How do you lose weight healthily and increase your chances of keeping it off? Check out the steps below:
- Decide first if you truly need to lose weight. Look at your shape, height, weight, and history of obesity-linked diseases and the history of those factors in your family. Then consider when your weight problems began.
- Analyze your eating and activity patterns. If you’re starving and bingeing, you first have to learn how to eat normally.
- Keep a food diary for two weeks. Write down everything you eat, when you eat it. And how you’re feeling at the time- bored, angry or hungry.
Make a plan. Once you decide you’re ready to change your lifestyle to reach a desirable weight, you’ll have to figure out how to do that.- Don’t plan to lose too much too soon. Rapid weight loses generally means a rapid weight gain down the road. Don’t try to lose more than a half a pound per week.
- Pick a good time. Don’t decide to start this the week before your wedding or right after you lose your job. You don’t want to choose period of high stress only to add on additional stress.
- Don’t try to change everything at once. It’s unrealistic to think that tomorrow you’ll completely redo your food habits in some 180 degree shift. Make changes gradually.
- Start with damage control. If you’re the family food shopper, you can handle this one yourself. Or discuss it with the person who does the grocery shopping. It’s a pretty simple advice: If you don’t have potato chips or chocolate around. You’re not as likely to indulge in these high calorie snacks. Instead, keep low calorie snacks and foods on hand-raw vegetables or rice cakes, whatever works.
- Measure your foods. Doing this tedious chore for a few days can help you train your eye to recognize portion sizes.
- Don’t count calories. Opinions differ on this one, but most experts suggest changing the way you eat, rather than allotting yourself only so many calories a day.
- Cut out the alcohol. You could say a martini is “empty calories”- it has no nutritional benefits. Alcohol may encourage fat distribution around the waist. So abstinence for some could mean a substantial drop in calories. Some people can lose weight by giving up beer.
- Eat breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. Skipping those meals leads to binge eating it’s the body’s attempt to make up for lack of food intake as it goes into starvation mode.
- Make sure you eat enough. That’s music to any dieter’s ears. Starvation lead to bingeing and lowered metabolism
- Don’t make a lapse a collapse. Just because you fail one day and pig out on the wrong foods doesn’t mean you should give up for good. Pick yourself up, dust yourself up and start over again the next day.
- Get your nutrients. You need two servings a day of meat, fish, poultry, or meat substitutes like eggs, legumes, or nuts; two servings of dairy products, (three for children and four for teenagers); four servings of fruits and vegetables; and four servings of bread, cereals, pasta and other grains.
- Cut the fat. Fat is where it’s at if you want to target one enemy of your waistline. And cutting out high fat foods can benefit much more than your figure. – You’ll lower your risk for heart diseases and some cancers. Fat is nature way of crowding a lot of calories – or energy- into food. A gram of fat (one-fourth of teaspoon) contains nice calories, while a gram of protein or carbohydrate has four.
