How to Lose Weight and Keep it Off!

Swap high calorie foods for low fat versions of various foods as a fairly painless way to cut calories and harmful fat. Dairy products for dieters are skim milk, frozen yogurt and imitation whipped cream reduced fat cottage cheese or sour cream or coffee creamer. Lean meat or meat trimmed of external fat, turkey sausage, Canadian bacon, chicken or turkey without skin, and even low fat cold cuts are good choices. Light mayo and fat-free salad dressings and light spread margarines or whipped butter for your condiments.

To cut sugar, drink tea, coffee and water with a slice of lemon. Lite beer has only 99 calories. Nonalcoholic beer doesn’t have fewer calories, just less fun! Spirits have fewer carbs. To drink cocktails responsibly—designated dieter that you are—watch what you mix them with. Sometimes you can take your focus away from your craving by rewarding yourself with sugarless gum, sensuous perfume or a massage. To keep yourself on track over the long haul suspend your eating rules once a week. Now then, those cravings don’t seem so unconquerable after all!

The Best Life Diet by Oprah Winfrey’s fitness trainer is about habits and emotional eating. There isn’t anything particularly innovative. It is made of 3 phases. The 1st phase has you eating 3 meals + 1 snack a day—yeaah! Then you stop eating 2 hours before bedtime. Take a multivitamin, omega-3 supplement and calcium. The 2nd phase is more aggressive with menus and meal plans. Phase 3 adds fitness plans for integrating some changes to your lifestyle—for your best life.

Eat Right for Your Metabolism follows on the acid alkaline principles of a popular book that advocates a balance of the body’s acid and alkaline levels for ridding it of acidic wastes. The book contains recipes to balance your acid alkaline pH to lose weight and prevent disease without dieting. It explains that people have different metabolic types with differing food requirements.

The Zone diet maintains that a stable blood sugar level is the goal for shedding pounds—goodbye fat pads! It’s based on achieving a state of hormonal balance because hormonal responses occur each time you eat. Other benefits are less foggy thinking and improved athletic performance since oxygen is getting to your muscles and the resulting metabolism allows better calorie burning. The key ingredient: protein, lots of it. Add to that extra monounsaturated fat each meal. Drink water ½ hour before each meal. Make sure the bulk of carbs you consume come from veggies and fruit. Grains, bread, pasta and starches should be no more than 25% of carbs. Don’t go more than 5 hours without a snack and always eat breakfast and, at night, a small snack before bedtime. Okay, I’m done bossing you around for now.

Research shows that a diet of 30% protein tends to suppress appetite in ways that carbs and fats can’t. Scientists are not sure why—and I don’t care why! An amino acid that makes up protein may be a key to keeping muscle and losing fat. It’s abundant in tofu, cottage cheese and fat free milk.

A low carb diet would be 11% of total caloric intake. The American Heart Association recommends 30% of calories to come from fat. That leaves 59% of your diet to come from protein. Here are some high protein foods:

A low fat diet is doable so long as it’s a moderately low fat diet of 20-30% of calories from fat. It is more likely to keep weight off long term over of a lower fat diet. Cut the fat, because excess fat calories are more fattening than excess carbohydrate calories because your body works harder to convert these carbs to body fat.

Dining out guilt-free is achieved by alternating a small beverage of soda or alcohol with water. Request sauces and salad dressing on the side. Eat slowly by putting down your knife or fork between bites and talk then. Bring your own mints for a sweet aftertaste without a dessert order. For those notoriously large portions, pack up your doggie bag leftovers before you dig in. For more tips from your peers in losing weight join Slim.com and earn 10% Cash Back as a member! Wow!

I’ll offer up a little coaching on the exercise side of this issue. Team up with others watching their weight, like Weight Watchers with their long history of battling the bulge and solid advice. Register in a walker-friendly marathon as a means of setting a goal for yourself. Take a large, energetic dog for a walk or run for big fun. Dance is one of my favorite forms of exercise and expression! You can relax the pounds away with a gentle style of yoga. It teaches you to practice focusing inward to take your attention off things like food to relieve stress or boredom. It’s often done as part of a class so you’re encouraged to keep it up by attending the class regularly. Of course there are intense forms of yoga for calorie burning too.

Exercising in the morning is good because it wakes you up; and if the exercise is intense it helps burn calories long after the exercise is done. If you're intense about this then go to Maximuscle Limited UK as they have products for losing weight and getting in one-heck-of-a-shape! After a night’s sleep your blood sugar level drops, so eat a small, easily digestible snack before you sweat. This helps stave off fatigue. Aerobics are believed to cause only a marginal effect on weight loss, even if training is 5 times per week. However, losing weight from dieting results in a little muscle loss. Aerobics reduces some of this muscle loss. If your game plan for weight control is jogging, then going slow for a long period of time teaches your body to become more efficient at fat burning. Fast sprinting increases the afterburn—calories you continue to burn after you’ve stopped. So a number of sprints are good. Low intensity aerobics is better for keeping weight off, such as 3 hours of walking a week. Doing step aerobics where your arms and legs are doing coordinated movement makes you feel as if you are exerting less than you really are; likely because coordination takes your mind off your perception of fatigue.

Interval training challenges both your aerobic (activity that makes you muscles use oxygen) and anaerobic (strengthens muscles, not the heart) systems. You will add muscle mass, which speeds up metabolism of fat in general, and you raise your heart rate. High intensity exercise is alternated with a recovery period. A scenario would be 1 minute of intense work followed by 2 minutes of low intensity exercise. Repeat these bursts for ½ hour. It’s a type of weight training for weight loss. Try different repetitions and heavier and lighter weights to vary the routine if you hit the all-too-familiar plateau.

Now for a heart-to-heart…you know you want to sustain your new and improved figure. Some solid tips for sustaining is to lose the weight slowly. Continue exercising for life. Keep food portions small, as you will become accustomed to smaller amounts of food to feel satisfied. Eat breakfast every day. Remember that health is synonymous with balanced weight!