a salad or baked potato instead of an order of french fries. Hold the mayo and have mustard. Have the dressing on the side. Order the smaller steak. Choose brown rice instead of white. Order fish. Just one better choice at each meal will make a world of difference.

9. Don’t Eat Past Full. Treat your body more like your car and you’ll eat better. You wouldn’t overfill your gas tank and you wouldn’t put 6 quarts of oil in your car. You measure out what your car is supposed to hold and needs to run properly and that’s what you put in your car. Do the same with your stomach. Prepare a dish of food that is reasonable in size, eat it and stop. You don’t need to be full at every meal. And, if you’re eating 6 meals a day, you won’t want to. A good rule of thumb for determining portion size is the size of a deck of playing cards, the size of your closed fist or the palm of your hand for all solid foods.

10. Resistance Train. If you’ve never worked out at all, talk to your doctor before you begin any exercise plan. But if you’re stuck in a rut with the treadmill, stationary bike and other aerobics, and getting no where, get off the treadmill and start to incorporate resistance training into your workout. A good pattern is aerobics one day and resistance training the next. Weight training or other resistance training (includes pushups, pullups, squats with your own body weight, walking lunges) have one excellent benefit that aerobics does not provide. When you resistance train, you break muscle down during your workout. As a result, you burn calories (and fat), during your workout and all day long, as your body repairs itself with all of the healthy choices you make in your diet all day long. Depending on how hard you train, you can burn calories all through the day and night, from one resistance training workout.

If you are having trouble figuring out how many calories to eat, use our food database and calorie counter (you need to be logged in to track calories) and find or build workouts using our find a workout creator.

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