"How to"
Diet and Weight Loss Tips (Part 1 of 2)
 No
one forces you to eat certain foods or to neglect exercise.
The decisions you make each day affect your life. What
foods will you eat? Will you get involved in a fitness
program? Only you can determine the success of your
weight loss program. Begin today by making the right
choices, and read these helpful tips to get you started.
We often eat when we are stressed out or depressed.
Try to break that habit by exercising instead. It does
not have to be intense exercise. Sometimes a quiet stroll
can have a great impact on relieving stress.
A great way to find out what triggers your food choices
is to keep a daily food diary. But rather than just
logging what foods you eat, log the circumstances around
that choice. Log your emotional state when you made
that food choice. Eventually you will see patterns emerge,
and the first step to fixing something is identifying
the problem! Once you know that you always eat junk
food when it rains, you can prepare for times like that
in advance. Tip from Joanne Bednar
Be aware of how much fat you eat. Keep a diary of everything
you eat. (Yes, even that soda you drink!) Next to each
item, write the number of calories and fat grams and
calculate your daily total of both:
1. Multiply the number of fat grams by 9 since each
fat gram has 9 calories. 2. Calculate what percentage
of your total daily calories came from fat by dividing
the number of fat calories by the number of total calories.
According to
RealAge.com,
becoming preoccupied during mealtimes may cause you
to eat more calories than you normally would. In one
study, women ate significantly more calories when they
listened to a detective story during their meal compared
to when they focused on the food they were eating.
How big are your dinner plates? If you start with smaller
portions, you may be able to stop without taking seconds.
The illusion of simply cleaning your plate can sometimes
be enough to trigger our hunger mechanism to stop. For
this reason, consider using smaller plates. If you take
seconds, try healthy seconds....like more veggies, salad
or fruits. Try removing all serving dishes from the
table after everyone has their first portion. It is
much easier to reach into the mashed potatoes bowl and
pile more on your plate than it is to get up, go over
to the counter, fill up, sit back down and eat. Tip
from Joanne Bednar
Are you the type that wants to keep eating at a meal?
Convince yourself that you should only eat a cup or
2 of food. If you get hungry later, you may eat a little
later. Our bodies digest food better in smaller portions
anyway, and this will help to keep your digestive system
active more often (burning more calories at a steady
pace). You don't have to go back for seconds or thirds
if you know that you can eat again later, if needed.
Remember, another meal will ALWAYS be right around the
corner. That is enough to keep anyone from feeling deprived!
Tip from Joanne Bednar
Weight loss is best accomplished through a combination
of cardio, weight training and diet. Weight training
increases your muscles and the more muscle you have
on your body, the more calories you will burn at rest.
In other words, your metabolism becomes faster.
Don't leave out resistance training when it comes to
weight loss. Many people make the mistake of thinking
they should only try and burn off the fat through aerobic
exercise. While this is a key component of fitness,
resistance training is too important to your weight
loss efforts to leave out. Tip from Joanne Bednar
The more muscle mass you have the higher your metabolism
is. Muscle is a highly metabolic tissue that requires
tons of energy to maintain. A person with muscle can
eat more food without gaining weight compared to the
slim, but non-muscular person. Tip from Joanne Bednar
If you have stalled in your weight loss efforts, pick
up weight training and watch the weight fall off! After
the initial changes (sometimes a 4 lb gain of muscle
over 6 weeks....balanced usually by a 4 lb loss of fat
so the scale remains constant) you will notice that
you will start to lose more easily, and more importantly,
be able to keep it off. All the while, you will be tightening
and toning your body into a more shapely figure, and
you will be amazed at your underlying physique as you
start to melt the fat away! Tip from Joanne Bednar
How do you get your body trained to burn fat
instead of store it? Aerobic exercise. As an
unfit person begins to exercise, the body continues
to hold on to the fat, because it is not trained to
release it very easily. Over time, as you exercise regularly,
your fat cells begin breaking down more readily, and
your muscles actually recruit more fat burning enzymes
to make their job easier. You essentially become more
efficient. As you become more fit, your fat storing
enzymes start to disappear, and you become a fat burning
machine! Tip from Joanne Bednar from
Motivation Station
One of the habits of naturally thin people is the "fidget
factor". This goes beyond just parking further
away and taking the stairs. The fidget factor accounts
for a significant calorie burn. Those who have it seem
to never sit down. If and when they are sitting, they
are tapping their leg, bouncing their knee, etc. If
you want to get the fidget factor, then concentrate
on daily exercise. The increase in metabolism that you
will get from exercise produces "restless"
muscles, causing you to want to move around rather than
sit still. Tip from Joanne Bednar from
Motivation Station
The goal
of cardiorespiratory exercise is to train your body
to burn fat better and more efficiently over time. An
athlete burns more fat, both during exercise and at
rest, than an unfit person, which explains why an active
person can eat three platefuls of food and not gain
a single pound. If you love to eat, then your goal should
be to integrate exercise into your daily life so that
you may do so and still maintain a healthy weight and
percentage of body fat Tip from Joanne Bednar from
Motivation
Station
Exercise in general increases your metabolism, because
not only do you require tons of energy to get through
your workout, but once you stop exercising your muscles
work like crazy to replace all the glucose you just
burned up! This "post exercise" calorie burn
continues after your session is over. Now you know why
fit people can eat so much. They have a high metabolism,
and naturally burn a large amount of calories during
exercise and at rest. Tip from Joanne Bednar from
Motivation
Station
A single
exercise session does not make a difference in your
weight or metabolism, but over time, your body adapts
to the regular stress of exercise and becomes more efficient.
Someone who exercises regularly will burn more calories
all day long, as opposed to someone who only exercises
once per week. Once you raise your metabolism through
regular exercise, you will be a calorie burning machine
and will see the weight come off, or you can eat more
without gaining.
Think starving yourself is the only way to lose weight?
Don't underestimate the power of physical activity when
it comes to whittling your waist. In one recent study,
participants lost approximately the same number of pounds
regardless of whether they used an exercise regimen
or a calorie-restricted diet as their means of weight
loss. What's more, compared to the dieting group, the
exercisers lost a higher percentage of body fat. Tip
from
RealAge.com
Energy
is the body's number one priority, so the body will
do anything to get it. If you go long enough without
eating, the muscle tissue (protein) must then be converted
to glucose to sustain body functions. You will burn
off some fat during a starvation or low calorie diet.
But since fat is the most abundant source of energy
the body will "hold on" to your fat cells
tightly before they release them for energy use.
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