9 Secrets of Losing Weight
9 Secrets of Losing Weight
9 Secrets of Losing Weight
In 1980 national surveys showed that 35% of Americans were overweight. Today, that number has almost doubled to 65%. Keeping weight off is looking like a losing battle in more ways than one. Maybe we're just doing it wrong. Despite the widespread interest in losing weight many Americans are in the dark on some of the fundamentals.
Here's some secrets you need to know about managing your weight:
Secret: How much you weigh is a function of how many calories you take in versus how many you burn. Here's the formula for a person with an average level of activity. First, decide what your ideal weight is. Multiply that number by 14 and that's how many calories you can take in each day to maintain that weight. For example, if your ideal weight is 150 pounds the formula is 150 * 14 = 2100 calories.
Secret: Stress is a major cause of over-eating. When you feel the urge to eat, stop, take a deep breath and focus on relaxing until the urge goes away. Do some soul searching and ask yourself if you're really hungry or are you just searching for a source of reassurance.
Secret: Even though it adds up to the same number of calories, eating 6 meals of 300 calories each is better for you than 3 900 calorie meals. When you eat your body takes what it needs at the moment for energy and stores the rest as fat. If you stop eating earlier you can avoid the fat storage phase. Plus, it's a good exercise in self control.
Secret: Watching television while you eat makes you fat. For one thing, if you're watching TV you're likely to miss the signals that your brain is sending you telling you that you're full. You're also more likely to ignore what your stomach is telling you and wait until the commercials to stop eating. Don't let TV tell you when to start and stop eating.
Secret: Losing weight is easy compared to keeping it off. Everybody knows somebody who lost a lot of weight, looked great for about a month and then the next time you saw them, they were fat again. In dieting, the losing phase and the maintenance phase are two completely different things. It doesn't really matter the name of the diet you go on in the losing phase. If you get the weight off in a healthy, controlled manner, good for you. What really matters is what you do afterward. Changing your lifestyle to include exercise and switching to a moderate diet of mostly fruits and vegetables is the key.
Secret: Almost all successful dieters eat breakfast. If you pass on breakfast you can let yourself get too hungry by lunch time and that leads to overeating. Eating a good breakfast helps you keep your appetite under control and improves the functioning of all parts of your body. Your brain will be clearer, too, and that helps you make good decisions about food.
Secret: You'll lose weight better and faster by blowing off your diet once a week. Let's face it, you can only be good for so long before you have a relapse. Pick a day of the week and go off your diet. Eat anything you want and get it out of your system. Next day, get right back on the diet. Having a scheduled, controlled relapse will help ease the pressure and keep you from going on a permanent relapse and forgetting the diet completely.
Secret: Losing weight takes some planning. You can't just say "Today I'm going to eat less". You have to think ahead to what you're going to eat for each meal so that you can get to the grocery store and stock up on the foods you need. If you don't plan, you'll get to meal time and realize that you don't have the healthy foods you need on hand. That leads to the dreaded refrigerator grazing expedition. At this point, the diet has gone out the window so better luck tomorrow. Don't let that happen to you. Have a plan ready for each day and make sure you execute the plan with time to spare. The old saying "Failing to plan means planning to fail" applies to dieting, too.
Secret: Write everything down. Even when you're not on a diet or trying to lose weight keep a journal of what you eat all day. If you can see in black and white what your daily intake is like it's much easier to see where you're going off the rails. If you're at a plateau where you're not losing weight or you are losing but at a slower rate than you should, you can look at your daily journal and see where you can make changes. People often tend to conveniently forget about the little snacks during the day that creep in between meals. Eating the leftovers from yesterday, helping your spouse with the meal they couldn't finish or just killing the rest of the chips can add up to serious calories and torpedo your diet for the day. If you write everything down you're not only keeping a calorie count but you're also keeping yourself honest about what you're eating.
If you're one of the millions of Americans trying to lose weight it's important to try not to be in too much of a hurry. It would be nice to be at your goal right now but healthy weight loss takes time. Even though gaining weight is a lot easier it didn't happen overnight so it would be unreasonable to believe that losing it would either. The most important thing to remember is that changing your lifestyle to eating healthy food and exercising will not only help you lose weight but it will help you keep it off, too.
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