How Small Changes can Help You Lose a Lot of Weight in 2012

Every year, losing weight tops lists of New Year’s resolutions, and dieters everywhere decide to completely overhaul the way they eat to lose weight fast. After a few weeks, or even a few months, many of these plans fail as dieters are unable to live up to the unrealistic expectations they create for themselves. For more long-term weight-loss success, making small changes in diet to create a lifestyle change is key. Here are some small changes that you can make to your diet to lose a lot of weight over the long term:

Drink More Water

Soda is a bad habit for many — one that can add hundreds or even thousands of calories to your diet every day. Fruit juices and sports drinks are equally high in calories and sugar that can pack on the pounds. A simple change is to simply trade out sodas and other sugary drinks  and substitute with water instead. Over time, this one change can help you to lose a lot of weight. If you don’t enjoy the taste of water, you can add some flavor by dropping in a strawberry or a splash of lemon or lime juice. Avoid mix-ins that contain artificial sweeteners or caffeine.

Control Portions

Do you like to eat a bag full of chips while you sit in front of the TV each night? It can be hard to eat just one. However, this kind of mindless snacking can add up to hundreds and thousands of calories. Working on controlling your portions can help you to lose a significant amount of weight. Instead of sitting down with an open bag of chips, grab a handful and put them in a bowl. Put the bag away and don’t go back for seconds. Often, we tend to eat what we see, or what we put on our plates. Simply putting food out of sight or filling up a smaller plate can help us to eat less.

Cut One Bad Habit at a Time

Do you have a sweet tooth? Or maybe you have a weakness for chili cheese dogs? Instead of calling off all your vices at once, just work on them one at a time. If sweets are your problem, start phasing them out slowly. Once you have become accustomed to eating less sweets or none at all, start working on your chili cheese dog problem. Over time, you will clean up your diet and will slowly change your eating habits for long-term success.

Eat More Protein

Protein digests much more slowly, helping to stabilize your blood sugar and making you feel full longer. Eating protein at every meal and snack will also help you to feel satisfied and full more quickly. In contrast, eating meals and snacks that consist mostly of simple carbohydrates will trigger cravings for more high-sugar, high-fat foods.

Make Healthy Swaps

Instead of trying to cut out all the foods you love, try to find ways to enjoy them in healthier versions. For example, instead of cutting out pasta, try whole-wheat pasta with a low-fat marinara sauce. Instead of cutting out cheese, try low-fat versions. Instead of cutting out fried chicken, try a heart-healthy baked version. In general, choosing whole wheat over white flour and low-fat or low-sugar versions over their whole counterparts can help you cut calories while still enjoying the foods you like.

Add Fruits and Vegetables

An easy way to make your diet healthier is to add more nutritious foods to it instead of focusing on what you have to take out of it. Eating more fruits and vegetables helps you get many of the nutrients you need, while also adding fiber to your diet. Eating more fiber helps to make you feel full faster, leaving less room (and less desire) to eat other high-fat, unhealthy foods. It also promotes digestive health, which can encourage your weight loss.

Add Exercise

Diet is only one part of weight loss; exercising more is critical to overall health and to long-term weight-loss success. Like your diet, you shouldn’t try to make drastic changes to your exercise routine. If you’ve been a couch potato for years, don’t expect to run a marathon this year. Start by making small changes. If you’re not used to exercising, start by walking a few times a week. When you get used to this routine, walk for longer distances or more days of the week. Slowly add in more intense exercise — like running or cycling — as well as strength training. Over time, you will make lasting changes to your physical fitness routine.

Though the excitement of New Year’s resolutions can make us eager to make big changes in our lives quickly, attempting to do so can actually set us up for failure. To successfully change habits in the long term, small steps must be taken. Making some of these small steps to your diet and fitness routine can help you lose a lot of weight in the long term. When you’re able to keep off the weight, you won’t have to make the same resolutions again next year!

 

About the author:

Amanda Tradwick is a grant researcher and writer for CollegeGrants.org. She has a Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Delaware, and has recently finished research on <a href=”www.collegegrant.net/cosmetology/”>grants for cosmetology school</a> and <a href=”www.collegegrant.net/college-grants-for-adults/”>grants for adults returning to college</a>.

 

 

This entry was written by scrawford, posted on January 16, 2012 at 9:39 am, filed under Fitness, Food, Life is Fitness, Lifestyle and Spa, Nutrition, Santa Barbara and tagged , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Why eating close to bedtime may actually help you lose weight!

by Rich Fahmy

Tis the season of resolutions so I thought a little discussion on a popular weight loss myth would be a nice blog post for January. The myth is one we hear a lot, especially in the form of random advice people start dispensing immediately upon hearing that your resolution is to lose weight. It comes in a few different forms but it usually sounds something like this: “Don’t eat past *insert favorite time here* o’clock because food just sits there in your stomach and turns to fat while you sleep!”

Let’s take a look at this one with a little common sense and a little science and hope we can debunk this one for good!

A little common sense:

First and foremost, digestive and metabolic enzymes don’t wear watches. Science has yet to find an enzyme that at 6:30PM says “Halt!! All calories consumed from here until sunrise will now be shuttled to fat stores!!” And what happens if I’m on a flight from LA to NYC, do I have to stop eating at 3:30? So unless you can convince me of the magical Fat Fairy that flies around at night causing all calories consumed within 3 hours of bedtime to be stored as fat, I’m not buying it.

You may then ask, then why did it work for my office mate or friend? Well very simply, it was an easy way to cut calories. To lose weight, we need to move more and eat less. And if I’m the type of person that normally plows through two servings of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey at 8PM; and I now suddenly stop because of this myth then it’s not because of the timing, it’s because I removed 600 calories from my day. So it made me eat less automatically, irrespective of time of day.

A little science:

The myth often rests its logic on the idea that we must somehow metabolically shut down so everything we eat just “sits” in our bellies and we don’t do anything with it but store it as fat. The truth is that even though our internal organs only make up about 5-6% of our body’s total mass, they make up for a whopping 60% of our resting metabolic rate. For example, the brain alone burns about 109 calories per pound of its mass per day which means a 3.1 pound brain (or about 1400g, the average for an adult human) would burn about 338 calories a day just on its own! What’s the point here? Most of the energy we expend is expended to keep us alive and functioning and since when we sleep, we need to be alive and functioning too, we don’t necessarily shut down or down regulate vital functions, and these vital functions burn a hefty amount of calories.

If we try to examine actual numbers, available studies reveal that sleeping metabolic rate is about 95-97% that of waking metabolic rate for an equivalent amount of time. That is, if I were to burn 1492 while awake and not doing anything but sitting there and hardly moving for 10 hours, I would burn 1416 calories while asleep for the same 10 hours. That’s not enough of a difference to account for the massive weight gain that people blame on this myth. Remember though this compares sleep to just sitting there awake fairly motionless, so think of it like this: if you surfed the web for 8 hours and slept for 8 hours, the number of calories you burned would be within 3-5% of each other.

So how does the bedtime snack help?

Well, one of our main goals when losing weight is to not be hungry. To put it simply, we overeat when we’re hungry. So appetite control is vital during our battle of the bulge this resolution season. So long as in a 24 hour period, I’ve burned more calories than I’ve consumed, I will lose weight in that same period even if some of those calories came at 9PM. If a little snack closer to bedtime will keep you from waking up at 1AM and taking out one of those familiar white cartons of leftover Chinese food in the fridge, then for Pete’s sake have the snack! It can actually help keep your calorie intake in check.

Happy New Year and here’s to a great 2010!

About the author:

Rich Fahmy M.S. is the Director of Education for Oracle Fitness Education, a company that specializes in online education for health and fitness professionals. His only New Year’s resolution is to not make resolutions, which either makes him a master of irony or a hypocrite. That part is still up for debate.

References:

1. M Elia Organ and tissue contribution to metabolic rate. In: JM Kinney, HN Tucker, eds. Energy Metabolism. Tissue determinants and cellular corollaries. New York: Raven Press, 1992:61-77.

2. L Garby, MS Kurzer, O Lammert, E Nielsen. Energy expenditure during sleep in men and women: evaporative and sensible heat losses. Hum Nutr Clin Nutr 1987; 41(3):225-233.

3. GR Goldberg, AM Prentice, HL Davies, PR Murgatroyd. Overnight and basal metabolic rates in men and women. Eur J Clin Nutr 1988; 42(2):137-144.

4. H Kumahara, M Yoshioka, Y Yoshitake, M Shindo, Y Schutz, H Tanaka. The difference between the basal metabolic rate and the sleeping metabolic rate in Japanese. J Nutr Sci Vitaminol (Tokyo) 2004; 50(6):441-445.

This entry was written by rfahmy, posted on January 10, 2010 at 12:37 am, filed under Fitness, Food, Life is Fitness, Los Angeles, Nutrition and tagged , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.