52 Tips for Losing Weight - a Tips a Week

A Tip a Week
If you add one of these tips a week to your daily routine, in one year you will have developed some very healthy habits.

1. Eliminate one tablespoon of fat a day and you will lose 10 pounds in a year.
2. Avoid strange fad diets - if you can't eat that way for the rest of your life, don't waste your time or your health.
3. Limit alcohol consumption - each serving contains 100 to150 calories.
4. Eat fruit at least twice a day.
5. Keep a food diary about your food choices, indicating how hungry you are each time you eat. Pay particular attention to your level of hunger when you snack.
6. Perform aerobic exercise a minimum of 30 minutes three times a week. Log this on your food diary. Gradually increase the length and frequency of your workouts.
7. Weigh yourself no more than twice a week.
8. Give yourself a non - food reward for every 5 pounds lost.
9. Slow down your eating speed - make meals last at least 20 minutes. Try eating with the other hand or taking a sip of water between bites.
10. Use smaller plates.
11. Bring your lunch to work at least three times a week.
12. Start to strength train twice a week. Building muscle increases your metabolism and forces your body to use fat, not muscle, when you're cutting back on calories.
13. Stop eating while watching television.
14. Have someone else put away leftovers.
15. Buy a good low-fat, low-calorie cookbook or magazine subscription.
16. Try two new reduced-calorie recipes a month.
17. Eat breakfast daily.
18. Don't read while eating.
19. Have a sweet treat once a week.
20. Keep healthful snacks at home and at work.
21. Limit your cheese consumption to reduce fat and saturated fat -- use cheese and lunchmeat with less than 5 grams of fat per ounce.
22. Add calorie counting or fat-gram counting to your food diary for a few weeks if your weight loss is slowing down. Maybe you're missing something.
23. Substitute herbs and spices for salt.
24. Shop for food when you are not hungry, and use a shopping list.
25. Replace ground beef with ground turkey or soy crumbles in dishes such as spaghetti. Don't skip the protein in your meals; find a leaner substitute.
26. Eat three vegetables a day.
27. Always eat sitting down.
28. Request that your family and friends respect your efforts to lose weight and get fit - beware of loving "sabotage."
29. Take a walk when you're stressed or angry.
30. Eat two dairy products a day - be aware of your calcium intake. Select low-fat or nonfat dairy products to reduce fat calories.
31. Order dressings and sauces on the side and apply them with a fork.
32. Increase your fiber intake - chose whole-grain breads, cereals and pasta products, legumes, and raw fruits and vegetables.
33. Add slow-down food to your meals - crunchy vegetables, a large glass of water, hot soup or beverages, or fresh fruit to fill you up.
34. Cook with chicken broth, nonstick cooking spray, wine or water.
35. Drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day.
36. Shrink portion sizes of meats and starches, and pile on the vegetables.
37. Ask how the food is prepared when ordering in a restaurant.
38. Choose low-fat frozen yogurt or frozen juice bars instead of ice cream. Be careful of the portion size these foods still have calories!
39. Select clear broth- or tomato-based soups over white soups.
40. Keep the junk foods out of sight in your home and workplace.
41. Take walking shoes or a jump rope with you when you travel to keep up with your exercise.
42. If you?re getting off track, try to pre-plan your food intake for the next three days by writing it down.
43. Buy frozen diet dinners with 10 grams of fat or less and 800 milligrams of sodium or less.
44. Avoid batter coating or breading.
45. Use two egg whites in baking instead of one whole egg.
46. Stretch during television commercials - arm circles, leg lifts, head tilts, etc.
47. Eliminate the butter on your rolls or popcorn.
48. Learn to say "no" gracefully when a friend or relative offers you a second helping.
49. Choose pizza with vegetable toppings rather than high-fat meats, such as sausage and pepperoni. Ask for less cheese. Have you ever tried tomato pie?
50. Choose cooking techniques that keep fat to a minimum, such as baking, grilling, broiling, roasting or steaming.
51. Add more low-fat soy products to your diet for the soy protein and health benefits.
52. Forgive yourself when you slip -- and make the next food choice a healthy one.

Weight Loss By Fasting

WEIGHT LOSS BY FASTING
Excerpt from “How and When to be Your Own Doctor”
http://www.healthrecipes.com/doctor.htm

Loss of weight indicates, almost guarantees, that detoxification and healing is occurring. I can"t stress this too much. Of all the things I find my patients seem to misunderstand or forget after being told, it is that they can"t heal in a rapid manner without getting smaller. This reality is especially hard for the family and friends of someone who is fasting, who will say, "you"re looking terrible dear, so thin. Your skin is hanging on your bones. You"re not eating enough protein or nutrient food to be healthy and you must eat more or you"re going to develop serious deficiencies. You don"t have any energy, you must be getting sicker. You"re doing the wrong thing, obviously. You have less energy and look worse every day. Go and see a doctor before it is too late." To succeed with friends like this, a faster has to be a mighty self-determined person with a powerful ability to disagree with others.

Medical personnel claim that rapid weight loss often causes dangerous deficiencies; these deficiencies force the person to overeat and regain even more weight afterward. This is largely untrue, though there is one true aspect to it: a fasted, detoxified body becomes a much more efficient digester and assimilator, extracting a lot more nutrition from the same amount food is used to eat. If, after extended fasting a person returns to eating the same number of calories as they did before; they will gain weight even more rapidly than before they stated fasting.

When fasting for weight loss, the only way to keep the weight off is to greatly reform the diet; to go on, and stay on, a diet made up largely of nonstarchy, watery fruits and vegetables, limited quantities of cooked food, and very limited amounts of highly concentrated food sources like cereals and cooked legumes. Unless, of course, after fasting, one"s lifestyle involves much very hard physical labor or exercise. I’ve had a few obese fasters become quite angry with me for this reason; they hoped to get thin through fasting and after the fast, to resume overeating with complete irresponsibility as before, without weight gain.

People also fear weight loss during fasting because they fear becoming anorexic or bulimic. They won’t! A person who abstains from eating for the purpose of improving their health, in order to prevent or treat illness, or http://www.healthrecipes.com/juicer_ebook.htm even one who fasts for weight loss will not develop an eating disorder. Eating disorders mean eating compulsively because of a distorted body image. Anorexics and bulimics have obsessions with the thinner-is-better school of thought. The anorexic looks at their emaciated frame in the mirror and thinks they are fat! This is the distorted perception of a very insecure person badly in need of therapy. A bulimic, on the other hand stuffs themselves, usually with bad food, and then purges it by vomiting, or with laxatives. Anorexics and bulimics are not accelerating the healing potential of their bodies; these are life threatening conditions. Fasters are genuinely trying to enhance their survival potential.

Occasionally a neurotic individual with a pre-existing eating disorder will become obsessed with fasting and colon cleansing as a justification to legitimize their compulsion. During my career while monitoring hundreds of fasters, I"ve known two of these. I discourage them from fasting or colon cleansing, and refuse to assist them, because they carry the practices to absurd extremes, and contribute to bad press about natural medicine by ending up in the emergency ward of a hospital with an intravenous feeding tube in their arm.

Atkins Diet Snack Choices

We live in a society of nibblers. Long gone are the traditional three square meals per day. Today, people eat at their desks, catch a snack in the afternoon and eat late night goodies. Most, if not all, of these snacks are carbohydrate based and full of sugar. This poses a challenge to people who are trying to follow the Atkins plan. Snacking is a necessary part of keeping your blood sugar up, but most packaged snack foods are forbidden on the plan.

Sweet snacks are high in calories, full of empty carbohydrates and offer no nutritional value. But they sure are popular. There is actually a Snack Food Association that tracks sales of packaged snack foods. It is estimated that Americans eat 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate. Snacking has increased more than a third since 1988. Sales of snack foods gross over $30 billion a year.

If you’ve been a snack food junkie you’ve become used to eating carbohydrates of the worst kind. Snack foods are made from highly refined carbohydrates like white flour, white sugar, corn meal and corn syrup. They are high in trans-fats (which is a contributor to clogged arteries). All in all, they are probably one of the worst food choices you could be making.

But there is hope! You can conquer your love of snack foods by making Atkins-friendly snacking choices. Before you can make the switch, make sure to educate yourself. Understand just how dangerous trans fats can be by reading up on them. Then read the ingredients label of your favorite snack foods. You may be shocked to discover how many trans fats, artificial flavorings and preservatives that you are eating.

Next, get rid of all of the snack foods in your house. If its not there, then you can’t eat it. Junk food is not good for anyone in your home so ignore your family’s complaints and do what is best for the health of everyone.

Now you’ll need to replace those snack foods with some better choices. Giving up your snack foods is not the same as giving up snacks. Snacks should be a part of your daily eating plan because it will help you from becoming too hungry and indulging in high-carbohydrate treats.

There are plenty of low carbohydrate snacks that are easy to make and simple to have around the house. String cheese sticks or small cheese rounds are very easy to keep in the refrigerator. Meat snacks are also a good choice. You can buy jerky strips and other meat products that keep well for long periods of time. When you buy cheese or meat sticks, make sure to read the labels carefully for hidden carbs.

There are low carb instant soups available that are very easy to make and satisfying if you are craving something hot. Low carb soy chips and celery can help with “crunchy” cravings. Try adding peanut butter or cream cheese spread to add more protein to these snacks. Also, you can’t beat a handful of nuts for a high-protein, quick snack.

All of the previously mentioned snacks are good for the initial phases of the Atkins diet and beyond. If you are past the induction phase, you can enjoy berries with cream as a snack. There are also many acceptable fruits that make good snacks for the pre-maintenance phase.

Atkins Diet Shopping Tips

When you start the Atkins diet, you are entering a new world of eating. And nowhere is that more apparent than at the supermarket. Suddenly, all of your stand-by foods like macaroni and cheese, pasta and bread are no longer on your shopping list. When you go shopping for the first few times you may feel like a fish out of water. However, with a bit of practice you’ll feel just as comfortable as you were with your previous shopping lists.

Successful Atkins shopping starts before you reach the store. There are many resources for shopping lists online and in Atkins books. Before you head for the store, make a list of the week’s recipes and then decide what you’ll need to make each meal. Make sure to purchase low-carb snacks for in between meals.

Also, plan for modifications to the meals for other people in your home. You won’t be able to make totally different meals for yourself and your family for the long term. The best approach is to use the main meat dish for your meal for the entire family and then a carbohydrate side dish for your family. For example, if you are eating meatloaf you can add half a potato for the other members of your family.

Once you’ve made your meal plan for the week, its time to hit the store. When you arrive, buy your protein items and produce first. This may sound very simple and like it won’t make much difference, but it will. Once you’ve filled your cart with all of the acceptable foods, there won’t be room for much more.

Consider buying your meat in bulk. This will save you lots of money if you know where to get family sized packages of meat. When you buy meat in large quantities, you can also cook it in bulk as well. Taking time a few days per week to cook meat makes it simple to follow the Atkins plan. You can cook your meat before hand and have it ready to go when you need it. You can purchase ground beef, chicken pieces, small steaks and even seafood in bulk.

Cheese, if you can tolerate it, can also be purchased in bulk. Many stores offer store-brand cheese in large bricks. You’ll need to make sure to read the labels before you purchase any cheese. Make sure that when you eat cheese to eat some fiber (salad or raw veggies) as well. Having large blocks of your favorite cheeses on hand can make it easy to grab a quick snack between meals.

As you walk around the store, stick to the outer edges. The outer aisles have the freshest food. Think about your neighborhood grocery store. Most often the deli, the meat counter and the produce section are all along the sides of the store with the packaged items in the aisles. This is especially important if you are in the initial phases of the Atkins diet. You’ll want to stay away from all packaged foods during induction, even if they are low carb packaged foods. Once you add more carbohydrate grams to your daily limit, you can start to experiment with low-carb packaged foods.

That leads to the next important tip – read the labels! Just because an item says it is low carb, it may have hidden sugars. Do your investigative work at the grocery store so you won’t get home with products that cause you to gain weight.

Shopping for the Atkins diet will take some time to get used to. You’ll be navigating parts of the grocery store that you may not be familiar with. You’ll also be purchasing items you’ve never cooked before. However, with planning and dedication low carb shopping will become easier. Just remember to make a list before you visit the store and stay toward the outer aisles of the grocery store. In no time, you’ll be an experienced low carb shopper.