Are you looking for weight loss tips that will help you lose weight fast or weight loss tips that will keep the weight off forever? There is one big difference. It’s tempting to opt for the former type of tip. Searching for shortcuts and quick results is just part of human nature. The problem is that if you lose weight quickly, you’ll be right back to square one when the weight comes back (and it will). Here are some weight loss tips that will help you do what it takes to achieve lasting weight loss and look forward to a healthy life.
Weight loss tip no. 1:
Keep a food and exercise diary for a week. Track calories consumed per day and calories burned per day. Don’t cheat! Drop everything. Being honest with yourself is a crucial step in weight loss. At the end of the week you will have a good idea of your average calories burned and burned per day. Then move on to the next of these weight loss tips and determine what you should be consuming per day.
Weight loss tip #2:
Learn the basic formula for losing weight. Calories ingested must be less than calories expended. We all have a certain amount of calories that will just maintain our current weight for our height, weight, gender, age and activity level. These calories are spent on our daily needs for our physical activities like breathing and digestion, as well as for our normal task activities, whatever they are. Calculate this amount of calories using a calorie calculator. If you want to lose weight, you need to do two things:
1. Lower those calorie intakes.
2. Increase the amount of calories burned.
Weight loss tip no. 3:
Over time, healthy, sustainable weight loss sets in. One to two pounds a week is the recommendation to achieve this. A pound of fat is approximately 3500 calories. So if your goal is to lose a pound a week, you need to be in a 500 calorie deficit per day. If you’re aiming for two pounds a week, that deficit should be 1000 calories a day. Once you’ve determined that your calories per day are 2000 calories per day to maintain your current weight, reduce your intake to 1750 per day and burn another 250 calories. This could be as simple as eating half a sandwich instead of a whole sandwich for lunch and going for a brisk two-mile walk. If your goal is to lose two pounds a week, don’t cut your calories too drastically.
Weight loss tip #4:
Read food labels. Nobody wants to spend the rest of their life counting the calories of everything they put in their mouth. It’s important to understand portion sizes and calorie counts at first, but after a while you’ll be able to gauge most of what you’re eating. You will probably be surprised at first too. It hardly seems fair that an ice cream scoop is half a cup! As painful as it is, you need to know this so that when you think you’re eating 350 calories of non-reduced fat ice cream, you understand that filling that cereal bowl with what you used to think was a serving is really more like 1000 kcal. A slice of bread is a serving of bread and is typically around 100 calories. I started eating open sandwiches when I found this out!
Weight loss tip #5:
Realize that what you are doing now is one of the most important things you could do for yourself! Healthy, lasting weight loss is a priceless reward for all your hard work. Patience is the key. Don’t pay attention to this colleague who lost ten pounds last week no matter what fad diet she tried! In five to six weeks, I guarantee you, she will have regained most of it and you will be reaping the rewards of your slow, steady weight loss. Not only that, you’ve built the tools and knowledge to keep the weight off forever!
Thanks to Darlene Nicholson