Dieting Tips For Successful Weight Loss
It has become an increasingly popular trend in today’s society for people to want to lose weight. However, most people who set out to lose weight either fail completely or end up putting it all back on in a few weeks or months.
One of the biggest reasons why people fail to lose weight is because they set themselves too high a target to begin with, and as a result, achieving their weight loss goal seems unrealistic and too far away in the distant future. This in turn leads to a lack of motivation, which can then cause a person to quickly return back to their old lifestyle and eating habits.
In order to successfully lose weight, you must therefore be able to set clearly defined and realistic goals. Such goals will allow you to identify exactly what you want to achieve, and most importantly, how and when you are going to achieve it. This is the very first step of any successful weight loss program, so let’s have a look at how this can be done.
Weight Loss Goal Setting
Depending on the type of goal that you set, it can have two very different effects on you.
The first, is that your goal motivates you. It inspires you, fills you with energy and gives you the confidence to achieve more goals. This motivation can come from the goal itself, or as a result of achieving that goal.
The second effect that goals can have, is to demotivate you. Such goals make you doubt yourself and your abilities, and so usually lead to lowered levels of self-esteem and self-confidence.
Which type of goal do you think is going to give you the most chance of successfully losing weight? The answer is obvious, but despite this, many people set themselves goals which are demotivating and then wonder why they always struggle to achieve them.
Good Vs. Bad Goals
Any type of goal can be motivating in the short-term, because when you first set a goal, all that you are really doing is imagining what something could be like in your head.
For example, I could set a goal to become a millionaire in six months and then be very motivated and excited by that goal. But what if I have no means of making that much money in such a short space of time? What will happen when those six months have passed and I failed to reach my goal?
If I fail to reach my goal, I am likely to be disappointed and feel drained of energy. Why? Because my goal was unrealistic. It was based in fantasy, but had no grounding in reality.
This is a key point to understand when it comes to successfully setting goals in any area of your life, because in the long run, what really makes a goal motivate or demotivate you is how realistic it is for you to achieve it in reality, not just in your head.
In terms of weight loss, there are two main areas in which you need to set goals for yourself; exercise and diet. These are the two pillars upon which all weight loss efforts are built, and if you have unrealistic goals in either of these areas, then your chance of failure is going to be much higher than your chance of success.
Setting Realistic Exercise Goals
In order to exercise, you need to have the time and motivation to do so. So let’s have a look at each of these components.
Time
You may want to exercise every day for one hour, but does your current schedule allow for it? For example, do you have any commitments, such as work or family commitments, which leave you with little or no time to visit the gym?
Or do you have plenty of free time to exercise, or could you free up time somehow? Are you wasting time that could be better spent doing something else?
So in order to start exercising, you first need to determine what time you have available to exercise in. If for example, you find that you only have two free hours a week which you can devote to exercise, then unless you can free up more time, that is what you are going to have to work with.
Once you have determined how much free time you have, you can then set a realistic goal to exercise during those times.
Motivation
You may have the time to exercise every day, but do you have the motivation to do so? You might do right now just thinking about it in your head, but how will you feel exercising every day when your muscles are still sore from your previous workout? How realistic is the long-term reality of what you would like to do, compared to what is actually likely to happen?
Only you can determine this, because only you know what your current level of health and fitness is. Some people for example, may struggle to motivate themselves to exercise two times a week, whilst others will have no problem exercising every day.
How motivated you feel to exercise is also affected by the type of exercise that you do. If for example, you have a very low-level of fitness and then promise to run half a mile every other day, then you probably won’t be very motivated to do it again after a couple of attempts. But, if you started out with a very gentle form of exercise, such as walking, you probably would be likely to do it again.
So to set yourself a realistic exercise goal, think about where you are now in terms of your level of fitness. Then think about what you could realistically achieve doing each week without making yourself hate what you are doing.
Setting Realistic Diet Goals
In order to eat more healthy foods, you need to examine the type of lifestyle that you live and the types of foods that you normally eat. So let’s have a look at both of these now.
Lifestyle
We all know that eating junk foods will make us fat. So why do people still eat them? The obvious answer would be because they taste good. But did you know that the reason why most people eat junk foods is not because of how they taste, but rather because of how convenient they are?
Eating junk food usually means that you don’t have to cook, and if you do cook, it will just involve heating something up in the microwave rather than doing any proper cooking. So if you have a busy lifestyle, or simply feel tired as a result of coming home after work, it can be quite easy to find yourself eating junk most of the time.
To set yourself a realistic diet goal, you therefore need to examine your current lifestyle and the types of foods that you eat as a result of it.
You may find for example, that you are snacking on candy bars during the day because they are a quick and easy source of food. But could you replace those snacks with something else? Something more healthy like nuts or dried fruit?
What about when you get home after work? Could you, instead of eating packaged food, have a meal which you cooked for yourself the previous night that is waiting for you in fridge?
If you can make healthy foods convenient, you will be much less likely to turn to junk foods when you start to feel hungry because you will always have good quality food available to eat.
Types of Foods
Food is enjoyable to eat, and so when we are asked to give up our favorite foods it makes us feel as though we are making a sacrifice, which then causes us to crave for and long for that food.
The more we crave something, the harder it becomes to resist, and the more miserable we become for not being allowed to have it. This type of mindset is a recipe for failure, not for long-term success.
To set realistic diet goals, you need to think about all the types of foods which you normally eat. You then need to determine which ones are healthy for you, and which ones are not. Which foods are causing you to put on weight, and which foods can help you to lose weight.
In order to lose weight, you will eventually need to stop eating the unhealthy and fattening foods. But if you were to give up everything at once, you probably wouldn’t last for very long because it would seem like you are making a massive sacrifice. But would it be less of a sacrifice for you to give up one particular type of unhealthy food whilst keeping all the others?
Of course it would, and this is a recipe for long-term success, because eventually, you will be able to repeat this process for all of your unhealthy foods until you find yourself on more or less a completely healthy diet. So to be realistic, don’t expect to give up all the bad at once. This simply won’t work in the long run.
Do You Have The Time?
You are not going to lose all of your excess weight in one or two weeks, and then keep it off for the rest of your life. That’s what suckers believe, which is why so many people yo-yo diet.
Sure, it is possible to lose weight quickly, but in the long run, study after study has shown that virtually all of the people who lose weight quickly end up putting it back on just as fast. If that wasn’t bad enough, those people also usually put on a little bit of extra weight. So now, they are actually fatter than they were before they started their diet!
The reality is, successful weight loss takes time. So realistically, you are looking at a minimum of months, or in some cases, years, as a timeframe in which you can achieve the body that you desire.
How long will it take you to reach your goal? That depends on three factors:
Your current weight
The fatter you are the longer it will take to slim down.
How much you exercise
The more time you have to exercise the quicker you will burn fat.
Your diet
The healthier you eat the quicker you will slim down
But remember, although it can be very motivating in the short-term to think about rapid weight loss, the things that you will have to do to achieve that weight loss, the sacrifices you will have to make, are likely to be very demotivating in the long run. This is why most attempts to lose weight fail.
So make a decision. Do you want to lose weight quickly and then quickly gain it back with a little bit extra? Or do you want to lose weight slowly and keep that weight off for good? If you choose the latter, then this can only be achieved by changing your lifestyle. It is not something that a short-term diet can do.
Monitoring Your Progress
In order to determine whether you have achieved a goal, or how far along you are to achieving it, you need some way of monitoring your progress. Fortunately, when it comes to weight loss goals, this is quite easy to do as you can just stand on a scale and see how much your weight has changed.
However, do not make the mistake of weighing yourself every day. Since weight loss takes time, if you weigh yourself every day you are likely to quickly become demotivated because it will look as though you aren’t making any progress despite all your efforts.
A far better way to monitor your progress is to weigh yourself only once a month, and to avoid the temptation to do so more frequently. You should also avoid using other methods to determine how much weight you have lost. For example, looking at your waist in the mirror or grabbing the fat around your belly. This should not be done until you weigh yourself at the end of the month.
The reason for this is because weight loss happens slowly, and due to the fact that you see yourself every day, you are unlikely to notice the weight that you are losing.
As a result, it will look as though you aren’t losing anything, and so your mind will be focused on your apparent lack of progress rather than on the things (i.e., your goals) that you need to be focusing on to make the progress happen.
Since we become what we think about most of the time, if all you are thinking about is how little weight you are losing, and how fat you are, then eventually, your thoughts will demotivate you and cause you to return back to your old habits.
So focus only on your goals, and reserve your judgement of your progress until the end of the month when you step on the scale.
Using Rewards
Teachers give stars to children when they do well on their homework or when they have behaved themselves. Why? Because rewards cause people to want to repeat a certain type of behavior again. This isn’t rocket science, but surprisingly, many adults don’t use rewards, or when they do, they reward themselves for bad behavior.
If you achieve a goal, give yourself a reward for its accomplishment. This will make you feel good for achieving your goal, and also motivate you to achieve more goals. But since you are trying to lose weight, this reward should ideally be non-food based.
You can use food based rewards, but be aware that the very nature of junk foods makes them highly addictive. So if you know that you have an addictive personality for example, don’t even take the risk.
Burning Calories Vs Burning Fat
When it comes to weight loss, there is an important distinction that needs to be made as to how people lose weight. In its simplest form, a person can either burn calories or they can burn fat. But it is also true that the two go hand in hand.
In order to understand the difference between burning calories and burning fat, you need to have an understanding as to what each of these are. So let’s have a look at both calorie and fat burning now.
Burning Calories
Calories are used as a measure of energy, and you are probably familiar with calories because most foods will tell you how many calories they contain. There are two main forms of calories that you can burn.
The first are the calories which you consume from food. If you eat a meal and then exercise for example, you will initially be burning off the calories from the food that you have just eaten.
The second form of calories are the calories that you have stored in your body, usually as fat, because you ate more calories than you burned off on a particular day.
Calories are very important when it comes to losing weight, because as was just mentioned, if you eat more calories than you burn off then you will gain weight. Conversely, if you eat fewer calories than you burn off then you will lose weight.
Different foods contain different amounts of calories, although in general, the foods which contain the most calories tend to be what you would consider as a junk food.
These are heavily processed or refined foods that are not normally found in nature. Eating a diet that is high in junk foods will provide you with a lot of calories, and as a result, can lead to rapid weight gain.
Burning Fat
The fat that you have on your body is essentially stored energy. This occurs when you consume more calories than you burn off. Fat is there to provide you with a source of fuel should you ever suffer from a shortage of food and are unable to eat for a prolonged period of time.
It is this very same fat that makes a person look overweight, and the more fat that you have on your body, the more overweight you will look. It is important to note however, that it is normal to have some fat on the body. But health problems can occur once you start to accumulate too much fat as measured by your body fat percentage.
When it comes to losing weight, burning fat is therefore what you should be most concerned with. You will start to burn fat once you have used up all the energy, or calories, that you have consumed from the food you have eaten.
This is why it can be very effective to exercise in the morning before you have eaten, because during this time the body has limited immediate energy due to you not eating anything for 6-8 hours. So if you exercise on an empty stomach, then the body must turn to your fat deposits to fuel your activity.
The reverse of this is also true. If you have eaten recently and then exercise, your body will burn the fuel from your food first and then turn to your fat deposits. This however, means that you have to work out longer or harder in order to get any immediate fat burning benefits from your workout.
Certain types of exercise however, such as anaerobic exercise, can provide you with delayed fat burning benefits due to increased muscle mass and an increased metabolism.
Also, fat burning can occur by having a negative calorie deficit, which means that you burn more calories than you consume. When this occurs, the body starts to burn fat as a source of energy thereby resulting in weight loss.
Why You Need To Know The Difference
The reason why it is important to know the difference between burning calories and burning fat is because if all you do is burn off the calories from the food that you have eaten, then your weight will most likely stay more or less how it is. Once you start to burn fat however, you will then notice a change in the amount of body fat that you have.
Do Fad Diets Work?
A fad diet, sometimes called a crash diet, is a diet that quickly becomes popular and then quickly becomes unpopular. It is a “fad” that comes and goes.
The reason why such diets become popular, is because they actually are very effective at causing rapid weight loss. However, most of the time, this weight loss is due to getting rid of water. So when you rehydrate your body again, you will also gain back the weight that you have apparently lost.
Other fad diets involve severely restricting the types of foods that you eat so that you end up starving for most of the time. This will obviously cause you to lose weight, but when you go back to eating the foods which you used to eat, that weight will rapidly be regained.
This is why fad diets become popular and unpopular so quickly. Initially, they help you to lose weight, but eventually, the lost weight comes back and so you start looking for other and more effective diet plans.
So if you only want a short-term quick fix, then a fad diet may be just what you need. But before you rush off and start dieting, please be aware of the following disadvantages of fad diets as listed below.
Nutritional Deficiencies
A fad diet which promises you quick and easy weight loss usually involves eating only one type of food, or eating one food more than other types of food. For example, with the cabbage soup diet, you can only eat cabbage soup.
The disadvantage of following such a diet, is that in the long run, you are likely to develop nutritional deficiencies due to eating a limited range of foods. So if you decide to follow a single food diet, then it is recommended that you take supplements to ensure that you don’t develop any serious vitamin or mineral deficiencies.
Boredom
Fad diets are notoriously boring, and this is especially true if you are only eating one type of food for several weeks. Whilst you may feel motivated to stick to your diet during the first week, this motivation is unlikely to last.
Eventually, people grow bored with eating the same food all the time, and when that happens, they usually give up on their diet completely or look for another diet.
For this reason, fad diets are unlikely to result in long-term weight loss, because as soon as you end your diet, you will usually go back to eating the same foods which caused you to become overweight in the first place.
Lose Weight, Gain It Back Again
As fad diets tend only to be effective in the short-term, they usually result in yo-yo dieting. This occurs when you quickly lose weight, then quickly gain it back on again and then start looking for another diet to help you lose weight again.
Yo-yo dieting is unhealthy, and it is not a permanent solution for weight loss. Yo-yo dieting also runs the risk of you putting on more weight than you had before, thereby slowly making you fatter over time.
Sagging Skin
When you lose weight, the skin will naturally contract and tighten. But if you lose weight too quickly, the skin won’t be able to do this as effectively which could then leave you with sagging skin.
A Fresh Start?
For some people, fad diets are an effective long-term weight loss solution, although this is not because of the diet itself.
Sometimes for example, fad diets are used to kick-start a weight loss program so that once the diet is over, and a certain amount of weight has been lost, a person then makes permanent changes to their lifestyle such as by exercising more and eating better quality foods.
So in this sense, the fad diet helps to get the ball rolling and serves as a bit of motivation to continue losing more weight. The trouble is, this requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline, and so unfortunately, most people will fail in their attempt at making a fresh start.
Popular Weight Loss Diet Plans
Below you will find listed some of the most popular weight loss diets.
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
This diet involves eating lots of protein and limiting your intake of simple carbohydrate foods. For example, you can eat lots of meat and vegetables, but you can’t eat pasta or bread. You can also eat as much fat as you like on this diet.
Low carbohydrate diets tend to produce excellent results, and also result in long-term weight loss.
Dr. Heller’s Carbohydrate Addict’s Program
This diet is basically another low carbohydrate diet. It promotes the consumption of vegetables, fruits, meats, grains and dairy products.
Dr. Heller’s program allows you to eat more carbohydrates than the Atkins’ diet, and so provides a greater variety of foods to choose from. Although this does come at the expense of slower weight loss.
Overall, this is a good diet for people who find it difficult to reduce the amount of carbs that they consume, and also for those who don’t feel comfortable jumping into something as drastic as the Atkins’ diet.
The Low Glycemic Index Plan
This is essentially a low carbohydrate diet, but a bit more specific as to what you can and can’t eat. For example, you are allowed to eat low glycemic index foods such as brocoli or humus, and a few medium glycemic index foods such as beetroot or a banana.
This program, like other low carb programs, tends to result in rapid weight loss. However, the use of the glycemic index alone has been criticized as it may not always give you an accurate representation of what foods are safe to eat.
As a result, many people believe that you should back up a glycemic index score with a glycemic load score.
Dr. Goor’s Choose To Lose
The basis of this program involves restricting the amount of fatty foods that you eat. You are provided with a “fat budget” which allows you to eat a certain amount of fat each day. There are no restrictions on carbohydrate consumption, meat, low-fat dairy products, fruits, vegetables, bread, pasta or grains.
Although cutting out man-made trans fats is certainly good for your overall level of health, there is little evidence to show that reducing the amount of natural fat which you consume will cause you to lose weight, especially if you are eating carbohydrates such as bread and pasta.
The DASH Diet
The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet encourages the intake of moderate quantities of unsaturated fat, protein and high carbohydrate foods. It advocates high intake of grains, fruits, vegetables and low-fat foods.
Some people feel that you need to eat quite a lot on this diet to feel full, which can make it difficult to stick with in the long run. Furthermore, a high intake of grains can cause inflammation in the body, a major cause of aging and disease, and many low-fat foods tend to contain artificial sweeteners to give them flavor.
Dr. Ornish’s Eat More, Weight Less
This is a vegetarian and low-fat diet. Like most vegetarian diets, it may help you to lose weight, but it is also likely to result in nutritional deficiencies if you stick with it for a long time.
Eat Right For Your Type
This diet varies depending on what blood group you are. For people with blood group type O for example, it encourages lots of meat intake. But the diet plans for other blood types are not balanced and very low in calories, which can make the diet both unhealthy and difficult to stick with.
This diet however, is interesting, because in the future, diets may be tailor-made to suit your genetic makeup.
The Pritkin Principle
This diet promotes the intake of watery foods to satisfy hunger, as a result, you are encouraged to eat a lot of fruit and soups but you must limit your protein intake.
Whilst watery foods may satisfy short-term hunger pangs, they can leave you feeling bloated, needing frequent urination/bowel movements and low in energy, especially if you lead an active lifestyle.
Weight Watchers
Weight Watchers is perhaps the most famous diet plan around. It promotes high carbohydrate intake with a moderate intake of proteins and fats.
There are also lots of Weight Watcher foods designed to help you lose weight, but in reality, these probably won’t help you very much. Furthermore, a high carbohydrate intake is likely to cause you to put on weight rather than lose it.
The Calorie Restriction Diet
This diet is based on research carried out on rats. It was found that rats which were fed a restrictive diet tended to live longer than rats which ate lots of food. As a result, some people believe that severely restricting your calorie intake each day will allow you to live longer.
Whether or not this is true, we can’t say for certain, as there have been no long-term studies done on this. But evidence from some populations in Japan does seem to support the idea that eating less is better than eating more.
In terms of weight loss, low-calorie diets will cause you to lose a lot of weight. However, people who severely restrict their caloric intake are likely to experience low energy levels, reduced sex drive, feel cold during the winter and find their diet very difficult to stick with on a long-term basis.
Which Diet Program Should You Follow?
A low glycemic index/load or low carbohydrate diet is probably your best bet when it comes to losing weight in a healthy way and keeping that weight off.
There is little real evidence to suggest that saturated fats cause heart disease (something which has not yet been proven), and plenty of evidence showing that carbohydrates cause both weight gain and heart disease.
Therefore, any diet which advocates high carbohydrate consumption is unlikely to result in long-term or rapid weight loss. However, it is important to remember that we all have a unique genetic makeup, and so we each respond to foods differently.
This means that until we are able to do some sort of genetic screening to see what diet would best suit our genetics, it is impossible to say for certain what is the perfect diet for each individual.
For now, at least, the low carb diet is probably your safest option as many people have reported excellent long-term results with it. Low carb diets also closely match the type of diet which people used to eat before humans began mass producing foods.
In addition to eating low carb, it’s also probably a good idea to reduce the amount of food that you eat, eat less in the evening, and to take digestive enzyme supplements with each meal. But whatever plan you follow, just be sure to cut out sugar and refined carbohydrates from your diet, as those are the two biggest things which cause weight gain.
It could be argued that vegetarian diets also closely resemble the diets our ancestors used to eat. However, studies done on populations who eat a purely vegetarian diet show that these populations experience a lower level of health than populations who consume meat.
Although you may have heard otherwise, for example from the China Study, once you look at the raw data this is actually what these studies show.
How Does The Atkins Diet Cause Weight Loss?
The Atkins diet is one of the few diets that have consistently remained popular over the past several decades, and for one simple reason, it works.
Despite doctors recommending low-fat diets for weight loss, many dieters soon began to lose faith in eating low-fat foods because they were not getting any results from doing so.
This then caused people to look for alternative diets, and bizarrely enough, they found that eating a diet which was essentially the opposite to a low-fat diet produced much better results in terms of weight loss and health benefits. So clearly, eating fat was not what was causing people to become fat.
The Atkins Diet
As more and more people began to experience success on the Atkins diet, its popularity continued to grow. This was despite the fact that many doctors and health experts were arguing against the Atkins diet by saying that it was not healthy or effective.
However, for those who followed the diet they could see the results that they were getting, despite what the naysayers were saying, and so decided to stick with what they were doing.
Soon, word of the Atkins diet began to spread, and today, millions of people now follow the program and have been able to keep off the weight that they initially lost. So really, it’s no wonder that the Atkins diet has remained so popular.
How Sugar & Carbs Cause You To Store Fat
The basic theory behind the Atkins diet is that consuming too many sugars and simple carbohydrates causes fat deposition in the body as a result of insulin resistance which develops over time. The more sugar and carbohydrates that you eat, the quicker this insulin resistance develops and the more fat that you will accumulate.
The reason that sugar and carbohydrates cause insulin resistance, is because when you eat them, insulin is released by the body to help control blood sugar levels. Some of the sugars and carbohydrates are used immediately for energy, but most is stored as glycogen so that it can be used later if needed.
However, the body only has a limited storage capacity for glycogen, so when your stores are full, the rest of the extra energy is converted into fat. Over time, as you eat more sugar and carbohydrates, you need more and more insulin for it to do its job effectively (insulin resistance) which could one day lead to the onset of Type 2, or adult onset, diabetes.
The first signs of insulin resistance appear as fat around the waist in men and fat around the buttocks in women.
Going Low Carb
If sugar and carbohydrates cause insulin resistance, which then causes the body to deposit fat, then by reducing the amount of sugar and carbohydrates which you consume, you can help to prevent excess fat from being deposited and so will lose weight in the process.
This is very basis of the Atkins diet, and is why people find it to be so effective in helping them to lose weight and then stopping them from putting that weight back on again.
How To Lose Weight On The Atkins Diet
Following the Atkins program is simple, and most people find it quite enjoyable once they get into it. The Atkins diet is also one of the least restrictive diets that you are likely to find, which is another major reason why people find it so easy to stick with for the long-term.
In terms of what you can eat, all you need to remember is to not eat any sugar or simple carbohydrates. This means not eating sugary foods such chocolate, ice cream, candy, cookies or potato chips, as all of these foods will cause you to put on weight quickly.
You also have to avoid simple carbohydrates, which are foods that have a high glycemic index (sugar load). For example, you can’t eat white flour, white rice, potatoes and some root vegetables like carrots.
The best way to determine whether or not a food is safe to eat on the Atkins diet, is to check the glycemic index of it on the internet. Generally speaking, you can eat all the low glycemic index foods and a few medium glycemic index foods.
If you are following the Atkins diet strictly, you will be given a daily allowance of around 40 g of carbohydrates which you can consume. However, many people find that if they just stick to the low glycemic index foods, without restricting themselves, they are still able to achieve significant weight loss.
Successful & Healthy Dieting
Overall, the Atkins diet is an excellent and healthy way to lose weight. Not only will those pounds start to melt off when you cut down on the amount of sugar and simple carbohydrates that you consume, but your energy levels will also rise dramatically.
Whether or not you want to follow the Atkins program as strictly as is recommended is up to you, as it really depends on how much weight you would like to lose and how quickly.
One word of warning though, if you are used to eating lots of carbs and sugar, and then suddenly stop eating them, you are likely to feel tired and weak on the Atkins diet for the first few weeks.
For this reason, it is generally recommended that you reduce your consumption of carbohydrates and sugars gradually, as this way you will be able to give your body time to adjust to the dietary changes which you are making.
Do Low Calorie Diets Work?
A low-calorie diet is a highly restrictive type of diet that involves only eating a handful of different foods or eating very small portions.
Low calorie diets are actually very effective at promoting weight loss. This is because the amount of calories that you consume is likely to be far less than the amount of calories which you burn from your normal everyday activities.
As a result, you end up burning stored fat for energy which can lead to rapid and often dramatic weight loss. This is why low calories diets tend to be popular amongst women who want to slim down for the summer.
Most low-calorie diets are usually done for only a few weeks at a time, although for some people, it may become a lifestyle choice and they will continue to do it all the time. Such people however, tend to be quite rare, as sticking with a low-calorie diet requires a lot of will power and so you need a very strong reason for wanting to stay slim.
What About Long Term Weight Loss?
The trouble with low-calorie diets is that because they are so restrictive, most people do not enjoy being on them and soon start to feel deprived. When that happens, food cravings kick in and it is not uncommon for a person to feel depressed as a result.
Once you start suffering from cravings they can be very difficult to resist, and most people find that within a short period of time they start to binge on unhealthy junk foods.
This is one major criticism of the low-calorie diets, because whilst they may be effective at helping a person to lose weight in the short-term, in the long run, any weight that has been lost will most likely be put straight back on once that person resumes eating normal foods.
In some cases, this can result in a person actually becoming fatter than they were before they started their diet.
Can Eating Less Make You Fatter?
There is also concern that low-calorie diets can actually make weight loss more difficult. This is because of two main reasons.
The first, is that whenever you start to restrict the amount of food that you eat, or if you do not eat enough food, your blood sugar levels drop which then causes you to feel very weak and start craving sugar containing foods such as chocolate.
This means that if you don’t eat enough food during the day, then it can actually cause you to start binging on sugary foods later on just to get your blood sugar levels back up. Also, because such foods can be addictive, it can be very difficult to stop eating them which can then lead to rapid weight gain.
The second reason why restricting the amount of food that you eat can make weight loss more difficult, is because whenever you starve yourself your body actually holds onto its fat reserves more than it would do under normal circumstances because your metabolism starts to slow down. This can result in you losing weight slower and also finding it harder to lose weight.
The reason why low-calorie diets seem to produce such dramatic results in the short-term, is actually more to do with losing water than it is to do with losing fat. Of course, if you stick with your diet for long enough, then eventually your body will have to get energy from somewhere and this will come from your stored fat deposits.
So, Does Going Low Cal Work?
In the short-term, low-calorie diets do work. So if you want to lose weight for a special occasion, such as a wedding or a photo shoot, then severely reducing the amount of food that you consume will help you to look your best.
In the long run however, low-calorie diets are just far too restrictive to stick with. Eventually, you will grow bored with your diet plan and start craving junk foods. This can lead to binging on junk later on and yo-yo dieting.
So for most people, low calories diets will overall cause them to put on more weight and so cannot be recommended as a means of successfully losing weight.
Can Drinking Cold Water Make You Slim?
Virtually everything that you do which involves some form of physical activity has the potential to help you lose weight, even eating food! The trouble is, that when you eat food you often consume more calories than the energy it takes to digest it which then results in you gaining weight.
Some foods however, such as celery, can actually help you to lose weight because they contain so few calories that you spend more energy eating and digesting it than you get from eating it thereby causing you to lose weight.
The same applies to ice-cold water, although for a slightly different reason.
How Cold Water Helps You To Lose Weight
If you are looking for a simple answer to the question of whether or not drinking ice-cold water will help you to lose weight, then the answer is yes! Drinking cold water does help weight loss.
The reason this occurs is because when you drink something very cold your body has to warm up that liquid so that it reaches body temperature. This of course, involves energy, and due to the zero calorie nature of water you will therefore expend more energy drinking the water than the energy which you get from it (zero).
The colder the liquid is that you drink, the more the body will need to work to raise the temperature and the more calories you will burn in the process.
However, this will only apply to cold liquids that do not contain any calories. So if you drink something containing a lot of sugar for example, then that will not help you to lose weight because you will be getting more calories from your drink than you will lose from the body raising its temperature once you have drunk it.
How Much Weight Will You Lose?
Whilst it is true that drinking cold water can help you to lose weight, it is important to have realistic expectations about how much weight loss you can expect to achieve by this method.
To give you some idea as to the amount of weight that you could lose by drinking cold water, for a person who drinks 8 glasses of water each day they will burn around 70 calories.
As you can see, this is not a large amount of calories to burn and so drinking cold water by itself will not make any noticeable difference to your waist size.
However, if you combine this with healthy eating habits and regular exercise, losing those few extra calories could be just what you need to help shift that difficult pocket of fat which you have been unable to get rid of.
The reverse of this is also true. If you eat unhealthy foods and do little exercise, then drinking cold water will not help you to lose weight because it will make too small of a difference on its own.
A Word Of Warning
Most people recommend that you drink around 8 glasses of water each day as doing so is thought to be healthy for the body (although nobody seems to know exactly where this recommendation came from, or who started it).
It is important to note though, that you should be careful not to drink too much water and not to drink too much in one go, as doing so can disrupt the electrolyte balance of the body and flush minerals from your system.
It is also important that you drink clean water that has been filtered. So try to avoid drinking tap water if you can, as that tends to have a lot of chemicals in it which you definitely do not want to be drinking on a daily basis.
How Best To Use Water For Weight Loss
The best way to use water for weight loss is to use it to compliment your existing weight loss efforts. One of the most effective ways to do this is to drink cold water during or after a work out, as doing so will help you to burn a few extra calories.
You can of course, drink cold water any time you like. But because you will only lose a small amount of calories, you will reap the most weight loss benefits when you use it as an aid rather than relying upon it as one of your primary weight loss weapons.
Types Of Diet Pills
Not everyone who wants to lose weight wants to exercise and go on a diet, and most people would like to lose weight sooner rather than later.
Today, an increasingly large number of people are becoming obese, and as a result, the weight loss industry has responded with weight loss diet pills. These pills are designed to help you lose weight, and can work in a variety of ways such as by suppressing your appetite, increasing the rate at which you burn fat and boosting your overall metabolism.
However, it is important to remember that whilst such pills can help to assist your weight loss efforts, you won’t get slim simply by popping a pill everyday and doing no exercise and eating junk food. So weight loss pills should be seen as an aid to your regular weight loss efforts, rather than a substitute for them.
But with so many diet pills available on the market, it can be difficult to decide which one or what type to buy. So to help you out, you will find a brief description of the main types of weight loss pills and what sort of person they are best suited for.
1) Metabolism Boosting
The higher your metabolism, the quicker you will burn fat. The slower your metabolism, the quicker you will accumulate fat and the more difficult it will be to get rid of.
Pills which boost your metabolism will therefore help to accelerate fat loss, and are ideal for people who don’t have much time to exercise or have a slow metabolism.
Look out for diet pills containing alpha lipoic acid, L-Carnitine and green tea extract. All these ingredients have been clinically proven to be effective in increasing weight loss by increasing your metabolic rate.
2) Appetite Suppressants
Appetite suppressant pills are designed to suppress hunger pangs. They are ideal for people who like to snack between meals, or for people who eat too much in general. By reducing the amount of food that you consume, you will gradually start to lose weight.
There is a danger however, that appetite suppressants can be abused. So they are generally not recommended for teenagers, as they could lead to anorexia and malnutrition if they are used every time a person feels hungry.
3) Calorie Stoppers
Generally speaking, the more calories you consume the quicker you will gain weight. Calorie stopper pills are designed to prevent this from happening by reducing the amount of calories entering the body.
Calorie stopper weight loss pills are similar to appetite suppressant pills, except that you will still feel hungry but won’t put on as much weight as a result of your hunger.
These diet pills are ideal for people who overeat at meal times, but like the appetite suppressants, they have the potential to be abused and could lead to malnutrition.
4) Water Retention Diuretics
These types of diet pills contain diuretics that help to flush the body of excess water, usually due to consuming too much salt in the diet.
Water retention diet pills can actually be very effective in helping you to lose weight, although it should be remembered that you are just losing excess water and not getting rid of fat.
As a result, these pills are good if you want quick short-term weight loss, such as if you are going to a party, but are not very effective if you want long-term weight loss.
5) Fat Blockers
Fat blocker diet pills block the absorption of fat into the body. This is based on the assumption that fat causes people to become fat, when most evidence shows that this is not the case.
As a result, fat blocker diet pills tend not to be very effective at helping you to lose weight. They can also be dangerous if abused, as fat plays many essential roles within the body such as insulating nerves and serving as a component of cell membranes.
6) Carbohydrate Blockers
Carbohydrate blockers reduce the amount of carbohydrates that the body absorbs. These work on the assumption that it is the intake of excess carbohydrates which causes people to become overweight, therefore, by reducing the amount of carbohydrates consumed, one will start to lose weight.
There is some debate as to whether or not carbohydrate blockers are effective for weight loss, although in theory, they do actually make sense because there is a lot of evidence showing that carbohydrates are a major contributing factor towards obesity.
If these weight loss pills do work for you, they are likely to be one of the most effective pills that you try.
Weight Loss & Dieting Tips
Below you will find some simple tips that will help you to lose weight and diet more effectively.
Don’t Get Bored
One of the keys to successful dieting and weight loss is to make it fun and interesting. Sure, you may be able to lose 10 pounds in two weeks by eating nothing but celery and drinking only water, but you are unlikely to keep off this weight for very long.
By eating better food and a variety of food, your weight loss may be slower, but you will be much more likely to keep the weight off. So try not to stick to only one type of food, and instead incorporate a variety of different healthy foods into your diet plan.
Phase Out Unhealthy Foods Gradually
When you are trying to break bad dietary habits, the worse thing that you can do is to try to go from a completely unhealthy diet to a completely healthy diet in one go.
Such drastic steps will not only be perceived as difficult, but you are also likely to find making such changes boring, depressing and leaving you craving for unhealthy and fattening foods.
The trick therefore, to losing those extra pounds, is to gradually phase out unhealthy foods rather than trying to do it all at once.
For example, if you are used to eating pizza every night, then you could try alternating pizza days with healthy food days. This way you will be losing weight, but it won’t seem like you are making such a big sacrifice. As a result, you will find losing weight much more enjoyable and will stick with it for longer.
Break Bad Food Habits
Think for a moment about all the foods which you have eaten this week, or ate last week. How much variety was there in your diet? For most people, they eat pretty much the same foods day in day out, week after week. Not only does this get boring after a while, but it is also a major reason why people develop eating habits for particular foods.
For example, if you always eat ice cream after dinner, then you will develop the habit of eating ice cream. Now, since everyone likes variety, eventually you will start to want different flavors of ice cream and so soon you will go out and buy something which you haven’t tried before.
One of the tricks to successfully changing the foods you eat, is to recognize the foods which you have developed a habit of eating. The next time you grow bored with that flavor, you could try breaking that habit by getting another type of food entirely rather than just a different flavor of the same food.
For example, instead of trying out another type of chocolate bar to snack on after lunch, you could try getting some nuts to snack on instead. If you can do this for all your problem foods, then soon you will be able to replace your bad eating habits with good eating habits. When this occurs, you will easily be able to lose weight and will keep it off for good.
Note: A common technique that many dieters use to satisfy their craving for sweet foods is to replace sugary foods with fruit. This way they still get their sugar fix, but in a much healthier form.
Don’t Eat & Watch TV
One of the biggest bad habits when it comes to weight gain, is eating in front of the TV. It has been shown that when you eat whilst watching TV, you tend to eat far more food than if you were eating without the TV. You also tend to eat more often, as people like snacking whilst watching their favorite show.
Instead of eating in front of the TV, try eating with your family and talk with them instead. If you have nobody to eat with, try reading a magazine while you eat.
Listen To Your Body
It takes about 20 minutes for you to feel full after a meal. Unfortunately, this delay can cause people to overeat, which then makes them feel tired and bloated after their meal. As a result of this tiredness, they may then go and lie down or even have a nap or go to sleep.
This is one of the worst things that you can do when it comes to trying to lose weight, because when you eat more than your body requires, the extra food is basically just stored as fat. If you sleep after eating, you will pile on the pounds even faster.
So if you still feel hungry after finishing a meal, wait 20-30 minutes before you eat anything else. This will give your stomach a chance to expand, and send a signal to your brain that you are full and satisfied.
Drink Water
Water can be an excellent way to reduce hunger pangs because it makes you feel full. So if you are only slightly hungry, then try drinking a glass of water instead of eating and you will save yourself from consuming those unneeded extra calories.
What Time Of The Day Do You Eat?
If you find that you are always in a rush in the morning and don’t have much time to eat breakfast, and then later in the day not much time to eat lunch, then you probably eat the most in the evening.
It has been shown that the body is best able to control blood sugar levels in the morning and worst in the evening. Regulation of blood sugar is important because high blood sugar levels can cause you to put on weight quickly, and can even lead to diabetes later in life.
In order to lose weight, you should therefore make an effort to eat most of your food in the morning, and the least in the evening. There are no exceptions to this rule, as you can’t argue with how the body works.
Stay Active
Staying active is a very important part of successful dieting, because when you are doing things your mind won’t be constantly thinking about food.
Staying active can be something which involves physical activity, such as playing a sport, or something which keeps you mentally active, such as doing volunteer work within your community.
As you begin to lose weight, you should find that your levels of mental and physical activity actually begin to increase automatically, as your improved energy levels and raised sense of confidence will cause you to seek out new things to challenge yourself with.
Have Treat Days
Ideally, you should be eating a completely healthy meal every single day of the week. But in reality this probably won’t happen, at least not right away.
A good tactic to use when you are trying to eat healthier food is to have one or two days a week where you treat yourself to whatever you want. This way, giving up your favorite foods won’t seem like such a big deal, and so you will be much more likely to stick to your new diet because you are rewarding yourself for sticking to it.
A good time to have your treat day is over the weekend, because psychologically this will reward you for the week just past.
Snack On Fruit
Fruit is good for weight loss because it can be used as an alternative to sugary snacks.
For example, if you like to snack on a chocolate bar between meals, you could replace that with an apple or banana instead. Since most dieters have cravings for sugary foods, fruit can be a great way to satisfy your sweet tooth.
Set Realistic Goals
There is no point in setting a goal to lose 10 pounds in one week if you are not willing to make major changes to your current dietary and lifestyle habits.
The type of goal you set will also be dependent on what is possible for you to do. For example, you may want to exercise five days a week, but may not have the time to do so.
When setting weight loss goals, it is far better, and also much more effective, to set goals that might take you longer to achieve, but goals that you know you will easily be able to stick with.
This can double your chances of losing weight, because one of the biggest reasons for weight loss failure is due to people setting themselves unrealistic goals which they find demotivating and impossible to follow on a long-term basis.
So when it comes to successfully losing weight, just remember that slow and steady wins the race.
Lose A Little Before You Lose The Rest
Because most people want to lose weight fast, they will look at themselves in the mirror and say something like “I want all my excess fat to be gone so that I am slim”.
Whilst this may be their end objective, trying to lose so much weight all in one go is very often counterproductive, because the mind doesn’t see it as being possible. As a result, the person eventually starts to lose the motivation to lose weight, because they feel that they are not making any visible progress.
To lose weight successfully, it is absolutely essential that you set yourself a goal, but also that you break this goal down into smaller sub goals. For example, you may aim to lose 10 pounds in one month, and then lose another 10 pounds the next month and another 10 pounds the following month.
You are much more likely to complete a goal if you break it down into smaller goals, and when you complete each goal, your motivation will increase thereby making future goals that much easier to achieve.
Monitor Your Fat Loss
Just as it is important to set weight loss goals, it is also important to monitor the progress of those goals.
So keep a record each month of how close you are to achieving your goal, and you will find that doing so will help to increase your overall motivation and also keep you focused on what it is that you are trying to achieve.
Weigh Yourself Once A Month
It can be very easy to become obsessed about how much you weigh, and then to start weighing yourself everyday. However, doing so can very often ruin your chances of weight loss and/or lead to an unhealthy obsession about your weight.
Weighing yourself more than once a month is pointless, because it takes time to lose weight and so the only accurate judgement of how effective your weight loss efforts are is monthly measurements.
It is also important to remember that your weight may not tell you the whole story. For example, when people lose weight it is not uncommon for their weight to increase because they are developing more muscle mass. This is actually a good sign, because it means that your metabolism is increasing and so is the rate at which you burn fat.
If you find that your weight has increased, measure your body mass index or waist fat ratio to get a more accurate representation of your weight loss progress.
Don’t Feel Down
Another common reason for weight loss failure is because people start to feel depressed when they are not getting the results they had expected. Most of the time, this occurs as a result of setting unrealistic goals.
If you find yourself becoming demotivated, reexamine the goals you had set for yourself. Were you trying to lose weight too quickly? Were you on too strict of a diet?
Determine what is causing you to feel down, and then resolve to do something about it. To help get you through the pain, keep your mind focused on your end objective and the benefits that it will bring.
Use A Smaller Plate
An interesting psychological study found that people tend to eat as much food as is on their plate. However, if a person is given smaller portions, they were just as satisfied in terms of hunger as those who were given larger portions.
Use this knowledge to your advantage by preparing yourself smaller portions than you would normally eat, such as by using a smaller plate. This can be a great way to reduce calorie intake, whilst at the same time accelerating your weight loss efforts.
Do Fat Burning Exercises
Exercise helps you to burn calories in two ways. The first way occurs due to the fact that any form of activity requires the body to burn stored fuel, in this case, food or fat, in order to provide you with the energy to do that activity.
The second way exercise helps you to burn calories is the effect that it has on your metabolism, because exercise helps to increase your metabolism which then speeds up the rate at which you burn fat.
To lose weight quickly, you therefore need to be doing exercise on a regular basis and doing it in the right way.
Maximum fat burning occurs when you exercise for an extended period of time, such as 20 or 30 minutes, and when you really push yourself to your limit because this raises your metabolism. You will experience less fat burning if you only do moderate or light exercise, because that will have less of an effect on your metabolism.
Another way to accelerate fat burning is to exercise on an empty stomach. Normally, when you eat before exercising, your body burns off the energy from the food that you have eaten first.
Once this has been used up, it then starts to burn stored energy in the form of fat. If you exercise on an empty stomach however, your body will burn much more fat resulting in you losing weight quicker.
It is also a good idea to consume some protein containing food, such as chicken or fish, after your workout, because the body will use this protein for muscle development. The more developed your muscles become, the higher your metabolism will be and the quicker you will lose weight.
Sleep
Studies have shown that people who do not get enough sleep at night have a higher tendency to overeat during the day.
The recommended number of hours for sleep ranges from 6-8 hours, although everyone is different so you may require more or less sleep than this.
A good way to determine how much sleep you need is to wake up naturally without an alarm clock for three days in a row, and then work out roughly how long you need to sleep for.
Lose Calories
By far the best thing that you can do to lose weight is to consume fewer calories. But since you probably know this already, I am not going to belabor the point. Just remember that the only way you will be able to lose weight is if you burn more calories than you take in from the food that you eat.
So try to eat less and avoid sugar or white flour containing foods, as those tend to promote weight gain because they are usually very high calorie foods.
Move!
Every time the body moves it requires energy. Most of the time, this energy will come from the food that you eat, but if you move enough then your body will start to use its stored fat deposits for energy.
You should take advantage of this fact by moving your body as much as possible throughout the day and not just in the gym or during your predefined exercise hour. For example, whenever you have the opportunity to walk, do it. If you can walk a longer way and have the time to do so, then do it.
All of these little things add up, and the more of them that you do each day, the faster you will burn fat and lose weight.
Eat More Often
One of the main problems that people have when they go on a diet, is that they start to feel hungry due to declining blood sugar levels. This can cause intense cravings for sugar containing foods, which can then very easily make a person pig out on junk foods and then later regret it and feel guilty for doing so.
If you find that this becomes a common problem for you whenever you diet, then you may want to try modifying how you eat throughout the course of the day.
Traditionally, most people tend to eat three meals; one at breakfast, one at lunch and one at dinner. For some people however, following such a meal plan can leave them with hunger pangs and so they would be better off eating more frequent but smaller meals instead.
This does however, require a bit of extra work on your behalf, as in order to eat healthy this way, you will need to prepare your food in advance so that it is there for you when you need it.
Eat Meat
Meat is something that you can eat as part of a low carb diet, and you can eat quite a lot of meat without having to worry about putting on weight. Meat also helps to make you feel full, and so you don’t end up eating as much as you would do if you were eating carbohydrates.
Build Muscle
Fat burning can be greatly accelerated by increasing muscle mass. For this reason, if you want to lose weight as quickly as possible then you really should be doing anaerobic exercise and not just aerobic exercise, even if you are a woman.
Anaerobic exercise is any type of resistance exercise that involves the use of weights, or your own body weight, to provide resistance against your muscles. Over time as your muscles become larger, it will take more energy to maintain those muscles than it will to maintain fat.
What this means is that once your muscles start to grow, so does the rate at which you will burn calories even at a resting state such as when you are sitting down or sleeping.
To maximize the benefits that you get from anaerobic exercise, do resistance exercises 2-3 times a week, allowing yourself one or two days to recover after each session before you start doing resistance exercises again.
Drink Green Tea
Some studies have shown that caffeine containing beverages, such as green tea, may help you to lose weight faster by increasing the amount of calories that you burn.
So if you normally have a drink with your meal, or after your meal, then you might want to try drinking something like green tea to help you burn those calories quicker.
Optimize Blood Sugar Levels
How well the body is able to cope with rising blood sugar levels varies throughout the day. This is important because it also affects how likely you are to store the food which you have just eaten as fat.
As a general rule, just remember that the body deals with blood sugar levels the best at the start of the day in the morning, and becomes progressively less effective at doing so as the day progresses.
To reduce the rate at which you put on fat, and increase the rate at which you burn fat, eat your largest meal for breakfast, your second largest meal for lunch and your lightest meal for dinner. This way you will burn off the food you have eaten during the day by the time you reach the evening when traditionally people are not very active.
If you look at what most people do however, they tend to eat the least in the morning and the most in the evening. A good combo for gaining weight!
