It doesn’t matter if summer is fast approaching or it’s getting towards the end of the year, if you are like many other people, you are starting to think about losing weight. And losing weight fast. There are some things you can do to drop a few pounds in a short amount of time and do it safely.
None of those crazy soup or celery or lemon juice diets. Those do work, but what a cost you have to pay for releasing a couple of pounds. And the worst part is that when you go back to regular eating after lemon juice for 10 days, the weight seems to miraculously reappear all by itself.
But if you want to do some small modifications in how you eat; changes that you can live with and keep going with after your initial weight loss, then listen up because here a few good tips for you.
Pay Attention
There’s a reason why many famous dieting programs have you keep a food journal of everything you eat. When you pay attention and write down every single thing you eat, whether it’s a snack or a breakfast bar or even a stalk of celery, you tend to eat less.
Could be because the thought of having to keep track of each bite makes people want to eat less because it’s a pain to write it all down. But more likely it’s because your brain begins to think to itself “Am I really hungry enough to eat this and then write in my food diary?” Many times, the answer to that is “No” and you wind up eating a lot less food.
This keeping a journal idea works in a lot of self-improvement areas, not just dieting, but when it comes to food, it really helps you pay attention to what you are doing. And being mindful about how you are treating your body and your health is a very good step in the direction of feeling better and losing weight.
Another great tip has to do with the idea that less is more.
Cut it down.
One of the largest amounts of caloric intake comes from the consumption of fats. Of course, this is not the case 100 percent of the time for 100 percent of the people. But if you live in a place that has a diet similar to the Standard American Diet, which is very high in animal fats and saturated and hydrogenated fats, you are eating a lot of calories from fats.
The fats themselves contain a high amount of calories per unit measurement. Basically if you took a teaspoon of a carbohydrate and a teaspoon, the fat would have more than twice as many calories in it.
Fats contribute to the taste and the mouth feel of food and this is a big reason why they are so popular. Problem is along with twice as many calories, they don’t metabolize as cleanly as many carbohydrates and you are left with the results hanging around your waist.
If you like butter on your toast in the morning, put only half the amount on that you usually do. Use only half the amount of oil when you are cooking on the stove. Try something like one of those cooking sprays. Your food will still cook nicely and will slide out of the pan, but the amount of oil you will have added is almost non-existent.
Bake your potatoes instead of frying them. Boil your eggs instead of scrambling them with a tablespoon of butter. Do just a couple things like this and you will amazingly find that you are ingesting nowhere near the amount of calories that you did before.
The truth is, it doesn’t take a lot of doing to change some dietary habits. And when you make those changes in your lifestyle you will be well on your way to losing some weight quickly in a safe, easy to sustain way.
