Great Weight Loss Tips To Jump Start Your Weight Loss Efforts

Weight Loss Tips

If you've been given a green prescription from your doctor to lose weight before your high blood pressure gets out of control or some other chronic health condition prevails, you've come to the right page for effective tips to lose weight that can make a world of difference to your weight loss efforts.

These first four tips for weight loss come from the book, "I Can Make You Thin" by Psychologist, Paul McKenna:

Weight Loss Tips 1

Eat only when physically hungry.

Listen to your body's cues about hunger and learn to tell the difference between peckish, slightly hungry, hungry, very hungry, ravenous, and faint with hunger. Aim to eat when you are some where in the middle of that range. Also learn to tell the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger.

Here are a couple of clues that can help.

First - emotional hunger comes on as a sudden craving and is usually not satisfied by food.

Physical hunger comes on gradually.

Second - the brain's signal to the body for thirst and hunger are identical.

To tell what your body is saying to you, have a bottle of water always handy and drink before eating. If you still feel hungry eat, if not your brain was simply telling you "Man you're parched!"

Weight Loss Tips 2

When you are physically hungry, eat what you want:

Whether it's a crisp cool salad, a crunchy fresh sweet juicy apple, hot soup and a chunk of crusty fresh bread with lashings of butter, creamy mashed potatoes, a bowl of delicious Rojan Gosh, Chili Con Carne, or Chicken Chow Mien, a meat pie or black forest gataux, if that's what you'd like and you have it on hand go for it.

Don't worry that you will endlessly indulge your cravings at the expense of a healthy balanced diet, if you eat only when truly physically hungry and eat what your body calls for your diet will even out.

Your body will tell after the third day in a row of Death by Chocolate Cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner that it has had enough of that and would like something else thank you.

Weight Loss Tips 3

Enjoy every morsel

Pay close attention to every bite, slow down, chew well (digestion begins in the mouth) and eat with healthy relish.

Weight Loss Tips 4

Stop when you have had enough

Forget the drill - "clean up your plate!" If you are full save the left overs for later, if eating out ask for a doggy bag. Differentiate between: a) still hungry, b) satisfied, c) full, d) stuffed. Aim for some where between b and c.

Weight Loss Tips from Our Elders

The centenarians of Okinawa have traditionally incorporated calorie restriction into their eating rituals. Instead of eating until they are full like most of us tend to do, they stop eating when they are no longer hungry.

This subtle distinction is a powerful way to maintain a healthy weight, and they credit this habit, which they call "hara bashi bu" meaning "eating until you are 80% full" with being one of the most important factors that contributes to their healthy longevity.

Once you begin eating more mindfully, you will begin to notice how you feel after you have eaten. For example you might find that meals heavy on white rice, white flour products and sugar give you an initial lift, followed by a sudden drop in energy that has you reaching for that next hit of caffeine.

Here's what happens, if we often eat foods that release their sugars into the blood stream quickly such as white flour products, sugar, white rice and do so to excess, glucose, the end product of digestion and the body's preferred fuel source, floods our blood stream rapidly. Our blood sugar (the amount of sugar in our blood) spikes.

To deal with this onslaught, we produce a lot of the hormone insulin. Insulin removes glucose from our blood and delivers it to the cells. Our blood sugar then drops dramatically.

When blood sugar spikes the excess sugar is put into storage as fat, when it drops we feel wobbly and lethargic. The net result is an ever increasing waistline and exhaustion.

Weight Loss Tips 5

Eat foods that keep your blood sugar even.

Foods that keep our blood sugar stable help us feel alert and energetic and make a big difference to weight loss. Foods that release their sugars slowly into the blood stream, and are eaten frequently, in small amounts at a time keep our blood sugar levels even.

Complex carbohydrate foods contain slow releasing sugars, and have the least adverse influence on blood sugar levels.

The ones that are the most beneficial to maintain leanness include non starchy vegetables, most fruit (exceptions would be bananas, raisins and mangoes), oats, barley, whole meal pasta, whole rye bread, whole wheat bread, beans. These carbohydrates contain water and fibre as well, which are also important for staying lean.

Other foods to be included in a weight loss program are:

• Lean protein like soy, other beans, nuts and seeds low fat dairy products, and moderate amounts of lean meat poultry and eggs.
• Enjoy fats like avocado, and cold pressed oils, for example, flax seed oil, extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds, fish liver oils and fatty fish.
• How you balance carbohydrate, fat, and protein in each meal makes a big difference to how your blood sugar rises and how you are able to burn fat. The aim as we've said earlier is to keep blood sugar and insulin production on an even keel.
• In general, aim to have an equal portion of carbohydrates and protein at each meal. Include non starchy vegetables and fruit in two of these meals.
• Eat 5-6 small meals of whole foods a day instead of three large meals.
• Divide your plate so one third is made up starch, the other of protein, and two thirds of vegetables.



• Keep portion sizes reasonable e.g an egg would count as one portion. Your Palm or fist size for carbohydrates and protein and your thumb size for fats.
• A sample meal might consist of: salmon, brown rice, broccoli, and raw vegetable salad with and olive oil and lemon juice dressing.
• A snack could include an apple and a dozen almonds or equal amount of sunflower seeds.

The Next Two Weight Loss Tips Involve Exercise

Weight Loss Tips 6

Exercise to rev up your metabolism

By helping our bodies to utilize the energy we gain from food more efficiently exercise enables us to stay lean. Twenty to forty five minutes a day 3-5 days a week fits the bill for most weight loss needs.

The two principle types of exercise that help us stay lean are cardiovascular exercise and resistance exercise.

Weight Loss Tips 7

Train with weights prior to doing cardiovascular exercise.

If you are exercising for weight loss, do your weight training or resistance work prior to your cardio vascular work.

The weight training will utilize most of your glycogen stores,(a compact store of glucose molecules found mainly in the liver and in muscle) and so that by the time you start on your aerobic or cardiovascular training most of the calories you burn in your workout will come form your fat stores.

For more information on incorporating aerobic and resistance exercise into your life, go to our exercise pages.

By utilizing these fat loss tips you'll go from having a body that is a fat storing machine to having a body that is a fat burning machine.

Bon Appetite and happy exercising!