Author: Diane Carbonell

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How To Lose Five Pounds In Two Weeks Without Starving Yourself

Letters hit my email inbox all the time with people asking how they can quickly lose five pounds. They may have an upcoming reunion, wedding, or just want to fit back into the jeans they swore they’d never get too big for. While you can’t safely lose five pounds in a day, you can safely lose five pounds in two weeks without starving yourself.
I hate crash diets that promise fast weight loss without long-term weight maintenance. This two-week plan isn’t a crash diet but instead a healthy, realistic way to drop five pounds and use the lessons learned to keep going with your weight loss, if necessary.
First, make sure you are mentally prepared to work hard for two weeks. Don’t start a diet if you aren’t 100 percent committed, because there are few things more depressing to the dieter than failure.
Second, if you have any pre-existing medical conditions, check with your doctor before starting a diet.
Third, get ready to make a list, do some shopping, cook up some good meals, exercise at least eight times, and lose those pesky five pounds.

The Eating Plan

Eating to lose five pounds in a couple of weeks is relatively simple. You just need to keep your calories at a weight loss level for 14 days in a row.
What’s a weight loss level? Well, that depends on the person. But in general, women should eat between 1,200 and 1,500 calories a day and men should eat between 1,700 and 2,200 calories a day.
I recommend eating three or four meals a day and dividing your calories relatively evenly among the meals. For example, if you are eating 2,000 calories a day and want four meals, each meal should have about 500 calories.
The truth is that in most cases, it doesn’t really matter what you eat so long as you keep your calories at a weight loss level. That being said, it matters to your health.
Don’t lose five pounds eating Pop-Tarts for breakfast, Lunchables for lunch, and a frozen meal for dinner. If you do that, you will lose weight but you will also gain it back as soon as you begin eating regularly.
Breakfast Options
1. Egg white omelets with vegetables and low-fat cheese
2. Oatmeal (regular or steel cut) topped with fruit, honey, or nuts
3. Greek yogurt with fruit or 1 tablespoon of nuts
4. A piece of fruit and a small bagel
5. Whole wheat toast with peanut butter, fruit, and a cup of juice
Lunch Options
1. Pasta Salad with light dressing and vegetables, 3 ounces of grilled chicken, and 1 ounce of cheddar cheese
2. Mixed green salad with teriyaki-seasoned beef strips, cantaloupe slices, a small piece of crusty bread, and 1 tablespoon of dressing
3. Pita bread stuffed with seasoned grilled chicken, black beans, salsa, and a sprinkling of cheese; add a piece of fruit, a bit of guacamole or sour cream, and you have a delicious, filling lunch
4. Turkey burger on a lettuce bun: If you’re avoiding bread, use lettuce or other greens to wrap a well-seasoned turkey burger; top the burger with a thin slice of cheese, a bit of turkey bacon, and your favorite mustard and serve alongside a salad and an apple
5. Hearty minestrone soup: A bowl of minestrone soup has about 200 calories; have two bowls and a few whole wheat crackers for a meal that will leave you full until dinner
Dinner Options
1. Black bean, corn, and salsa pizza made on pita bread: Slice the pita bread open and use both halves. Mix the beans, corn, and salsa together and put on pita halves. Top with some cheese and bake for about 10 minutes. Serve with Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, fruit, and some sherbet for dessert.
2. Angel hair pasta with meat or marinara sauce: Make your own spaghetti sauce using canned or fresh tomatoes, fresh basil and oregano, and tomato paste. Add lean turkey or beef to the sauce if desired. Serve over 1/2 cup of cooked angel hair pasta.
3. Hearty main dish salad: Use mixed greens as the base and add salmon or chicken, sesame seeds, olive oil dressing, and your favorite vegetables. Serve the salad with fruit and whole wheat bread.
4. Roasted chicken and vegetables: Roast a chicken in the oven or buy one already cooked from the store. Toss some vegetables such as potatoes, onions, Brussels sprouts, and butternut squash in olive oil and salt. Roast the vegetables for 30 minutes at 425 degrees until tender.
5. Beef or turkey chili: Use canned kidney beans, cooked beef or turkey, tomatoes, onions, green pepper, cumin, and chili powder to make a spicy chili.

The Exercise Plan

You don’t have to go crazy with exercise to lose five pounds in two weeks. Commit to regular exercise, and you will be surprised at how good you feel.
Perform cardiovascular exercise four days each week, adding in two sessions of weight training on your non-cardio days.
Here are some ideas that will help you burn 200-300 calories in 30 minutes, depending on your weight and your exertion level:
– Moderate bike riding
– Low-impact aerobics
– Dancing vigorously
– Using the elliptical machine
– Walking at a moderate pace
– Strength training
– Jogging
– Swimming
– Participating in a martial arts class
– Playing basketball (for an hour)
You can see that losing five pounds in two weeks isn’t that hard, but it does take planning your meals, committing to an exercise plan, and not cheating.

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How To Fight Your Way Off The Weight Loss Plateau

Weight loss plateaus are boring, frustrating, and often the cause for you throwing up your hands and quitting your weight loss efforts entirely. There’s not much about weight loss that could be called fun, and weight loss plateaus are definitely in the not-fun category. If you are sitting atop a weight loss plateau feeling stuck and unmotivated, here are some practical tips for fighting your way off the plateau and getting your weight loss mojo back.

I once had a client who said she spent more time on a weight loss plateau than actually losing weight. She told me that she was so used to losing a few pounds, staying there for what seemed like forever, and then finally losing a few more that she began to believe she was never going to get to her goal weight.

With some dedicated work, she finally stopped the cycle of spending most of her time on a weight loss plateau and kicked her weight loss into high gear. And you can too.

There are lots of reasons for weight loss plateaus. Here are a few of the most common:

– You are eating more than you realize.

– You’ve reached a balance point between calories and exercise.

– Cheating is happening.

– Exercise is lacking.

– Medications you are on are affecting your weight.

– Hormonal fluctuations are making it hard for you to control snacking and cravings.

The first thing to do when faced with a weight loss plateau is to make sure you really are atop one.

Here’s what a weight loss plateau is not:

It is not a day or two of no weight loss. It’s not a period of stalled weight loss after you’ve deliberately overeaten at a holiday or eaten much more than you need due to stress in your life.

I define stalled weight loss as a true plateau if you have been at the same weight for more than 10 days. Then you need to take a look at what’s going on to figure out how to get your weight loss moving again.

Be Honest About Your Eating

By far the most common problem with stalled weight loss is simply eating too much. It’s vitally important that you are 100 percent honest with yourself when your weight loss stalls. It’s very easy to assume you are eating at a weight loss level when in fact you have bumped up your calorie consumption to the point where you are maintaining rather than losing.

For example, if eating 1,600 calories a day was causing you to lose 1/2 pound a week, eating 2,000 calories a day could lead to weight maintenance. Just a few extra pieces of cheese, a second roll, or two small handfuls of nuts equals about 400 calories.

Look At Exercise Patterns

If you really are eating the right number of calories, ask yourself if you’ve slacked off from exercising. If you have, you are not burning as many calories as before. The lack of calorie burn can cause your weight loss to slow if you do not reduce your calorie intake to balance the lack of exercise.

A solution is to resume your previous exercise routine or reduce your calorie intake.

Talk To Your Doctor About Medications You Are Taking

Some medications–such as certain antidepressants, beta blockers, and steroids–can negatively affect your weight. Call your doctor and ask if medications you are taking could be causing you to have difficulty continuing your weight loss. Ask if there are alternatives you can try.

Weight loss plateaus aren’t fun, but they are a good learning experience. During your analysis of what’s causing you to not lose weight, you can assess your eating, decide whether your exercise program is appropriate, and get advice from your doctor. The only thing you shouldn’t do is give up.

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How And Why To Just Say No To Candy

The major holidays have passed, but the candy aisle at your grocery store is as full as ever. The variety and amount of candy available is staggering. One day, just for fun, I counted over 100 different types of candy in my medium-sized grocery store. If you are trying to lose weight, candy may be a temptation for you. I know it was for me, and at certain times of the year it still is. I finally broke the candy habit for good with some simple tricks.

Why Should You Stop Eating Candy?

I do believe in moderation when it comes to weight loss and weight maintenance, but most candy is just so bad for you that I usually recommend people avoid it altogether.

Why?

You should avoid candy for three reasons:

1. It contains lots of calories in a small package.

2. With some exceptions, it has no nutritional value.

3. It often triggers cravings for sugary foods.

These three reasons alone make candy a poor choice when losing weight. As a quick illustration, here is the nutritional information for a single ounce of jelly beans.

Calories: 105Fiber: 0 gSugar 20 gCarbohydrates: 26 gFat: 0 gOther Vitamins: Basically zero

This candy, because it has so much sugar, does not have any fat. Other candies, such as chocolate bars, are not fat-free but are equally high in calories and sugar.

Real-Life Tricks To Stop Eating Candy

It’s one thing to know candy is bad for your weight loss and another thing entirely to actually stop eating it. Believe me, I know. It wasn’t uncommon for me to consume a large bag of M&M’s over the course of two days. I’d tell myself I was just going to have two or three candies. Then I’d reach my hand in the bag again and again and again until I had two or three candies about 50 times.

Here are some of the tricks I used to break myself of the candy habit for good.

Look At Candy Like Poison

It sounds extreme, but I used the same technique on candy that people who are trying to quit smoking use on cigarettes. I stopped thinking of candy as pleasurable but instead as dangerous to my health. The M&M’s calling my name weren’t good for me–they were bad for my health and weight.

Educate Yourself On Calories

Candy is high in calories but how high? I was very good at not looking at the nutrition label and instead just eating candy here and there, even if I was dieting. “A little couldn’t hurt too much,” I justified to myself.

Once I decided to eliminate candy from my diet, I looked at the nutrition labels carefully. Even I was surprised to find that a relatively small candy bar had about 200 calories. That’s a big chunk of your daily calorie allotment, especially if you don’t stop at just one candy bar.

Acknowledge That Candy Isn’t Necessary

Some foods are necessary, such as fruits and vegetables. Candy is not. I realized I would rather spend my calorie allotment on foods that were necessary for life, not junk food.

Realize Candy Triggers Cravings

Candy, because of its high sugar content, often triggers cravings for more sugary foods. When you eat candy, are you suddenly satisfied, or do you want more?

You probably want more.

Quit eating candy for 10 days and assess whether you craving for sugary foods has decreased. I’d wager that it has. If you keep away from candy, the cravings will stay away as well.

The Exceptions

As with many things, there are some exceptions to the no-candy rule. Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, has some benefits to your health and may help you avoid feeling deprived if you cut out all other candy. Some research, including a research letter published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that people who ate a small amount of chocolate each week and exercised regularly had a slightly lower body mass index than people who did not eat chocolate as regularly.

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Pre-Logging Your Meals: A Smart And Effective Weight Loss Technique

Write it down. Log it. Keep track of what you eat. These are phrases you hear all the time. I admit to saying them once or twice myself. Why do you hear them so often when it comes to weight loss? Because it’s a proven technique for weight loss backed by research studies and real-life results. There’s a variation on this technique that is equally effective and gives you the added benefit of knowing what you are going to eat before you even sit down. It’s pre-logging your meals. Here’s why you should consider it and how to do it effectively.

I like the concept of pre-logging your meals because it takes the guesswork out of what’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snacks for the day. When I guessed what I was going to have, I often ate too much. Why? Because I made it up on the spur of the moment, and it often wasn’t the healthiest or lowest calorie choice I could make. I ended up overeating more often than I should have because of last-minute choices.

That’s a recipe for disaster right there.

Pre-logging your meals might feel like a pain or an unnecessary extra step, but it is neither. In fact, it takes a lot of the stress out of weight loss. Why? Because knowing what you are going to eat for the day when you get up in the morning is one less decision you have to make.

Here’s how to get started with logging your meals before you actually eat them.

First, decide whether you are going to pre-log your meals day by day or a week at a time. Initially, I recommend a daily approach. Each night before you go to bed, think through your upcoming day and decide what you will eat.

Second, write down your meals for the next day using your favorite method. It could be an old-fashioned notebook or an app on your phone. Calculate the calories and make tweaks so your calories line up with your personal goals.

Third, check your pre-logged meal planner app or notebook before you eat the next day. If you wrote down that you were going to have an egg white omelet for breakfast with some chopped vegetables, have that for breakfast. Repeat throughout the day.

At the end of the day, if you followed your pre-logged plan, you will have eaten just what you decided you would and no more or no less.

Here are some questions you may have about working with a pre-logged meal plan.

1. What if you are going out to eat?

In many cases, you know the day before if you are going out with friends or eating out for a work meeting. In the rare cases where eating out is truly unexpected, choose an entrée on the menu that closely matches the number of calories you initially intended to eat.

2. What if you eat something not on your pre-logged plan?

This is real life right here. Of course, you won’t always be able to follow your plan perfectly. If you add an extra snack, have two pieces of toast instead of one, or indulge in a dessert, add those calories to your food diary. No harm done.

3. How long should you pre-log your meals?

I say do it as long as it is working for you. As with many things in weight loss, what works for one person may or may not work for another. Give pre-logging your meals a try for a week and see what happens.

If you find it easier to stick to your allotted calories and eat a balanced diet when pre-logging, then do it for another week. The purpose of pre-logging your meals is to make your life easier and your weight loss permanent by establishing new habits.

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5 Tricky Ingredients To Avoid When Dieting

Your body is an amazingly efficient machine: able to filter out a variety of toxins, process junk food like nobody’s business, and keep going even when you feed it almost-fake food like Laffy Taffy. That being said, you don’t want to load your body up with foods that aren’t good for it, especially when you’re trying to lose weight. Here is my list of ingredients I recommend people avoid when dieting. Not all of them are high in calories, but all of them are unnecessary and may even be harmful.

Artificial Sweeteners

Artificial sweeteners seem like a good idea when you are losing weight because they are basically calorie free, but trust me, they’re not. Not only are they completely unnatural, but they can slow down your metabolism and make you crave sweets. And both of those are the last things you want when losing weight.

Watch out for the following sweeteners on an ingredient list:

– Aspartame, often listed as NutraSweet

– Sugar alcohols

– Sorbitol

– Acesulfame potassium

– Glycerol

– Saccharin

– Sucralose

Trans Fats

Although the Food and Drug Administration has announced a complete phaseout of trans fats in foods, many bakery goods and restaurant foods still contain trans fats. You can also find trans fats in some processed foods.

Trans fats are dangerous for your health because they increase the levels of unhealthy cholesterol and decrease the levels of good cholesterol in your blood. In terms of weight loss, you should avoid unhealthy fats because they have the same calories as good fats but lack any health benefits. Look for words like partially hydrogenated fats on food labels and avoid those foods completely.

Refined Grains

Going on a diet doesn’t mean you have to give up grains completely, but you should avoid eating too many refined grains. Refined grains are highly processed and have little nutritional value. The foods they are in are not great for weight loss (think cookies, crackers, and desserts).

Skip the white bread, white rice, or cereals made with refined grains. Instead, choose all-natural grains such as whole wheat flour, popcorn, couscous, or quinoa.

High Fructose Corn Syrup

High fructose corn syrup is a highly processed sweetener that is cheap to make and cheap for food manufacturers to put in foods. The problem with avoiding high fructose corn syrup is that it is in a plethora of products, from bread to condiments.

Some research–such as the 2005 study published in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism–suggests that eating foods with high fructose corn syrup negatively affects your metabolic rate, which isn’t good for weight loss.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)

Monosodium glutamate, commonly referred to as MSG, is an additive in many processed foods. It’s used in some restaurant foods as a flavor enhancer and in salad dressings and sauces, soups, and some chips.

MSG can cause your appetite to increase, give you a headache, and if you are allergic to MSG, you may experience breathing and digestive problems. Read food labels carefully and avoid foods that contain MSG.

Although you can still lose weight if you eat these foods, I believe you should make weight loss as easy as possible. And if avoiding these foods makes your weight loss journey a little easier, why not skip these ingredients and focus on natural, wholesome foods?

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All Things in Moderation: How to Avoid Eating Too Much

Food overload. Our society definitely has it. There are few places where you can’t find food. Sports complexes, drug stores, gas stations, shopping centers, and even high-end department stores often have food for sale. How then, with food everywhere, can you avoid eating too much? Because you know that eating too much is one of the prime causes for obesity. Here are some practical tips to help you avoid food overload and keep your food intake at a reasonable level.

I had a real problem with eating too much. It was a rare night when I went to bed with even the slightest feeling of hunger. Instead, I usually went to sleep uncomfortably full and woke up slightly full. And then I repeated the cycle day after day until I weighed 300 pounds. Eating too much was definitely the main reason I was morbidly obese.

One of the greatest challenges to losing weight is to stop eating so much.

To get your food intake under control, you must do several things and you’ve got to keep doing them for the rest of your life. If you don’t, you will be likely to regain the weight you fought so hard to lose.

1. Be mindful of how much you are really eating. It is easy to sit on the couch with a box of healthy crackers or baked chips on your lap and eat way more than you meant to. I tell people to be mindfully present when you eat. Don’t let your mind wander or get distracted.

2. Think before you eat anything. You may be like I was and eat whatever sounds good at the moment. And then the next moment something else sounds good and you eat that too. Take a couple of minutes and really think before you eat. Are you truly hungry? Is it time for a meal? Are you making a good choice?

3. Watch out for foods packed with calories like desserts and tasty savory dishes. Some of these foods contain half your calorie allotment for the day.

4. Deliberately be the last one done when eating with other people. Slowing down your eating pace works like magic. If you chew your food thoroughly, take small bites, and engage others in conversation, you will be much less likely to overeat.

5. Eat on a schedule to avoid eating all day long. When you eat all day long, it is very hard to eat the proper number of calories. I learned the hard way you can’t eat five snacks, three meals, and a few desserts and lose weight. Schedule your meals to avoid feeling ravenous and commit to sticking to an eating schedule.

6. Don’t have any if you don’t like it or are already full. It’s okay–and even a good idea–to say “no” if you don’t want the food being offered.

7. Pay attention to your gut. The uncomfortable feeling that comes with eating too much is unmistakable. When you are dieting, you should not feel overly full. If you do, you have likely eaten more than you should have.

8. Equate food with calories and exercise. Have a good idea of how many calories you are eating and how much exercise you will have to do to burn that donut, cookie, or bag of chips. As an example, a 200-pound woman has to walk for 30 minutes to burn about 220 calories.

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The Simple Food Scale: A Fantastic Weight Loss Companion

If you’ve bemoaned the fact you aren’t losing weight as fast as you feel you should be, you are likely eating more calories than you think. There are a lot of ways to track your food intake, from calorie counters to measuring cups. However, the most accurate way is the food scale. As the common phrase goes, “The scale doesn’t lie.”

I didn’t have a food scale for a long time. I thought I knew how much food I was eating and what a portion should be. After all, I had been dieting for years and was somewhat of an expert on food portions, at least I thought I was.

After losing weight successfully for a while, I decided it might be fun to get a scale. So I did. I bought a digital scale that measured in both grams and ounces. This turned out to be a good decision because even though I live in the United States, many food labels list food weights in grams only or have both grams and empirical measures.

Imagine my surprise when what I thought to be a portion actually turned out to be a portion and a half or even two portions. I still remember measuring rice and being surprised at how little rice 185 g or 1/2 cup really was. Even though I had used a measuring cup, I was eating more than I intended. I guess I smashed the rice down a little bit when putting it in the cup.

A digital scale makes that impossible. You can smash food into a cup or guesstimate how much is on your plate, but you can’t cheat the scale.

If you’ve never used a digital food scale, here’s a quick primer on how to use one:

Ÿ – Purchase a scale with a wide surface area to accommodate a variety of bowls and dishes.

– Always zero out the scale. In other words, don’t count the weight of the container when measuring your foods.

Ÿ – Add up all the ingredients and divide the number of servings into it. For example, if you are making a chicken stir-fry that has 450 g of chicken, 1/2 an onion, 1/2 a green pepper, and 4 cups of cooked rice, measure each ingredient and record the calories. If you split the dish into three servings, divide the total calories by three.

Ÿ – Make use of the recipe builders on websites like MyFitnessPal or SparkPeople to analyze total calories of your recipes and measure ingredients. If you log onto the sites, you can save your recipes for future use.

Ÿ- Use the zero out feature as a time-saving device for salads. Put your container on the scale and set it to zero. Then add each ingredient and zero out the scale after each addition. That way you are only measuring each new ingredient. After you’ve recorded it all in your journal, take the bowl off the scale and eat your perfectly measured salad.

The small amount of money you will spend on the scale is definitely worth it in the long run. It’s really easy to blame a lack of weight loss on everything but overeating. A food scale will hold you accountable and give you an objective way of determining exactly what you are eating and how many calories it has.

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Baking, Love, And Emotions: Looking At Baking In A Whole New Light

I enjoy cooking all kinds of food, but I especially love baking. Unfortunately for me, the foods associated with the word bake aren’t on many weight loss food lists. You never see cake, pies, and cookies on the “must include” list of any diet plan. If you love to bake and are trying hard to lose weight, I want you to know you can have both: a love of baking and successful weight loss.
Losing weight is about calorie reduction, but it is also about taking a hard look at your lifestyle, your food habits, and the emotions that drive those choices. Although you may not think baking falls into one of these categories, it really does.

Baking to Show Love

For many people, baking is a way to show love. Showering family and friends with cookies, cakes, and delectable desserts is their way of giving something special to people they love. It was to me.
I baked unceasingly, one amazing dessert after another. We wouldn’t even have time to finish one dessert or give it away to friends before I’d be pulling the next one out of the oven.
It makes sense that this is a common reason to bake. Preparing and sharing food for other people is a way of creating a bond and satisfying a physical need. The famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving illustration that shows a loving family gathered around a Thanksgiving table depicts this perfectly.

Baking to Satisfy Emotions

When I got pregnant with my first daughter and gained 75 pounds, I drowned my stress in chocolate. I continued baking, gaining, gorging and gaining. I couldn’t seem to stop making desserts. And unfortunately for me, I couldn’t stop eating them either.
I was baking to calm myself down and then eating most of the brownies or cookies to relieve stress. Predictably, I continued to gain weight and baked all the more in a fruitless attempt to stop feeling bad about how I looked and felt.

Backward Thinking

Baking to show your family love or baking as a way to soothe your own feelings is backward thinking. It really is.
Answer this question: Are you really showing your family you love them by baking high-calorie desserts? Or are you pulling them with along with you on your unhealthy eating path one bite of brownie at a time? It’s a hard question to answer.
After a lot of soul-searching, I realized that baking didn’t equal love.
I wasn’t doing my family or friends any favors by showering them with spectacular desserts. Instead, I was adding unnecessary calories and unhealthy ingredients to their diet. I came to the point where I realized it would be more loving to focus on spending more time with the people I loved, finding nonfood ways to support them, and make healthy rather than unhealthy foods.
As far as the emotional component, baking doesn’t fix your stress, stop you from worrying about your finances, or make your life better. Instead, if you bake and then eat most of your creations as I did, you are putting a roadblock in front of your weight loss plan every time you pull cookies or cakes out of the oven.
Once I came to these realizations, I stopped baking all the time, and I hope you will as well. I still bake on occasion. I make amazing birthday cakes for family, have made a few wedding cakes, and occasionally make a homemade dessert just because it’s Tuesday. But gone are the days when I made cookies for the neighbors and ate half, created huge homemade desserts every night for us, and a cooked a pan of brownies on the side just for me.
What a relief those days are gone forever.
If you enjoy baking and end up eating more of your creations than you should, be honest with yourself. Put a moratorium on everyday baking and see if your family and friends love you any less. After a few weeks, you might notice you have less of a craving for sugar and are seeing the scale move down. It’s a win-win for you and for the people you used to shower with baked goods.

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The Top 10: Weight Loss Advice That Really Works

There are thousands of pieces of really bad weight loss advice out there. Crazy suggestions like “eat only orange foods,” or “breathe differently to lose weight,” do nothing to help you. After 17 years of maintaining a 150-pound weight loss, I’ve got 10 pieces of weight loss advice that really work, won’t drive you crazy, and can be used no matter who you are or how much weight you have to lose.

#10: Remember Quality of Calories Count

Don’t lose weight eating Cheetos and drinking soda. The quality of calories counts in weight loss. Not only is good food better for your health, but losing weight by eating healthy food gives you time to develop habits you can take with you into weight maintenance.

#9: Don’t Drink Your Calories

Calories in drinks are pointless. Why would you drink a 140 calorie Starbucks skinny caramel macchiato when you could have zero calorie water, an apple, and a piece of cheese for the same number of calories. Commit to eliminating or severely limiting your drink calories. If you must have the Starbucks drink, set aside one day a week for the treat.

#8: Balance Your Nutrient Intake Appropriately

Have a balance of carbs, fats, and protein each day. It is relatively easy to eliminate an entire food group for a short time and a whole lot more difficult to do so for a lifetime. Eating a realistic balance of nutrients will allow you to lose weight and more easily maintain your weight.

#7: Be a Joiner

Join a weight loss group, be active on a weight loss Facebook page, or get together regularly with friends who share your weight loss goals. Joining together with other people who want to lose weight is a great way to stay motivated, accountable, and successful.

#6: Look At the Whole of Your Life

Don’t look at weight loss in a vacuum. Learn to incorporate your new eating and exercise habits into your daily life. Some people get so focused on the weight loss process they forget to keep up with relationships. Your weight loss needs to fit in with your life, not become your whole life.

# 5: Adjust Your Calorie Intake Regularly.

As you lose weight, your body needs fewer calories to sustain itself. Regularly adjust your calorie intake downward by a few calories to account for that change. The exception to this is if you started out your diet by eating at the minimum recommended calorie allotment. Then, just keep doing what you are doing until you reach your goal weight.

#4: Don’t Eat Your Exercise Calories

If you burn 250 calories walking in the morning, don’t eat back those calories. For example, if you are eating 1,400 calories a day and burn 250 calories, don’t eat 1,650 calories that day. Stick to your 1,400 calories to lose weight more quickly.

#3: Address Emotional Eating Issues

Make sure you address the emotions that cause you to overeat. You may eat from stress, happiness, anger, sadness, boredom, or another emotion altogether. Talk to a trusted friend, share your feelings with your weight loss group, or get in touch with a counselor. Ignoring emotions just pushes the issue aside and it will resurface at some point and may cause you to gain back the weight you lost.

#2: Have a Restart Plan

It’s rare to find someone who lost all his or her weight the first time around. Make sure you have a restart plan for the inevitable slip-up or outright failure. A quick restart plan is to:

1) Assess What Went Wrong

2) Get Rid of Unhealthy Foods in the House

3) Write Down Your New Plan

4) Start Back Immediately

#1: Start With a Sustainable Plan

My best weight loss tip is to start with a sustainable plan in the first place. When I lost weight my philosophy was simple:

Lose weight in a way that doesn’t look any different than my weight maintenance will.

In other words, if you can’t sustain your weight loss diet for a lifetime, find another way to lose weight. Look for plans that encourage real food, a reasonable balance of nutrients, and realistic exercise amounts.

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So You Lost Weight! Why Does It Feel Weird When People Notice?

Losing weight isn’t always fun, but most people find it exciting when other people notice their weight loss efforts. The attention, looks, and comments are all rewarding—at first. But after a while, you may start to feel a little weird about the attention. Here’s why you feel that way and how to handle unwanted (and wanted) attention.

I get it that it is awesome to lose weight. I also get it that weight loss often brings with it some unexpected side effects and changes in how people treat you.

For example, the husband of a friend of mine who I knew when I was fat never gave me the time of day. He barely acknowledged I was standing nearby and never initiated a conversation with me. I didn’t really think too much of it at the time because I wasn’t his friend, I was his wife’s friend. All that changed once I lost weight. Suddenly he was engaging, interested in what I was saying, and generally complimentary. I took great offense at this and went out of my way to avoid ever speaking to him.

As you lose weight, people will start to notice the changes in your body shape and appearance. Whether they say anything or not is another matter entirely. Good friends of mine didn’t say much. It was those casual acquaintances who couldn’t stop talking about my weight loss, my newly svelte figure, and how great I looked.

I just wanted them to stop.

You would think that the attention would feel good, but for many people it feels more uncomfortable.

Here are some reasons the attention may make you feel uncomfortable.

You are afraid of gaining it back.

Losing weight is a very public endeavor, especially if you have more than a few pounds to lose. Unfortunately, gaining weight is also very public.

You may be uncomfortable with people noticing your weight loss efforts because you are afraid of regaining the weight you have lost. That was me. I didn’t want people to notice because I had never been able to maintain a weight loss before. What if I couldn’t this time either?

The fix for this is to just accept their compliments and use the fact that everyone notices as an incentive to maintain your weight loss when you reach your final goal.

You don’t like people looking at your body.

A lot of people are uncomfortable when someone spends too much time looking at their body. I know I am.

It’s weird to know that people are looking at you in a way they wouldn’t have if you weighed 50 or 100 pounds more. There can be a sexual aspect to it that may make you feel uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, you can’t make people stop looking at you. What I recommend is to be confident in yourself and your new look and remember that the longer you are at your healthy weight, the less people will notice that you look different from how you used to.

You may feel like you were not appreciative of your old body.

There can be a feeling of betrayal to your old self if you enjoy people complimenting you on how good you look now. You may feel as though you failed by not being happy with yourself at your old weight. Although I understand these feelings, the important thing to remember is that you have done a good thing for your health by shedding unwanted pounds. Because you lost weight doesn’t mean you didn’t appreciate yourself before.

You feel vulnerable because your shield is gone.

Some studies have shown that there is a modest relationship between abuse and being overweight in people who have suffered from various types of emotional trauma and abuse. For some, being overweight is a shield. Your heaviness is insulating and comforting in a way that people who are not overweight don’t understand.

When you are heavy, people tend not to look at you as a sexual being as frequently, you may feel more invisible in groups, and your body weight can feel like a shield against hurt.

That’s how I felt. I did feel somewhat insulated. As I lost weight, I felt more vulnerable. It was an uncomfortable feeling, especially when people exclaimed how great I now looked. It’s important to not let that uncomfortable feeling push you back toward food.

Thank them for their compliment and keep working hard on eating a healthy diet and exercising. Over time, the newness of your weight loss will wear off and you will be more comfortable in your slimmer figure.