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I can tell you right now that my biggest weakness when it comes to weight loss is my craving for sweets.

I have been know to eat a dozen home made cookies even when I wasn’t hungry. I have also eaten entire bags of black liquorish before I knew they were gone.

One of my biggest problems is the craving for something sweet after every meal. I have found that if I eat some salted peanuts after a meal this helps with this craving.

So what do I do about this problem? I’ll be real honest here sometimes I fail the test and give into my cravings.

The thing I don’t do is beat myself up so bad that I quit my plan. If you slip a little, just start again tomorrow and try to do better.

The fact that you know and admitted you have a problem that needs working on, is half the battle.

Don’t give up and do better tomorrow. Like I said before, you can’t do anything about yesterday, but you can change the here and now.

Also take a look at my post on Lifestyle Changes and my new article on EzineArticles called What is the Difference Between Lifestyle Changes and Diets?

You need to take the word diet out of your vocabulary and replace it with lifestyle changes.

Diets are short term attempts to fix a long term problem, and therefore fail us more often than the help.

I just wrote an article on the differences between diets and lifestyle changes and submitted it to Ezine Articles. You can read it here

The gist of it is the sooner you start to look at aspects of your life that you can make changes that you can stick with for a lifetime the sooner you’ll get your weight under control.

These don’t have to be major changes that make you feel like you are depriving yourself of something you can never do again. These can be as simple as getting a dog so you have more of an insensitive to take a 30 minute walk everyday.

You could decide that your done with Soda and replace it with flavored water, or just add lemon to tap water. Start drinking eight glasses of water everyday.

You could start to look at the calorie information for everything you eat, so that you know what your putting into your body and therefore your making an informed decision based on know facts.

You could use the simple cheap diet software ($7.95) I have listed on this blog to find out what your daily calorie intake should be to reach your goal weight in a predetermined time.

You can go from three meals a day to eating 5 or 6 smaller meals that will make you stay full and help your body process the food more efficiently.

When you replace the word diet, with lifestyle changes your weight loss now becomes a long term solution to a problem. This way you are doing little things everyday that won’t hurt as much as a full blown diet and will result in lasting changes.

Don’t make this harder than what it is, have some fun with it and get a dog

Also see my “Eating Plan Off Track?” post

There are safe fast ways to lose weight, but there are also many unhealthy ways to quickly lose weight. Your number one priority should be to stay healthy while losing weight.

Now that we have the health issues out of the way, I will tell you about some ways to lose weight fast. Do not beat yourself up if you have some weight to lose however. Are you aware that your rate of metabolism has an impact on the weight you are? It plays a major role in weather your body burns or store fat. There are other people who suffer from hormonal imbalances.

The most common causes of weighing too much are a lack of exercise and eating too many of the wrong foods or simply eating in an unhealthy manner. If rapid weight loss matters to you because a special event is coming up then the first thing you need to do is to start consuming more water on a daily basis.

You should start each morning with an eight ounce glass of water and then drink seven more through out the day. This helps to jump start your metabolism. Water is not only good for you when it comes to losing weigh but it is good for the body in general.

Eat as organically as possible. Start your day with an apple, banana, whole grain, plain yogurt and raw honey. If you don’t already, you are going to need to learn to eat other vegetables, like tomatoes and carrots along with salmon caught in the wild, not chemically feed. Rapid weight loss can only be accomplished if you eat as healthy as can be.

One other problem some people have, because of their busy schedule is that they eat supper too late. You should always allow four hours between your last meal and the time you go to bed, so that your body has time to process your food.

Okay so now lets talk about excise, but don’t worry we are only talking about taking a daily walk. Were not talking about speed walking here, you don’t have to compete in a race to lose weight. Start with a 20 minute walk every day and then work up to 30 minutes and from there, 45 minutes to an hour.

For some people this part is going to be the hard, but you need to stop eating junk food. This includes most if not all fast foods. These foods are fatty, fried and very salty. This all spells bad news for a person trying to lose weight. In the same way, put an end to drinking soft drinks and drink water instead. There are not nutritional values in the 150 calories found in soft drinks, and therefore you don’t need or want them. Studies show that soft drinks contribute for up to 16 pounds of extra weight per year on the average person that regularly drinks them.

You can lose wight if you look at your eating and exercise as a lifestyle change instead of a diet. Set small goals and make up your mind that you are going to make healthy choices for the rest of your life. You do not have to work out at the gym everyday to achieve the rapid weight loss you want–nor do you have to hire a gourmet chef.

Also see Lose 15 pounds fast interview

This is the first of a series of weight loss videos that I will be posting to YouTube tell me what you think.

Also take a look at this weight loss software

What do you do if you get off track with your eating plan? You know what I mean, you’re to busy to take the time to think about calories and you grab some fast food.

This one meal pretty much blows your calories for the entire day so what do you do now?

What you don’t do is beat yourself up and get so frustrated you just give up. Most people give up on their weight loss plan right after they have a set-back.

The best thing you can do is just start again like nothing happened and get back on track. You can’t change yesterday, but you can take control of the here and now.

As I said many times, this needs to become a lifestyle change, not a diet. Once you get to that point, you will have less set-backs to deal with.

So just what is a lifestyle change? Stay tune for a future post :-0

How much time do you spend thinking about what to eat for the diet your on? I hear people everyday say I can’t eat this or that’s not on my diet.

Now don’t get me wrong there should be some thought given to what type of foods you eat, there are good calories and bad calories, but this “what do I eat” can’t consume your life.

If all we think about is what we can or can’t eat for the next meal everyday, I can guarantee that you won’t stick to your diet.

The best thing here is to make this not about being on a diet, but about a new way of living your life. Picking your next meal needs to become a natural thing, not something you agonize over.

One of the best tricks you can do to help, is to eat smaller meals more often, so that your not hungry anytime during the day. This way your not thinking about food as often and there are many benefits to eating up to six meals per day.

Just think lifestyle change, NOT diets!

Many people ask me if using diet software really works.

The answer is Yea using it would really help you lose weight. The problem is most people stop using them after a few weeks if that long.

You see most diet software is designed to track your daily eating and exercise activities. The problem with this is it takes time to do the data entry, and you need to do it every day.

If you’re finding it hard to find the time to take a 30 minute walk how are you going to find time every day to do data entry?

What I found out to be most useful was to use a simple diet software program that I found to help calculate how many calories I could eat per day, if I wanted to lose a certain amount of weight in a certain amount of time.

It take on minute or less to answer the three or four questions it needs to do the calculation and gives you the answer you need to reach your target weight.

If the information you give it is too unrealistic it will tell say “This is unrealistic”.

Once you find out how many calories you should eat per day to lose the weight, you simple tract you calorie intake (on a note pad) for the day, and compare it to your goal. If you eat to many, then you know you need to cut back or up your activities, and you also know your not going to make your target on the date you picked.

This is the simplest diet software you’ll ever use so take a look.

I hate the word diet because right away it sends the mind into a negative place. Diets to most people mean depriving yourself something you like, so right away you start out in a negative place.

I would rather use terms like lifestyle change, when talking about losing weight, because what you eat is just one part of how you look and feel.

When it comes to the eating part, while we do need to change what and how we eat, we don’t need to starve ourselves, nor deprive ourselves total from our favorite foods. The trick as I mentioned in an earlier post is to eat more often and in smaller portions.

When most people think about exercise, again the mind envisions things that are not pleasant and we once again start out in a negative place.

At first what we should be doing is figuring out ways that we can get exercise just by changing things in our daily activities. Again a good example would be taking stairs instead of the elevator.

These little things become a normal part of our lives and therefore we have made a lifestyle change, and have tricked our minds by not really starting a formalized diet plan.

Once we do these two small easy changes, and we start to see results then our mindset is in a more positive place when we decide to kick it up a notch.

If the diet you select focuses mostly on fast results, your going to find out that these will end up being a short-term results and not really a way to loose weight and keep it off.  Once you stop this type of diet, you’ll most likely find that you eat more and therefore end up weighing more than you did before you stated the diet.

You could continue to try one diet after another, or you could finally understand that you need to make a permanent change in your life that will result in lasting weight loss.  The secret to the success of a lifestyle change fitness plan, is over time you will see your body’s metabolism change, and this further helps burn more calories.  You going to start to see that your exercise program becomes even more efficient, and the best part is once you raise your metabolism your body burns fat even when your not working out.

There is no magic pill that will safely increase you body’s metabolism, you only need to know two things:  The first thing should excite you. You need to eat more meals during the day, but they need to be smaller meals.  You also need to add more activity into your day.  While these are changes that you should commit to for a life time, you can work them in gradually and before you know it you will be living a healthier life, without even thinking about it.
Don’t think of exercise as something you need to find the time to do, instead think about what you can change in your daily activities that would give you some exercise. This could be a simple as walking more places or taking the stairs every day.  A good time to burn a few extra calories would be during breaks at work.  You don’t have to go to the gym, just take short walks daily and they will add up.

Once you learn to select the proper things to eat, it can be fun to eat six times per day instead of just three.   Because you digestive system can process these smaller meals more efficiently, the body does not have to store excess calories that in most cases tend to turn into fat.

For some reason our body seems to think that we are still in our cavemen hunt in gather stage of evolution.  Therefore when it has an excess it will store it as fat, planning on using it when food is not available.  If you only eat three large meals per day, you put your body into a cycle whereas you metabolism is cycling between it’s daily high and low.  The goal of the six smaller meals is to keep your metabolism steadier through out the day at a higher level.

Your going to need to have a stash of healthy snacks to eat during the day, and you could also break your lunch into two smaller meals.  The goal again is to have an even influx of calories all day long.  Your going to want to divide you total calorie goal into your six meals, so that it gives you the most even calorie intake that’s possible.
This lifestyle change of eating is so much easier than those extreme diets, there is no food that is totally off limits, so you don’t have to feel deprived.  For this to work you need to treat yourself to some good candy once and awhile. This should be part of the calories of one of your six meals.

Unlike those strict, eat this don’t ever eat that diets, you can treat yourself to a less than healthy food once in awhile.  The truth is this is the only way you will ever stick to your long term plan and you should accept it as part of the plan.

There are many diets telling you what to eat and what not to eat, but how do you know how long it will take you to loose a certain amount of weight?

No matter what diet plan you choose it all comes down to two things… calories in and calories burnt, it has always been that simple.

The problem is, its not that easy to figure out how many calories you should consume per day if you want to loose a particular amount of weight in a specific time.

There are a lot of factors that come into play, including age, current weight and activity.  There are formulas to help you figure this out if you are a math major

There are software packages that trainers use that would help you figure this out, but be prepared to spend a hundred dollars or more for this help.

I found a simple little software program that costs less than $8.00 that will tell you exactly how many calories you can eat per day to make your target weight on the date you desire.

You answer three questions and in about two minutes you will know what you need to do to loose the weight you entered into the software.

This software can be used with any diet, because like I said it doesn’t matter what diet you are using it all boils down to calories in and calories burnt.

I have my own thoughts on dieting, but that is for another post.

The software is called Weight Loss Oracle and it costs $7.95 from this link.