How to Lose Weight Your Way?

How to Lose Weight and keep it off your way?

Many people spend their entire lives dieting for weight loss, and most of them either give up or ride the highs and lows of dieting for their entire lives. There is no reason to feel discouraged or to give as long as you understand that: DIETS DON'T WORK!!!

You do not need to diet to lose weight!

All you need to do is change you eating lifestyle. Make smart decisions about everything you put into your body. I often watch friends and family members eat the worst fast foods that you could possibly imagine, but then they take so much time and effort to put the best rims on their ride or the best quality gas in their cars. Why not use that same energy and care to put the best foods into your body?

As I said diets do not work for the simple fact that you might go on one of these prescribed diets like Jenny Craig, Atkins etc. and as soon as you reach your goal weight then you start thinking its ok to eat the way that you use to eat before this diet, or you might indulge in their favorite foods too often. This is what causes all the weight to come back and then some. But, why follow a diet someone else came up with? After all, everyone is different, therefore, one diet can't work for everyone. We all have different things we like and things we do not like.

What I am about to give you are tips that should help you to lose weight that you should incorporate into your lifestyle. This is not a diet, but tools you should use to develop you own little diet.

Instructions

Step 1

RESHAPE YOUR MINDSET:

First of all a lot of people think that in order to lose weight they need to restrict A LOT of their calories or starve themselves. This mindset is very dangerous and will either lead you into dangerous eating disorders or in a cycle where you starve or restrict to lose weight and because you body is so deprived of a lot of nutrition you end up bingeing uncontrollably, gaining back all the weight (and possibly more) that you have lost.

What you need to do is come up with a healthy caloric range that you will stick to per day and work on meeting that goal. Do not beat yourself up either if you go over this goal, remember it is just a target.

The stress we sometimes cause ourselves from going over our calorie limit is way worst that the few little calories we went over our goal by in the first place. So be kind to yourself!

Step 2

ELIMINATE TOXIC PEOPLE:

A lot of us don't think that the people around us can influence our behaviors. But, I am here to tell you that this is one of the reasons why people go off their plan. When you are dieting people around you will find all the negative things to say to throw you off course. Some of them might be a little concern and might mean well, but some of them might be plain jealous and want you to fail. So be very careful as to who you tell that you are trying to lose weight. Weight Loss is not just exercising and eating healthy. Its is way more than that and it involves a lot of emotions, so you want to keep the energy around you very positive, even if it means temporarily eliminating those people from your life until you have reached your goal.

Step 3

CALORIE RESTRICTION:

Eating healthy is very good. But, if you eat too many healthy calories, you will still gain weight. So it is important that you restrict your calories bearing in mind that women are not suppose to have less than 1200 calories a day, and men are not suppose to have less than 1500 a day (Of course there are other factors to consider like height and weight, BMI, BMR etc.), but that is the basics. If you are a woman and you currently eat 2000 calories a day, it would be safe to restrict your calories to 1500 per day.

Remember 3500 calories= 1 pound. So if you take away 500 calories from a 2000 calorie diet then you should lose 1 pounds per week by restricting alone; to lose 2 pounds you would most likely have to burn 3500 calories per week (i.e. burn 500 calories a day) along with cutting back the 500 calories to lose 2 pounds.

N.B. This is how I calculated my calories to lose 30 pounds.

Step 4

EXERCISE:

Exercise is a very important part of weight loss. I recommend burning 500-1000 calories per day. You do not have to stress yourself out about exercise as the most important thing in weight loss and exercising is consistency. If you are a beginner start slow.

It is also very important to incorporate little movements in your day to burn more calories, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, get a bicycle and ride to place close to home instead of driving, or just walk, stand at work instead of sitting and so on.

Find the things you love to do the most and try incorporating it into your exercise routine.

Step 5

DRINK LOTS OF WATER:

We all tend to eat sweet, salty and spicy food. But what we don't understand is that salty foods and not enough water forces our bodies to hole on to water weight. So drinking half your body weight in water will actually hydrate your cells, allow your body to lose all that water weight which can equal up to 5 pounds. So stop drinking Soda, sugary juice with meals or for snack and drink water. If you want apple juice, eat an apple or get a juicer and get your juice straight from the source instead of consuming all that SUGAR, artificial flavor, added color, preservatives and so on. MY MOTTO IS: EAT YOUR CALORIES DON'T DRINK THEM. Remember, water is zero calories so you can have as much as you want!

Step 6

KEEP AN EXERCISE AND FOOD JOURNAL:

It is very important that you keep track of all your inputs and outputs daily. This way you can see where you are going wrong and correct it, and if you are doing good you can at least be able to consciously know what you did right and keep up the good work.

There are many online food and exercise logs like: caloriecounter.com, fitday.com, sparkpeople etc. that you can use to help track your progress.

Step 7

HAVE A POSITIVE ATTITUDE:

Love yourself throughout this process as getting to your goal weight will not automatically make everything perfect. So love yourself!

Tips & Warnings

In creating your diet. Add foods that you love but also keep a watch on the calories and the portion.