Healthy Weight Loss Tips

My son brought a cookie home – not just any old cookie. It was a peanut butter cookie with a Hershey’s kiss in the center. It winked at me from its cozy spot on the counter and whispered, “You should taste me. You know how much you love me.”

Several times I was tempted to reach for it. I reasoned, “If I share it with my boys, it won’t be that bad.”

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Tom Landry, former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, said there are three things that make a successful team:

1. Set your goal
2. Develop your game plan
3. Identify your enemies

These same three things work in any area of our lives. Whether we’re going back to school to get a degree or going on a diet to lose 30 pounds, we have to take the right steps.

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You think you’re eating right, but you’re really not.

If the scale isn’t moving down, you’re lying to yourself. You may have convinced yourself that your diet is good and you “just don’t understand why you aren’t losing weight.”

I’ve been there. I used to say all the time, “I eat the same things that my friends do and they’re all skinny. I just don’t understand it!” I would cry over my weight. I would complain how unfair it was.

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Many times clients express their wishes to lose weight, but they don’t really want to change their diets. They may say they want to “ease” into it. Maybe they are willing to make a small change like giving up their daily candy bar. But they want to stay pretty comfortable with their food and not feel “deprived.”

Sure, small changes can be good. For some people, this is all they can handle. And at least it’s better than nothing.

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Having a strong core can help ward off back problems and improve your strength overall. Start slowly until you become stronger. Add time and reps as you can.

Lie on your stomach on a mat. Place your elbows directly beneath your shoulders and turn your toes under. Press up with your elbows and your toes so your body hovers a few inches off the floor. Contract your lower abs to hold your body in a straight line, like a board, and make sure your butt is not sticking up or dropping down.

Hold: Hold the hover for 10-60 seconds. Remember to keep good form with abs pulled in and back straight.

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With working evenings, I often have to eat my dinner at 9:00 at night. I don’t want to eat anything heavy, and I certainly don’t want to put much work into it!

I’ve found a really easy and tasty way to make a late night dinner. And I’ve found that eating fish and veggies at night doesn’t affect my weight.

Here’s what I do:

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Someone said, “Exercise is my Prozac.” (That’s an antidepressant in case you didn’t know.)

I totally agree. I’ve often said that I exercise more for my state of mind than for my fitness. Of course I want to be fit, but exercise totally affects my noggin. When I have a good exercise session I feel good, have a more positive attitude, and am in better control of my food.

Exercise is also my stress relief. It mellows my emotions. If I didn’t exercise, I’d be pretty high strung.

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One of my friends told me she has started working on eating better. She wants to lose weight now that her husband has, and he talks all the time about how great he feels.

She made some comments about trying to cut back her portions, but was unsatisfied with her weight loss results. I offered to give her a food plan that would show her what foods to eat and when.

She said, “I would want a little more freedom with my diet.”

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I had a conversation with someone at the gym about the health club business and personal training. He made an interesting comment: “I’m surprised more people don’t use trainers.”

“Well, it costs money,” I responded.

“Yeah, but so do doctors and medicine,” he said.

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I ran into a past client and walked around the track with him so we could catch up. He told me that after an injury, he couldn’t exercise for awhile and fell off the wagon. He put some weight on, and was feeling pretty miserable about his eating habits and his lack of exercise.

I told him to not be discouraged. “In my career, I have seen people cycle with their weight and exercise. They do well, then they slide down the slippery slope. Then they come back again.”

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If you’re like me, there are certain foods that need to be cut from your diet – or greatly restricted. They may not even be “bad” foods. However, they are foods that sabotage your diet.

For example, nuts and peanut butter are foods that are on my watch list. I love, love, love nuts and peanut butter. I cannot have a whole container of almonds or peanuts in the cupboard. I will pick away all day long – a few here, a few there. Before I know it, I’ve eaten 300 calories worth.

Because nuts, especially almonds and walnuts, are healthy, i do not want to eliminate them from my diet. What I do as soon as I get home from the grocery store is to measure them out into snack baggies. Then I put all the snack baggies into one big bag in the cupboard. Having them proportioned keeps me in control.

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I often hear complaints, such as, “I’m doing so good. I’m not cheating, but my weight is stuck. I don’t know what is wrong!”

Sometimes people truly hit a plateau in their weight loss while the body makes adjustments and resets. This usually ends after two or three weeks.

However, the culprit of stagnant weight loss is more often a little relaxing of the diet.

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If your schedule requires you to eat out often, it can be devastating to your weight loss efforts. Even when you think you’re ordering healthy, you’re getting more calories, fat, and sodium than you would cooking at home.

Do the best you can to stay on track with your diet with these 10 eating-out tips: [More]

None of us likes to look in the mirror and see our fat rolls. We don’t like to feel them either when we zip up our jeans.

Fat, however, is much deeper than skin deep. It is not only about outward discomfort. Too much fat puts us at greater risk for pre-diabetes, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, gall bladder and liver disease, sleep apnea, stroke, heart attack, and joint problems.

So how do you know if your weight is too much? How do you know if your weight is putting you in the disease danger zone?

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A man at church shared about how God is working in his life as he comes clean from drugs and alcohol. He said, “It took a long time for me to get where I was and it will take time to change, but God is working on me.”

I thought, “Hmm, that sure is a good thought.”

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Genetics play a powerful role in body weight. How you’re made up can make it really easy to stay slim, or make it very difficult to stay at a healthy weight.

One reason is metabolism. This is basically the rate at which you burn calories. Someone with a high metabolism can eat a lot of calories and burn them off quickly. Someone with a slow metabolism will burn calories very slowly and will not need as many each day. Unfortunately, you inherit your metabolism.

Another reason is your fat cells. If you are over overweight (by about 25 pounds or more) your body manufactures fat cells to hold the extra fat. When you lose weight, the fat cells empty out, but they never go away. They are constantly “wanting” to fill back up.

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Eat a balanced diet.

Your body needs all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates, and proteins that come from the different food groups. When your body gets a good balance of these foods, it can work efficiently.

This helps with weight loss because it keeps your blood sugar and metabolism stable. Eating balanced also helps you feel satisfied and fuller longer. (And you don’t want to feel hungry when you’re dieting!)

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Get rid of all junk.

Now we come to a touchy subject. Many people feel resistant, or even resentful, about giving up all their junk food. They want to hold onto a few “little” things.

It’s not that one pretzel or three chips will sabotage your weight loss. It’s that one pretzels turns into five, and three chips turn into half a bag.

Junk food is engineered to make you want more. Flavor enhancers, sodium, and sugar are used to cause cravings and make the food addictive. It’s almost impossible to stop once you get started.

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Watch portions and calories.

Weight loss still comes down to calories in versus calories out. Over the course of the day, you need to burn more calories than you eat.

How do you do that? By paying attention to your portions and calories.

The best way to do this is by keeping a food journal. Most people grossly underestimate the amount of food and calories they eat in a day. By journaling, you can keep accurate account of your food intake.

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Eat frequently.

Our bodies are like machines. They work all day, around the clock. We don’t always realize it while we’re sitting at our desks or driving in our cars.

There are thousands of processes going on. Our bodies are repairing and rebuilding muscle, building bone, pumping blood, digesting food, etc.

To do all this well and efficiently, our bodies need fuel. Just like we wouldn’t expect our car to work without gas, we shouldn’t expect our body to run without fuel.

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Eat breakfast.

Did you ever hear the saying, “Eat like an elephant in the morning and a mouse at night”? For weight loss, there’s a lot of truth to this.

Many people eat exactly the opposite. They skip breakfast and maybe even lunch. They grab a snack a few times during the day along with their coffee and soda. Then at night when they get home or go out to dinner, they eat a large meal. This is often followed by late night snacking too.

Because they didn’t eat properly during the day, their body is now “demanding” the calories it needs. Having all those calories late in the day, however, is disastrous. Now they’re loaded down with calories and they go to bed.

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