Losing weight doesn’t have to be boring when you focus on bright, colourful meals. What does this mean? Simply by making sure your plate reflects a range of colours, you’ll naturally create more balanced and healthful menus. Not everyone has the rime or the patience to count calories, but assessing the colours on your plate is something anyone can do – and it only takes an instant! Why Colour Is Important Many fatty and caloric foods, such as dairy products and startchy carbs, are beige or brown. When there are too many of these drab colours on your plate, weight gain is almost certain. That’s because these beige foods often are high in calories and can leave you feeling hungry later. A cup of beige or brown beans can be over 200 calories….but a cup of red or green vegetables is under a hundred! Add fresh greens, deep purple-reds and bright yellow-orange to a meal, and water the nutrient content go up, while calories go down! Plus, you’ll get more enjoyment from eating when there’s a variety of colours and flavours on your plate. Although these ideas may sound whimsical, they’re grounded in scientific fact. Dr David Heber, renowned nutritional expert from UCLA’s Centre for Human Nutrition established the role of colour in his book, “What Color is Your Diet?” So, next time you visit the refrigerator, think colourfully. And remember to mix, not match!
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One of the most daunting things about starting a slimming programme is planning what you’re going to eat. It doesn’t have to be as hard as it seems though. Most meals are simple to make, especially if they are using healthy, fresh ingredients. Forget boiling your vegetables to death and eat them raw, or lightly steam them if you want them to be hot. Don’t peel fruit that doesn’t need peeling, it saves time, and allows you to get the full benefit of the fibre content. There are lots of ways to plan your meals that will help you to achieve your slimming goals. 1) Eat fish Fish is good for you, particularly oily fish like salmon and mackerel. The other bonus is that fish is quick to cook. You can buy it ready-prepared from the supermarket or the fishmongers and most fish will grill in just a few minutes. It’s also easy to bake in foil, and you can even add some vegetables such as leeks, peppers or tomatoes into the foil so that it all cooks at the same time. Even poaching fish in a little seasoned water doesn’t take long. Plan to eat fish at least twice a week and you have an easy, healthy meal that requires little preparation and little cooking time. 2) Get used to salads Provided you have the ingredients, you can make a wide range of salads in a short amount of time. Green salads made with romaine lettuce, cucumber, celery and avocado are healthy and can be prepared in 10 minutes. Carrots, dried fruit and lemon juice with sesame or sunflower seeds makes a quick and easy salad to serve with chicken or fish. 3) Steam, don’t boil Boiling vegetables like broccoli and cabbage reduces the effectiveness of their nutrients and makes them less appetising. Steam broccoli and other vegetables for just a couple of minutes for vibrant, crunchy vegetables and sautй cabbage in some lemon juice. Although you have to change your eating habits when you are slimming, you don’t have to plan your meals a week in advance to make sure you’re eating properly. As long as you’re buying the right foods, cooking them well and not over-eating, you should find your weight loss plan is easy and fun.
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When you’re trying to lose weight, there are bookshelves, websites and TV shows full of people trying to sell you a dream. They say that you can lose weight quickly and easily, without any hard work, because of their new discovery. If a few people try it and it works for them, the press report it, and before anyone’s had time to investigate the health implications or the long-term effects, we’ve got a fad diet on our hands. Fad diets, basically, are diets that attempt to help you lose weight by making drastic changes to what you eat or some other element of your lifestyle, often telling you to only eat one thing or to avoid certain kinds of food completely. Now, I’m not saying that they can’t help you lose weight, as many of them can – people on Atkins-like diets, for example, really do lose weight very quickly. But what people don’t think about is the long-term. So you’ve lost all those pounds on a fad diet, great. What next? You have a choice: either go back to your normal diet, or keep eating in a completely crazy way. If you don’t want to keep on eating lettuce (or whatever) for the rest of your life, then you’re stuck, and you’ll just have to go back to your bad old ways – and a few months down the line, all those pounds have come back, and you go on the next fad diet. This is known as yo-yo dieting, and is even unhealthier than just being fat, as it increases your risk of heart disease and all sorts of other conditions besides. In the end, if you want to lose weight, you should work out a diet that works for you – it doesn’t have to completely traditional; as long as it’s something you can stick to for the rest of your life.
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There are few subjects in the world that have had more written about them than how to lose weight. Sad, but true. People are simply obsessed with their weight, and are willing to try any ridiculous fad if it promises to help them shed those pounds and lose those unsightly inches. At the moment, the fashion is for restricted-carbohydrate diets, like Atkins, the South Beach Diet and the GI Diet. These diets make foods like pasta and rice out to be the root of all evil, instead encouraging you to eat high-fat, high-protein foods like meat and dairy products. While this approach does result in weight loss for many people, its long-term health effects are, at best, unknown, with most nutritionists agreeing that such a diet would most probably be harmful if it was kept to for a long time. In the end, the reason that people go so far to find ways of losing weight is that the one method that works is so difficult. You simply have to eat less food, and find time to exercise. Unfortunately for us, our bodies are ‘addicted’ to food, and will do everything they can to manipulate us into eating more, not less – it’s like trying to give up smoking, only there’s no such thing as a food patch. More traditional weight-loss plans like diet clubs and slimming milkshakes can be effective at beating these urges, but only if you stick to them strictly. One of the best non-fad ways to lose weight is to take up a sport as a hobby. Whether it’s running, football, tennis or whatever doesn’t matter, as long as it gets you physically active regularly. Active people can eat huge amounts and still not get fat, as they are using all the energy every day – and it only takes a surprisingly small amount of extra exercise to tip you from putting on a tiny amount of weight each day to losing a tiny amount of weight each day. Remember, the little things all add up over time.
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Recently I hit my goal weight and moved to the Weight Watchers Maintenance Program. I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I continue to do my best to follow the program, and wondering how it is I was able to lose nearly 33 pounds in 8 months. So, I decided to write my Top 10 Strategies. I’ll list them Dave Letterman style. Top 10 Weight Watchers Weight Loss Strategies That Worked for Me 10. I make sure to have lots of 1 and 2 point treats in the house. I work at home and I’ve learned that I like to snack and nibble during the day so it’s important to have low point treats available so I don’t feel guilty. 9. I let other people know (my friends, family and colleagues) what I’m working on so they can support me and give me kudos when I succeed. 8. I share my success and challenges on a blog (http://www.slim-people.com). This has been a great outlet for me to focus myself on what I need to keep doing, reading and thinking about in order to stay on track. 7. I use the Weight Watchers online etools. I’m a nut for details so the online program is great for me. I work at home and sit in front of a computer all day. It’s no problem for me to add my food immediately to the online points tracker. I also enter my weight every Saturday after my weekly Weight Watchers meeting. I get an immediate visual representation of how I’m going as I view the graph. 6. I attend the weekly Weight Watchers meetings without fail. I think in 8 months I’ve only missed two due to being out of town on business and unable to get to a meeting. Though, when I know I’m going to be out of town, I will usually at the very least go the day before and weigh in. 5. I weigh and measure my food. I learned quickly that what my eye thinks is 2 ounces usually is a lot more. I’m not consistent about this but more often than not I do weigh or measure what I’m eating and drinking. 4. I track my points. I write down what I eat. I hear Flora in my head saying, “You bite it, you write it.” I’ve learned that when I slack off from writing everything down, I either don’t lose or I gain weight that week. Again, my eyes are not a good judge of quantity. 3. I work out 4 times per week. Before Weight Watchers I took Pilates classes 3 times per week. Though I was getting stronger, I was not losing weight. In fact I was gaining weight due to hormones, a sedentary job and eating too much. I switched to 2 days of Pilates and 2 days of cardio workout. I started the cardio workout the same day I joined Weight Watchers and I know it has make a big difference. Last week I even started walking to my Pilates studio since it’s only a 10 minute walk. Up until now I’ve been driving, if you can believe that. 2. I have a buddy. My dear friend and I joined Weight Watchers together, as well as joined the gym together. We go to the meetings together. We work out 2 times per week together. We talk about food and how we’re doing all the time. We evangelize about Weight Watchers. Without my buddy I don’t think I would have stayed with the program. No, I know I would not have stayed with the program. 1. And number 1. I made the decision to join Weight Watchers. I had heard a lot of success stories about Weight Watchers and after putting on 30 pounds over the course of 3 years, I decided it was time to take action. I had been telling myself it was age and hormones that contributed to the weight gain and that may be partly true, but I had to take action and do something so I could feel good about myself, my body and my health. That’s it. There are probably more things that could be added to this list. Now my challenge goal is to maintain for 6 weeks and get to Lifetime Member. Oh, I just remembered one more thing I did. I read an article, I think on Weight Watchers Online, about rewarding yourself when you do well. So I set up a savings account and deposited $10 every time I lost a pound. I call it the “Pamper Me” account. Now, I will add $10 every week I maintain my weight. Then, eventually, I’ll do something wonderful to pamper myself! Good luck and best wishes to you in your journey to weight loss!
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On the Zylorin website you will find the absurd statement “Fact, Zylorin has achieved elite status as the most effective weight loss product on the market today!” I guess there is a sucker born every minute. Don’t believe for a second that Zylorin is the “most effective weightless product on the market today”. While visiting their site, I had a chance to take the Zylorin “survey”. It was a total joke. You check little boxes which go nowhere, just give you the comfort of making the check? They should add a couple more, “Do you fall for total hype easily,” “Do you feel bad now that you’ve confirmed by our survey you are FAT?” Have you noticed the fad of placing some health and beauty magazines at the top of diet pill companies’ websites? Is every diet pill ever made in a magazine or are companies lying? Well, we already know Zylorin has achieved “most effective weight loss product”, it must certainly be in People magazine. Wrong. But seriously people, right when a diet pill makes a claim like “We’re the best”, you really need to put your thinking caps on and ask, “Ok, prove it.” The listed ingredients are little more than a stew of trendy ingredients to make you say, “Ooh, I’ve heard of that one, and that one, and that one. This must be great.” Don’t let “before and after photos” become your evidence of efficacy for a diet pill, I’ve seen the same before and after photos on different products it makes me sick. If you really want something good, it needs a double blind study conducted by the FDA proving results. BUT since that will never happen unless you’re a billion dollar drug company who both pays for such a study and bribes the FDA to publish biased results, you’ll need to rely on a little education. First, if a product-like Zylorin-claims to be the greatest ever created, you don’t buy it because you know they’re lying. Why would the greatest diet pill ever created even offer a money back guarantee? They advertise both so much, and yet they don’t realize it’s like saying “Come to heaven, here in hell.