"How to" Diet and Weight Loss Tips (Part 1 of 2)

	"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.

Food and Nutrition