Archive for the ‘Weight Loss Tips’ Category

What Did You Eat Today?

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!

Losing Weight is a Mindset

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.

How To Loose Weight and Keep it Off For Good

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.