Losing Weight and Feeling Great

Posts Tagged ‘diet tips’

If you want to know how to lose weight and keep it off, you’ll need to realize one thing — and that these are two different goals!  And as such, they have different approaches.  Here’s what I mean.

Losing Weight Fast – Not!

When you finally decide you’re going to lose weight, you want it gone — fast!  But here’s the problem.  When you lose weight fast, you’re not changing your eating pattern, except temporarily.

By losing weight more slowly, you are giving new habits (hopefully healthier habits) to form.  And it’s these new habits that can help you keep the weight off.

I do want to mention one thing, though — when you start a new diet, you may indeed lose weight fast for a short while, then level out to a slower rate.  This is normal.  The “fast” I am talking about is continually keeping your body on an accelerated weight loss.

And just to give you a number, anything above 2 pounds a week continually is too fast.

Keeping It Off

This is usually harder than losing the weight in the first place — keeping it off.

On a weight loss plan (a.k.a. diet), you know what you should and shouldn’t eat.  But once you reach your goal and go off that diet — whoa!  The whole world is your oyster, so to speak.

Here’s where the “keep it off” part of how to lose weight and keep it off comes into play.  If you’ve given your body and mind a chance to form new, healthy eating habits, you’ll find it much easier to stay at your goal.

But if you’ve been on a “diet” mentality, you’re going to find it much easier to fall back into the old bad habits that got you into trouble in the first place!

Here’s a tip.  Keep on weighing yourself once a week and if you move up by 5 pounds, time to go back on that weight loss diet.  Catching it at 5 pounds is much easier to handle than waiting until that 5 pounds moves to 15…or 50!

How to Lose Weight and Keep it Off

So how to lose weight and keep it off once you’ve reached your goal isn’t as tough if you’ve found a healthy weight loss plan that lets you lose weight slowly and creates good new habits.

But you will need to monitor your weight for the rest of your life, in case those bad habits start creeping back.  And losing 5 pounds, which can usually be done in a few weeks, is much easier than if you wait until that 5 pounds is a lot more!

Wouldn’t you like 12 diet tips from people who are losing weight?  You know what it’s like; it’s hard to lose weight with all the advertisement, all the fast food drive-though lanes that call to us.  Sure, sticking to your eating plan can be challenging, but here are 12 diet tips to help you out.

I’ve gleaned these from forum postings of people who are in the process of losing weight, so these are up-to-the-minute ideas from people who are kind enough to share what works for them.

12 Diet Tips

Life comes at you fast, but you can always make a U-turn.  Maybe you start a binge or eat something you know you shouldn’t have.  Instead of blowing your diet completely, recognize that one mistake won’t ruin your diet if you do a U-turn and get back on it.

Chew your food slowly and savor each bite.  Don’t just gulp it down and not taste a thing.  Make your meal last longer and you’ll feel full sooner.

Figure out your trigger foods, then stay away from them.  Don’t keep them in the house.  If you have to keep them around because of others in the household, distract yourself when they call to you.  Take a walk, give yourself a manicure, try new makeup or hairstyles — anything to keep you from the food!

Losing weight doesn’t happen in a day, and losing all the weight you need to won’t happen in a week — or maybe month or year.  The key is to be persistent and consistent.

Don’t talk about exercising — just do it!

Portion control tip:  go out an buy a baby food try — the kind that has three dividers.  Put your veggies in the biggest divider, then add protein and a grain.  The size of the plate (plus the dividers) helps keep your portions and proportions without measuring.

Use a food tracker to really see what kinds of foods and what times you eat.  Do it for at least a couple of weeks to discover not only what you really eat, but what effect different foods have on you.  And review your tracker before you eat dinner, to help make better choices.

Get used to reading labels, especially for foods labeled as low fat, fat-free, low carb or diet.  You’d be surprised what they put in those foods that aren’t exactly healthy!

Quit drinking sodas and diet sodas.  Drink water instead.

Get your sleep!  If you aren’t rested you may fall into the habit of using food and caffeine as a pick me up.

Eat small meals throughout the day instead of skipping breakfast and then eating a large lunch and huge dinner.

Learn to throw away leftovers.  You know, don’t be a member of the clean-your-plate-club.  If you’re full, don’t keep eating just because it’s on your plate.  If it’s big enough, wrap it up for another meal.  If it’s a few bites, throw it away.

There we go, ideas to help you lose weight.  They are pretty good, aren’t they?  I think I’ll put a few of these to use myself!

What about you — which ones do you think will help you the most?

There are some scary diet "tips" out there, coming from the celebrity front.  Sure, we’ve all heard about the models who are anorexic, the actresses afraid to eat more than a few leaves of lettuce at a time.  No, I’m talking about some diet "tips" that can tip you right over into a grave!

Here’s one of the new diets — a fast.  With a twist.  Fasts aren’t anything new, and they can be healthy — but not Hollywood-style.

How about a diet of water, lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper?  And then take a colon cleanse (so what is there to cleanse, anyway?).  And I’m not talking a one or two day fast, either.

Another trick is to use a laxative tea.  A cup is fine, but some people are drinking five and ten cups of this stuff a day.  Now that’s a way to mess up your body’s schedule — as soon as you stop with the tea, you get painfully constipated.

Here’s one I talked about the other day in my post about drunkorexia — women who subsist on coffee and alcohol, and the trend started with the celebrity circuit.  Heaven forbid that something healthy should pass between their lips.

This one may hit home with us, though — why can’t we lose weight when we do the same things other people do?  The "other people" may not be doing what you think; case in point:

“I had one actress who trained with me and took six Spin classes a week. And all
she ate was lettuce and Swedish Fish. When the press asked her how she’d
‘transformed’ her body, she said, ‘Oh, I do yoga and hike with my puppy.’ That
made me laugh. Don’t lie about how much you work out, because other women are
going to think, I walk my dog, why don’t I look like that?”
— Gunnar
Peterson, fitness instructor

(Read the rest of the article here.)

Losing weight the right (i.e. healthy) way is hard and slow.  But wouldn’t you rather be healthy while you’re losing weight than so sick by the time you’ve lost the weight that you don’t have the energy for anything?