Showing posts with label Healthy Living. Show all posts
Best Strategies for Long-Term Weight Loss Success
The Habits
The specific habits you form to lose weight are very personal, but here’s an idea to get you started:
- Eat whole foods — whole grains, nuts, seeds, veggies, fruits, non-fried protein — instead of sweets, fried foods, processed carbs.
- Exercise each day — walk, do some bodyweight exercises, run, do a short intense workout, etc.
How to Form the Habits
Habits are formed by tying a habit to a trigger, and repeating it a bunch of times until it becomes automatic. We’ll solve that in this habit plan:
- Replace an old habit with the new habit. Start with just one habit for now, to make it more likely that it’ll stick. Let’s say you want to eat more veggies. Instead of snacking on chips or sweets in the afternoon, snack on carrots/broccoli and hummus.
- Keep the habit small. We tend to be ambitious and do a lot at first. Then we crash and do nothing. But in the beginning, keep it small if you want it to stick.
- Focus on the enjoyment. Instead of thinking, “I have to do this” think, “I get to do this.” And enjoy the crap out of it. Then the habit itself becomes the reward.
- Have some accountability. Commit to doing something really embarrassing if you don’t stick to the habit each week.
So what are we to do? Before you get started on a weight loss program, consider the following tips. They should help you reach the goal of obtaining and maintaining a healthy weight.
Set the Right Weight Loss Goals
Setting effective weight loss goals is an important first step. Keep in mind that effective weight loss goals are specific, attainable, and forgiving. For example, "exercise more" is a wonderful goal, but it's not specific. Walk 30 minutes, five days each week" is specific, attainable, and forgiving.
Reward Weight Loss Success, But Not With Food!
An effective reward is something that is desirable, timely, and contingent on meeting your goal. Rewards may include treating yourself to a movie or massage, taking an afternoon off from work, or just an hour of time to yourself. Keep in mind that numerous small rewards, delivered for meeting smaller goals, are more effective than bigger rewards, requiring a long, difficult effort.
Balance Your Food Checkbook
This means that you should monitor your lifestyle by observing and recording some aspect of your eating and exercising behaviors, such as how many calories you eat in a day, how many servings of fruits and vegetables you eat per day, or how often and for how long you exercise. Doing this can really help you determine how you are doing and what you need to do to meet your weight loss goals.
Avoid Eating and Food Triggers
Identify those social and environmental cues that tend to encourage undesired eating, and then work to change those cues. For example, you may learn that you're more likely to overeat while watching television, or whenever treats are on display by the office coffee pot.
Get the (Fullness) Message
Changing the way you go about eating can make it easier to eat less and lose weight without feeling deprived. It takes 15 or more minutes for your brain to get the message you've been fed. So slow down the speed that you eat. Eating lots of vegetables or high fiber fruit can also make you feel fuller. Another trick is to use smaller plates so that moderate portions do not appear smaller.
Tag :
Healthy Living,
Weight Loss
Cut the carbs, lose the weight
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| from www.healthambition.com |
All carbohydrates change into sugar, the importance is the time it takes for them to be absorbed by the body. Unlike the other carbohydrates, fiber is the only one that does not turn into sugar when passing through the body. Fiber actually slows down sugar absorption. There are complex carbohydrates and simple carbohydrates.
There are several great reasons to control your carbohydrate intake. Managing diabetes (blood sugar), improving mood, improving energy, and weight loss are a few of these reasons. Cutting carbs is really difficult to do without setting goals and following a plan to help stay on track. It is hard to only eat a few potato chips. Eating half the bag happens before you know it. Stocking up on fresh fruits, vegetables and other food items are a much better idea. They are full of nutrients that are healthy for the body and are great snacks during the day. Those labels are put on foods for a reason. Reading them is a necessity when trying to cut carbs to lower calorie intake.
Why does cutting carbs work?
Cutting carbs is a great plan for losing weight. It makes sense because eating an excess of carbohydrates will fill the bodies storage tanks and the rest will be stored as fat. Another way to think about it is, many high carbohydrate foods are high in calories and unburned calories are what puts on the pounds. Who eats just one slice of toast.
Most people eat two or three. Do you over-eat bananas, apples, carrot sticks and celery? Generally, the answer is no. Overeating tends to be the high carbohydrate foods. High Carb foods are high in calories. When the body takes in more calories then it works off then it produces weight gain. It takes burning 3500 more calories than you eat to burn off 1 pound of body fat. Eating too many high calorie carbohydrates makes it difficult to burn off fat to lose weight and very easy to gain weight.
Is cutting all carbs a good idea?
Cutting all carbs would be really difficult for most people to do and unhealthy. Having no carbs in the daily diet is extremely restrictive and unsatisfying. For the longterm, learning to control the amount of carbohydrates , eating the right kinds of carbs, and learning how to use them as a tool to burn fat is a much better way to live. It is beneficial to cut carbs, but not remove them entirely.
Lowering carbs in the daily diet is a lifestyle change that can be maintained instead of a crash diet where the pounds come right back. Controlling carbohydrate intake is a much better solution. Carbs do turn to sugar, but they also break down into energy quickly. It's eating the wrong types of carbs, and in excess, that causes weight gain. It makes more sense to eat a diet high in protein and low in carbs in order to build muscle mass and provide higher levels of energy.
Eating lots of protein and the right kinds of fat helps a person feel stronger and more energetic. Cutting carbs entirely reduces the nutrients the body needs to be strong and healthy. It is the unused carbs that create the unwanted weight gain. A limited amount of carbs allows the body to actually burn fat while working out and build energy. This is why athletic teams have pasta feasts before competition. A reduction in carbs allows the body enough to use for burning fat while reducing the amount that causes weight gain.
Losing weight is a balance of eating right, lowering carbs, and exercise. Without exercise it is very difficult to lose weight. Cutting carbs completely out of the diet will result in weight loss, but it does not allow the body to function properly. The best way is to lower carb intake and eat fiber rich and low calorie foods.
Lower carbs in the daily diet instead of cutting them out entirely. Choosing fresh vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, high fiber, vitamins, and minerals is the healthy and most longterm solution. A healthy diet is not something you do for six months just to lose weight. It is a way of life. Following a diet that a person cannot maintain for life is not the answer.
Tag :
Healthy Living,
Weight Loss
How to Lose Weight in 7 Days
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| from http://thewellnessscientist.com |
Part One: Diet
- Form a diet that minimizes starches, and sugars. Bad starches and sugars to stay away from include: potato chips, fries, white breads, pastries, soft drinks, candies, and cakes. These will all keep you from realizing your weight loss goal.
- Form a diet that is rich in vegetables, fiber, and lean protein. All these foods are less prone to being converted into fat, and come packed with healthy vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
- Drink water instead of sugary drinks. Water will help your immune system stay healthy, keep your skin looking great, and give you more lasting energy to do the things you need to do during the day. Sodas, juices, and other sugary drinks aren't the way to go if you want to shed pounds off of your frame. Unsweetened green tea is another good substitute for sugary drinks. Green tea contains a good amount of antioxidants, meaning that it helps your body fight against free radicals, which enhance signs of aging in humans.
- Use dieting tips to form good habits. We all cheat now and then, and that's fine. But we can make it harder on ourselves to cheat in the first place, giving us an incentive to follow our diet more strictly and diligently.
- Keep a food journal. If you keep track of your diet and one week goes particularly well, you can try replicating your diet to achieve the same results.
- Never skipping meals, never eating late at night, and don't forget breakfast. A good breakfast will help you jumpstart your metabolism, keep it going throughout the day, and gently wind down as night comes. Eating right before sleeping is a bad idea because your body often doesn't metabolize all the calories, instead converting them into fat.
Part Two: Exercise
- Stretch before you exercise. Be prepared to stretch for 5 to 10 minutes — slowly and effectively — before you exercise. Stretching will keep you from getting injured.
- During your warm-up routine, try to break a sweat. Think of it this way: breaking a sweat means you're exerting yourself more, which means you're burning more calories. The more calories you burn, the more weight you'll lose. That's a good thing.
- Keep sweating throughout your entire workout. Now that you've set the tone during your warm-up, keep the intensity ramped up. Losing weight is going to require one hour of moderate exercise per day.
- Do one hour of cardio a day, working at a moderate pace at least.
- Complement your cardio with strength training. Strength training can be anything from yoga and Pilates to resistance or weight training.
- Do interval training. Interval training is short bursts of high intensity workout followed by longer intervals of mellow exercise, repeating throughout.
- Pace yourself. The good news is that if you pace yourself while exercising, you're less likely to feel burned-out and more motivated to finish your regimen at your maximum intensity. That's a good omen for calorie-burning.
Part Three: General Tips
- Burn more calories than you take in as food. This is actually the most effective way to think about weight loss.
- Starving yourself will make you gain weight, not lose it. Why? When a person starves him/herself, the body realizes it is getting less food, causing its metabolism to slow down in order to save energy. When this happens, your body starts eating its muscle supply, basically, consuming lean tissue instead of fat reserves.
- Any quick weight-loss regimen should also be accompanied by exercise. The truth is that if you want to lose quickly, you're not going to do it merely by eating right. You will lose weight, but it will take time.
- Stress can cause weight-gain. When your body is under stress, it released adrenaline — the fight or flight hormone. But your body also releases cortisol, another hormone. When the adrenaline wears off, which happens quickly, all that's left is the cortisol. The cortisol causes us to want to eat, because we've spent precious energy using our adrenaline to potentially save our life.
- Results will take time. If your goal is to lose 2 pounds in 7 days, that's probably double. If your goal is to lose 7 pounds in 7 days, it's not going to happen. On top of that, it's not healthy. Be reasonable about what your goals are so you don't get down on yourself when you fail to meet them.
- Too many people expect immediate results and then get discouraged when they aren't able to see them. Well, life isn't fair, and it's never easy, is it?
Tag :
Healthy Living,
Weight Loss
