The Importance of Lowering Your Weight

Losing weight is not only helps to improve the way that you look, but also it is important to improving your health and quality of life. By reducing your body weight by 10% you will substantially reduce your chances of developing diabetes, heart disease, and even joint problems. For a woman that weighs 165 pounds a 10% weight reduction would only be about 16.5 pounds. This reduction will help you feel better about yourself, it will help you drop a dress size or two, and it will help you enjoy your life.

Why Most Diets Fail

Most fad diets fail because they create negative biological effects within your body. Starvation diets that reduce your daily caloric intake too much will actually cause you to hold onto fat and extra body mass by lowering your rate of metabolism and by triggering your body’s starvation defense mechanisms. Fad diets that reduce your food choices to only one or two food groups are also unhealthy, and they will ultimately fail because they starve your body by not providing it with adequate amounts of nutrients, minerals, and fats that it needs to operate and function properly. As your body runs out of the stored elements it will trigger a craving that will encourage you to eat foods that have the nutrients that it needs. These craving, unfortunately, will kill you diet as once you start eating the restricted foods you won’t be able to stop. This cycle of starvation and bingeing can lead to heart problems and possibly an eating disorder.

In addition to nutritional concerns that fad diets pose, unbalanced diets also impact the way that you feel, and your ability to function normally. With too few calories, and too few nutrients your moods will swing to the dark side, and people will not want to be around you. This could negatively impact your ability to function at work, to socialize with others, or to take part in your family’s activities.

Diet pills are also a dieting issue that needs to be addressed here. While relatively non-invasive when taken as recommended, most diet pills contain a great deal of caffeine that can cause the feeling of being jittery, hyperactive, and shaky. Other ingredients within diet pills may also be harmful to your health if the pills are taken in quantities or frequencies greater than what is recommended. It is common for dieters to think that if one pill three times a day will help me lose 10 pounds in two weeks, then two pills four times a day should double my results. This actually is not the case, and with some over the counter diet pills, this practice could have serious effects on a person’s health, and it may even lead to liver or kidney failure, and in some situations it could even lead to death. Another health caution related to diet pills is that their ingredients may interact with the prescription drugs that you are taking. If you are currently using a prescription drug(s), you need to consult the warning label on the diet pill bottle, or ask your doctor if they are safe to take with your medications.

Set Reasonable Goals

Now that you know that unbalanced diets, staving yourself, fad diets, and diet pills are not the answer to your weight issues, you are in a good place to start eating in a way that will promote a healthy weight, and that will still allow you to eat like a real person. When deciding to lose weight you should sit down with yourself and truly identify weight loss and fitness goals that are reasonable for you to achieve, remembering that not everyone is designed to be 110 pounds and a size 2. Your body type, bone structure and size, and your muscle mass will determine what weight you should be. If you don’t know exactly what weight you should be, start with a short-term goal to lose 5-10% of your current weight. As you start losing weight you will start to get an idea of what weight range you feel the most comfortable at, and most importantly which weight ranges that you feel the healthiest at.

Set short-term and long-term weight loss goals. For example, week one I will lose 2-3 pounds (short-term goal), and by July 31 I want to be 20 pounds lighter (long-term goal.) This brings me to another important point, don’ expect to lose 10 pounds overnight. The diets that claim that they can give you this kind of result are either lying to you, or they are putting your health at risk. The liquid diets that have become popular in the last several years that promise if you drink only their juice diet drink for two days that you will lose 10 pounds, are basically providing you with a 48 hour fast. While you may lose 5 to 10 pounds with this diet, it will be from the loss of water weight and the cleansing of the contents from your bowel and intestines, and not actually from losing fat. And once you start eating normally and normal materials build up again in your bowl and intestines, the weight will return.

Safe and healthy eating programs should provide you with an average weight loss of about 1-2 pounds per week. Weight loss at his rate is more likely to stay off, than weight that is lost at faster rates through unhealthy methods. You should also be prepared to hit weight loss plateaus. These plateau periods will be frustrating and they may make you want to give up, but don’t. These phases are times that your body needs to readjust to your new body composition and metabolism rates. You may notice that during this time that even though you won’t lose any pounds, you will see your body toning and firming. To get out of this plateau increase your exercising. This will help increase your metabolism and it will encourage the weight loss engine to fire back up.

How To Lose Weight Without Dieting

The key to any weight loss program is to eat less and move more. This does not mean that you need to restrict yourself to 500 calories pr day, or that you need to enroll in a gym and exercise 2 hours a day 5 days a week. What it does mean is that you need to adjust your eating habits and movement patterns to maximize your body’s ability to burn calories and build lean muscle. (Muscle burns more calories than fat does, so you can eat more if you have more muscles without gaining any weight!)

The first tip I can give you is to cut 500 calories from your diet per week in order to lose one pound each week. If you would like to lose two pounds per week, then remove 1000 calories from your diet each week. This may seem like a lot of calories to remove from your diet, but these calories are spread out over seven days, so that comes out to only about 71.5 calories a day to lose 1 pound a week, or 143 calories a day to lose 2 pounds per week. Now lets take a look at how you can easily cut these amounts from your current eating habits without feeling deprived.

1. Use lite margarine instead of regular margarine or butter. This will cut 50 calories per serving for your diet. With this one change you have already almost met the calorie cut to lose 1 pound per week.
2. Stop using mayonnaise on your sandwiches, and instead only use mustard or some other no-calorie condiment. Trust me you won’t really miss mayo all that much, and you will save 100 calories plus (depending on how much you normally use) per serving. If being without mayo is unbearable, however, you can use lite mayo and you will still be able to save 50 calories per serving.
3. When you bake, reduce the amount of cooking oil that you use by 25%. This won’t impact the flavor or texture of your cooking and you will reduce your calories significantly. For every ¼ cup of oil that you omit you save 400 calories. You can reduce your calories further by substituting pineapple juice for cooking oil in the same quantity. This will save you 1500 calories for every one-cup of oil that is replaced with juice.
4. Instead of making a sandwich on two slices of bread, make a sandwich on a hot dog bun or a small hamburger bun. Two slices of bread have 180 calories depending on the type of bread used, whereas a hot dog bun or small hamburger bun only have about 110 calories each. This is a calorie savings of 70 calories.
5. You can also save calories by omitting the bread all together and instead make a salad out of your sandwich fixings. If you normally have a ham sandwich with cheese, you can save the 180 calories from the bread by cutting up the ham and cheese and placing them on a bed of lettuce. You get the great rich flavors from the ham and cheese, and you are filled up by the roughage from the lettuce.
6. Make your ranch dressing stretch. If you like to drench your salad in ranch dressing, you can reduce the calories of full fat ranch by mixing one tablespoon of ranch dressing with a ¼ cup or even a ½ cup of salsa. If you normally use two or three tablespoons of ranch dressing, then this yummy mixture will save you 90 to 180 calories per serving.

As you can see there are many small adjustments that you can make to save calories and encourage your body to naturally and safely lose weight. Another tick to lose weight and eat healthier is to incorporate more fresh vegetables into your diet. Get into the habit of eating your vegetables first before you eat your main course and you will find that your hunger will be satisfied with less of the main course and deserts then if you didn’t eat any vegetables. This way you get a healthy mix of food groups and you still enjoy a good meal. Also drinking 8 glasses of water a day is a great way to encourage weight loss. Water acts as a natural diuretic and appetite suppressant. It also works as a great way to purify your system and improve the texture and condition of your skin and hair.

Improve Your Results With Exercise

You can increase your weight loss by increasing the amount of exercise that you participate in during the day. This does not mean that you have to join a gym, or run a 5-K every other day. What it does mean is that you need to increase the amount of productive movement that you participate in each day. Walking is a great form of exercise, with little impact on your joints. You can enhance your health and weight loss further by walking 20 minutes a day at least three days a week. However, you can also increase your movement patterns by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking on your lunch break around the block, march in place while waiting for the copier to print out your work, and walk around the block after you eat breakfast and dinner at home. To improve your motivation have a friend join you and have a walk and talk date where you can catch up on the local gossip while you exercise. You will find that walking with a friend where you can have a pleasant conversation will help the mile(s) go by faster and with less effort than if you walk alone. If you need more motivation to start a walking program, join a walking club in your hometown. You can often find thee kinds of clubs by going online. Not only will joining a club help motivate you to walk on a regular basis, it will also provide you with moral support. Other fun forms of exercise include swimming, bicycling, belly dancing, yoga, tai chi, or even fencing. Find a few exercises or sports that you enjoy and mix them up during the week. In order to keep things interesting don’t do the same things every day. Have fun and try new sports and activities. Keep your body guessing what you’re going to do next.

When in Doubt

Exercise and dieting always should be formatted around your health needs and your physical abilities. If you have health concerns like diabetes or heart disease, then you should check with your doctor to make sure that the program is right and safe for you. Modifications can be made so that you can participate in and enjoy almost any activity. So physical limitations shouldn’t prevent you from doing something that you enjoy that will improve your fitness level, improve your overall health, and improve the quality of your life.