Help Lose Fat

Of all the bad things about the credit crunch, there has to be some good - and one of them is that it can help you lose weight.

How so?

Well, if you need to reduce your spending you can do so in all the following ways and help yourself drop some pounds too

1. Stop buying junk food - you don't need any of that stuff and what you don't buy you can't eat
2. Stop buying soft drinks and drink more water
3. Reduce your alcohol intake
4. Eat less meat and bulk out your meals with veggies 
5. Eat smaller portions all round
6. Stop over-buying food (and throwing it away at the end of the week). Plan healthy meals and snacks and only buy what is on your list.
7. Stop over-cooking food or cook double and make sure that half the food is put away before you serve the meal so that you can't be tempted to overeat on the first night.
8. Eat healthy home-cooked meals instead of eating out. Give up fast food and take-aways
9. Meet friends for a walk, a swim or a game of tennis etc instead of for a meal (or just go out for coffee)
10. Walk all short journeys instead of taking your car

If you have more tips to add, please leave a comment

The difference between those who want to lose weight and those who actually lose weight is one thing and one thing only.

Actually taking action!

It's alright imagining yourself slimmer, plotting what you'll wear (or eat?) once you're slim but unless you actually get your finger out and change what you eat NOW and/or increase your activity levels you are not going to achieve your goal.

• You can buy a diet book and not lose weight. You have to follow that plan.
• You can take a diet pill and not lose weight. You inevitably have to follow the diet plan they give you and don't mention.
• You can join a gym and not lose weight. You actually have to go and do the exercises  - regularly not just once or twice.

I quite often hear from clients "I have tried everything to lose weight" and it will be true. They have TRIED everything (or so it seems) but what is also always true is that they have never stuck with anything.

Losing weight is not going to happen on a wish no matter how much you want it. It happens when you take action day after day after day.

You might have the odd "off day" even the odd "off week" but you have to get right back on board and get on with your weight loss program straight away.

And the great thing is - it's entirely under your own control whether you lose weight or not. You just have to decide whether you want to lose weight (a wish) or whether you are actually going to stick to a plan and lose it.

I've often noticed that my weight loss clients and friends who are overweight spend an awful lot of time thinking about food - planning what to eat, salivating over what they think they should not eat, giving themselves a hard time about what they ate and think they shouldn't have, talking about what they ate

And in contrast my friends who are slim just get on with their lives - they may plan what's for dinner but they don't often think about food until they are hungry (or until someone puts a chocolate cake before them - well, they are human too!) and when they've eaten they don't think about it again (unless it was a spectacularly delicious meal!)

In some cases, the slim friends have busier lives than the more overweight ones - but it's not always true.

So what is going on here?

It seems to me that the slim friends have a "set it and forget it" approach to food. They may have a vague idea what they'll have for lunch or dinner or a firm plan in place and when they get hungry - they eat!

The others eat more because thoughts about food comes into their head all day. It's a bad habit they have got into. When they think about food, they feel hungry even though they are not physically in need of food - and more often than not they give into temptation because they don't stop thinking about food until they do.

I have found three ways to deal with this obsession:-

The first involves getting 100% occupied and interested in what you are doing so that you get in a flow state where you don't even think about food. This is the ideal but it's difficult for most people to achieve when they have got into the habit of thinking about food too much. And to be fair, most of our lives are not filled with activities that are so very interesting!

The second involves not giving into food thoughts unless we are truly physically hungry (tummy rumbles required) and giving ourselves a task to do before we even consider  whether we are hungry again. It means not eating now "in case we can't get time to eat later". It means not fearing being a little hungry - it won't do you any harm to wait.

With the third solution, you eat whenever you like but you change what you eat. Give yourself permission to nibble all day if need be but keep very low calorie foods (such as raw vegetable sticks) on hand and all higher calorie foods under lock and key until meal times.

If you need to lose weight, try to use a combination of all three tactics so that you get out of the habit of

a) thinking about food all day
b) giving into food thoughts when are not hungry
c) eating lower calorie foods when you do give in!

When you're trying to lose weight, there's nothing like the joy of seeing the figure on the bathroom scales go down.

And of course, there's also nothing like the disappointment of being "good" all week, eating healthy food and exercising like mad and seeng the scales not budge at all or (worse) go in the wrong direction. 

The problem is that the figure on the scales is subject to a lot of variation and much of that is nothing to do with whether you have been following your weight loss program or not.

Food type (chiefly the presence or absence of salt), weather and hormones all have an effect on how much water you retain and can affect your weight adversely even if you've lost fat. On the other hand you may be falsely celebrating (and so be in for a disappointment next weigh-in) just because your stomach is empty and you're wearing lighter clothes than last time you weighed yourself.

To get over this, if (and only if) you can be dispassionate about the scales and see them as a tool rather than the be all and end all of weight loss, I suggest weighing yourself every day at the same time wearing nothing at all (e.g. just before your morning shower) and plotting your weight on a graph.

Daily your weight will go up and down but on average you should be seeing a downwards path. You can happily look at your average going down from week to week and use that as motivation.

However if you are someone who reacts badly to the figure on the scales either by getting depressed if it goes up or celebrating too much (or rewarding yourself with extra food) if it goes down, then give up weighing yourself more than once a month. Use your clothes to be the judge of whether you are losing weight or not.

You really can’t control what the scales say on a day to day basis BUT you can control what they say from month to month and above all you can control your behaviour no matter what the scales say. Weighing yourself won't change your weight. But sticking with your weight loss program will…

Ok, I'm joking. But seriously you've got to stop the boom and bust with exercise and just fit more movement and activity into your everyday life.

Because you know what happens when you decide to go on one of your exercise bouts - you go crazy with it and get sore or injured and you just don't feel like doing ANYTHING for a week. Or you put off starting exercise until you're not so busy/tired because it all seems like too much effort. Or even worse, you exercise and then you reward yourself for all that effort by eating or drinking many more calories than you used up.

To lose weight you'll need to either eat less or move more or both. There's no magic diet pill, patch or gimmick no matter what the ads try to tell you. If you move your body more, you'll be able to eat slightly more than you otherwise would and still lose weight.

But we're not talking plates of pasta here - we're talking about an extra apple or yogurt, maybe an occasional cookie.

You walk for 10 minutes, you use about 50 - 60 calories. That's all! And you need to use up 3500 calories to lose a pound of fat. So don't go thinking you can have  a bar of chocolate after a walk around the block and still see a result at the end of the week!

If you love exercise and don't feel the need to reward yourself afterwards - go for it! We all need to get exercise for our health. But if you hate it and can't get through a jogging or gym session without the idea that you deserve a treat (and an edible one at that) - go for gentler exercise, a 10 minute walk here, an extra stair climb there, and add some activities which you find fun rather than a trial - tennis or badminton, swimming, skating or golf, dancing or karate. Let the activity itself be the reward.