One-Size Fits All Diets Do not Work

by | Jun 10, 2007 | Weight Loss Tips

Learn to incorporate healthier eating habits into your daily life, rather than trying to eat according to someone else’s plan. Even if you can stay on a strict diet, what’s the sense when you finally quit the diet and just gain the weight right back?

There is no One-Size Fits All Diet. Why do they serve a 5 foot, 120 pound woman the same plate of food as a 6 foot, 215 pound man? Why do they suggest the same 1200 calorie diet for an active woman and a sedentary one? It makes no sense — better to create a diet plan that works for you based on what you usually do (activity wise), your age, size, and other health factors.

The Day You Quit the Diet Turns into the Day You Decide to Gain Weight

Usually it’s the day you choose to eat something “off plan” that tosses your plan straight out the window. This is exactly why restrictive diet plans don’t work for the long-term. If you don’t learn how to eat what you love responsibly, or you try to avoid the foods you love entirely, you’ll obviously not be able to stick with it for very long.

Far better to learn how to eat within your usual lifestyle and create new habits that you then can live with, so even though it’s summer and there are weekend picnics and lots of those “special occasions” to indulge. It’s okay if you overeat today because you just get back to your new usual habits tomorrow. That’s how you can lose the weight and maintain your loss from now on. Eat a reasonable diet the majority of the time and indulge once in awhile instead of the other way around.

If you want a treat, have a treat, and no, it’s not a treat if you eat it every day; That’s a habit. Work on your habits, one at a time until you turn them back into the treat they once were.

Check out Wahines: One Size Fits All from the post pic above. I absolutely love these and want them. I’d like a pair in chocolate too!

Lose 5 Pounds – TV Turn Off Week

by | Apr 27, 2007 | Weight Loss Tips

Researchers agree that family dining (meaning families dining together) creates healthier family members. But lookout, a recent study showed the benefits of eating together as a family were negated if dinner was served in front of the television.

In other words, turn off the tube. April 23-29, 2007 in the U.S. is TV-Turnoff Week. I doubt advertisers are too excited about it, but you might be when you realize you can lose up to five pounds by trying this. If you can’t go cold-turkey then just try turning it off for dinner.

Weight loss is also accelerated by less TV watching simply because you’ll do less mindless eating. Think of how often you’ve eaten an entire dinner yet missed the experience because your attention was on the TV set? It’s no wonder we go back for seconds and thirds, and start eating snacks shortly after. We’re missing the joy of eating!

Visit the Center for Screen-Time Awareness for TV Turnoff Week.

Weight Loss Tip: Small Changes Equal Big Results

by | Oct 28, 2006 | Weight Loss Tips

Slow Change Works

There are 365 days in a year. If you achieved your goals on 200 of them this year wouldn’t that be an improvement over last year?As you improve, your weight will come off. That’s the secret to lasting weight loss. People who’ve achieved their best weight and maintain it learned to stay on their plan more often than not. Eventually you won’t think of it as a plan at all but just how you prefer to be, and that’s true weight loss success.

Eat What You Want to Lose Weight

by | Oct 27, 2006 | Weight Loss Tips

If you have a particular food craving, you should have that food. Not three other things to make the feeling go away, but that exact food. If you cannot have that exact food, then catalog it for later, and have something similar, such as if you want something crunchy and salty, find something else that’s similar in taste and texture.

If you expect to only want what is “good for you” you’re setting yourself up to fail. You’ll obviously want other things. Just today I wanted nuts, badly. So I ate nuts, plenty of nuts. Handfuls of nuts. Far more than I’d normally eat if I were in my natural state but this was a craving, and sometimes a craving needs to be satisfied.

I visited the nut jar several times during the day. So how do I feel now? Great. Satisfied. Excellent. I ate the nuts, I’m happy, not damaged, not ruined.

Survived Another Holiday

by | Mar 28, 2005 | Weight Loss Tips

I may be slow but I just realized that holiday candy is nothing more than regular candy in new clothes. Yes, Virginia, that colorful looking wrapping hides nothing special underneath.

I found myself putting an Easter goody in my cart and as I pushed toward the checkout I read the back, chocolate, coconut, “Hey, I thought. This sounds just like a Mounds Bar,” so sure enough I wandered to that aisle. (This is why it takes me hours to do the grocery shopping). I checked and yes indeed, the ingredients were the same. Here I was ready to shell out premium dollars because they’d taken a regular candy bar and put it in a nice shiny wrapper all dressed up for Sunday school!

I put it back. I look at candy bars all the time but I rarely buy them. Usually all it takes is a glance at the nutritional panel, and when I see the 12 grams of fat I think, “I’d rather have cheesecake,” and put it back.

So, next holiday make sure you aren’t just paying extra for the pretty packaging. If you don’t usually buy candy bars, why are you buying them now in their Halloween or Christmas colors? What is it about the red-white-and-blue packages that we are drawn to (frankly, those are not colors that are generally associated with food anyway). What about the pastel M&M’s? That’s just dumb to me becaues it’s the bright colors that makes me want M&Ms in the first place. Take that away and what have you got? For the record, I could have a million white M&Ms and I doubt I’d ever touch them.

So, next time you’re wandering the holiday aisles, just keep in mind, you are paying more money for the same thing. Wait for it to be really special. Shop speciality stores. This marketing ploy is just not funny anymore.

How to Explode Your Self Confidence

by | Dec 15, 2004 | Weight Loss Tips

If you want to explode your self confidence bestow yourself with super powers. You can then tap your magic wand upon the shoulder of anyone you meet and grant them wishes, powers, and riches beyond their wildest belief. The trick is, other people don’t know you have this magical ability and they never will, so it is how they treat you that determines whether they are rewarded.

So, now that you have this magnificent power, you can look at people with pity that are so short-sighted they don’t look beyond your exterior shell. It’s what’s inside that determines true beauty. Yes, it’s nice to have an exterior other find pleasing, but we’ll all grow old and frankly, I want to be a beautiful old lady too. Wrinkled, and bent, but beautiful with sparkling eyes and a mischevious smile.