Archive for Self Improvement
Weight Loss Tips – Cut Down Snack Portions
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the hardest things to give up can be your regular snack. If you always have a couple of biscuits with your mid-morning coffee, or a bar of chocolate when you fill up the car, the psychological effort required to give this up can seem insurmountable. You could of course give up the coffee, or abandon the car and take the train. But it’s far better to find a way to wean yourself off the snack relatively painlessly.
And that’s the trick – if you can’t go cold turkey, don’t worry. Just take it in stages. Cut down to one biscuit instead of two, or go for a lower calorie chocolate bar (there are loads of websites that give the calorie content for chocolate bars rather than you having to pick all of them up and read the small print on the packet). If you find one biscuit feels wrong, break it in half so you still have two, they’re just smaller. Or buy a brand with fewer calories.
Once you feel OK with this reduced snack – and you’ve proved to yourself that you can do this – you can now reduce it again. Or swap it to something healthier. Maybe you could have a banana with your coffee, or one of those low calorie health bars at the petrol station instead of the chocolate.
Depending on what else you’re eating and what weight loss you’re aiming for, this may be sufficient. If not, you can eventually wean yourself off the lower calorie snack too. You could even swap to something you don’t much like so it’s less of a wrench to give it up.
Weight Loss Tips – Recognise 100 Calories
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’re going to think in portions of 100 calories for snacks, which is useful, it will help to have an idea of what constitutes 100 calories. Here are a few examples of snacks that come in at around that level:
- A piece of fruit
- Ten crisps
- Two oatcakes
- Half a snack-size Snickers bar
- One mini muffin
- Twenty almonds, peanuts or cashews
- Eight dried apricots
- Half a small avocado
- Two rice cakes with cottage cheese.
You can see from this not only how easy it would be to eat more than you realise if you don’t measure it out, but also how much more satisfied some snacks will make you feel than others. Half an avocado or ten crisps? I’ll take the avocado, thanks.
Find a Shortcut
Laziness is often your chief enemy when it comes to portions. You can’t be bothered to weigh out the rice because you can tell by looking when you’ve used the right amount. But actually, you only have to overestimate slightly every time you cook rice, for example, and you’ll notice the difference when you stand on the scales.
One group of researchers found that if they asked people to take enough pasta out of a packet to feed two people, they took more if the packet was bigger. Which just goes to show that judging it by eye isn’t reliable.
The way round this one is to weigh the right amount first time, and then to find a suitable container that will hold it. A plastic tub of some kind, or a cup, or a yoghurt pot, or whatever. Now mark with a permanent marker the level that your exact portion comes to. Every time you cook rice, you can measure it accurately without having to weigh it. Clever, huh? And no more excuses for cooking too much.
Weight Loss Tips – Divide Your Cheese
Posted by: | CommentsWhen you buy something such as a lump of cheese, cut it up into 25 g/1 oz pieces as soon as you unpack the shopping. That way you know how much you’re eating each time without having to guess, which is of course a thoroughly unreliable approach. If you use a calorie-counting method of losing weight (which makes sense), you can establish how many calories there are in each portion and then you know exactly what you’re eating.
This can work for other things as well as cheese, of course. The point is that once you’ve made the effort once, the job’s done. Otherwise, sooner or later, you’ll be too lazy to measure it out properly. Besides, it’s much easier to cut a 200 g lump into eight equal portions before you’ve started eating it.
Portion Out Snacks
As well as dividing up cheese, and other regular cooking ingredients, you can also sort your snacks into portions. It can be sensible to make sure you always have 100-calorie snacks, whatever the weight of the food. I know, I know, I said I wasn’t going to talk calories. But this way, once you’ve sorted out the portions you don’t have to think about them again.
If you buy yourself nuts, or crisps, or strawberries, or yoghurt-coated raisins, weigh them into 100-calorie portions and put them into separate pots or bags. That way you can just grab one when you feel peckish, safe in the knowledge that you know what you’re eating.
It’s easy to kid yourself that healthy foods aren’t fattening, and this process should help you avoid the trap of pretending there’s no calories in fruit or vegetables.
You can also do this at the start of the day with fresh snacks such as raw carrot or cucumber sticks. Do it straight after breakfast if you have time – if you’re feeling full you’ll be less tempted to cheat.
The Basics of Weight Loss – Don’t Get Hungry
Posted by: | CommentsAlthough many of the barriers to losing weight are in your head and not on your plate, it certainly doesn’t help if your body is sending messages telling you that you must eat as much as possible right now.
If you feel hungry when you sit down to eat, you’re likely to eat as much as you can as fast as you can -within the bounds of modesty and decency, of course. What happens is that by the time your brain has noticed you’re full, you’re way ahead and have eaten another helping and a pudding, neither of which you really needed.
Far better to make sure you don’t get that hungry, and to eat slowly enough that your brain gets the message you’re full as soon as you’ve eaten enough, instead of being several courses behind your stomach.
If you never feel too hungry – and never think you’re hungrier than you are – you won’t eat so much.
Eat Ahead
It’s much easier to eat in moderation at mealtimes if you’re not so ravenous that you cram everything you can down your throat. So it makes sense to take the edge off your hunger before you sit down to eat. That way, you’ll find it easier to put less food on your plate, not to mention pinching all the crispiest roast potatoes before anyone else gets a chance.
There’s no point trying to reduce the hunger by eating an entire small meal ahead of the main one. That would just be counter-productive. One of the best ways to dampen your hunger is to drink a glass of water about 20 minutes before you eat. It’s good for you and dulls your appetite. If that doesn’t do it for you, eat an apple.
Or is that just me?
Sleep and Weight Loss
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’re not getting enough sleep, it makes it much harder to lose weight. Those busy researcher chaps have been at it again, and have found that if you get less than five hours of sleep a night you’re over 30 per cent more likely to gain weight than someone who gets at least seven hours of sleep. If you’re getting six hours a night I can’t help you, researchers being what they are. They didn’t oblige with that particular figure.
The researchers can only speculate about the reasons behind the facts, but their guess seems right – the more tired you are, the more likely you are to eat sugary snacks to keep yourself awake. I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly find it hard to lose weight on a regular five hours a night. I’d be eating all day to keep myself awake.
So, if you regularly suffer from sleep problems, see if you can sort that out alongside your slimming efforts, because it will give you a far better chance of losing the weight.
Switch Off
Watching too much TV makes it hard to lose weight. Honestly. It’s not the TV per se, it’s a combination of the fact that heavy TV-watchers take less exercise and the fact that your hands are free to do that mindless eating thing.
Over 60 per cent of people who successfully lose weight watch less than ten hours of TV a week. That’s under an hour and a half a day. To be honest, there’s really not that much on – surely no one needs to watch more TV than that? Look through the listings at the beginning of the week and pick the things you really want to watch, and turn off the rest of the time, or leave the room. Almost anything else you do will burn more calories, even just cutting your toenails.
Weight Loss Tips – Take Food to Work
Posted by: | CommentsIf you go out to work, you have to eat during the day. And if you’re surrounded by fast food outlets, sandwich bars and cafeterias, it’s pretty hard to find something really healthy and low calorie to eat. And it can be even harder to make yourself order it when it’s surrounded by other temptations.
So take your own food into work. Not only can you control exactly what you eat, but also you won’t have to look at all the other tasty things on offer. It’s easy enough to rustle up a salad or some raw vegetables with dips, or some cottage cheese with fruit.
And don’t start moaning that you don’t have time. Look, it’s your choice. If you don’t want to lose the weight, I don’t care. But if you do, you’ll find the time. You can buy in ready-prepared salad, or make enough meals for the week and keep them in the fridge or freezer. Or grab a couple of bananas, a tub of low fat yoghurt and a healthy cereal bar. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Carry Emergency
Suppose you get hungry when you’re at work or out and about – what do you do? Ignore it manfully, or relent and buy something you didn’t mean to eat? Personally I fall into the second camp far too often.
Suppose you already had a handy snack with you though? You could eat that instead of going and buying a muffin or a bar of chocolate. Now there’s a thought.
This is another of those ideas that I’m including because it works brilliantly for some people. However, I’m aware it doesn’t work for everyone. If that snack is burning a hole in your pocket, you may end up eating it when you didn’t need it and still being hungry later. If this is you, skip to the next tip (the next one can’t possibly backfire on you).
However, if you think you could run with this, give it a try. You may find it saves you from all sorts of worse eventualities.
Drinking Water and Weight Loss
Posted by: | CommentsI’m talking about water here, before you ask. They say you should drink around two litres a day, which is roughly eight glasses. You might personally find that your own optimum level is a bit lower or higher than this, but certainly if you drink very little you should find that drinking plenty of water really helps you lose weight.
It seems that water helps to boost your metabolic rate, so you burn more calories. It also helps you to flush out retained water, which will generally reduce your weight by a few pounds. And if you are losing weight, your kidneys will need the extra water to help them flush out all the waste products from converting stored fat into energy.
On top of that, drinking water fills you up so you feel less need to eat. If you’re feeling peckish shortly before a meal don’t have an extra snack, just have a glass of water. And if you’re drinking water, you’re less likely to drink calorific drinks instead.
Avoid Diet Drinks
This seems contradictory. Surely if they’re diet drinks they’ll help you lose weight, won’t they? Strangely enough, no. It’s quite true that they contain fewer calories than their sugar-filled counterparts, but it’s not that simple.
The problem is artificial sweeteners, which these drinks contain in significant quantities. When you consume these sweeteners your body tastes the sweetness and gets ready for a substantial influx of calories. When these don’t materialise your body starts asking for them by feeling hungry, so you’re encouraged to eat more.
In fact, researchers have discovered that people who drink just one diet drink a day are 30 per cent more likely to become obese than people who don’t.
Of course, this doesn’t apply only to diet drinks. They’re the biggest culprit because they’re so sweet, but ideally it’s best to avoid artificial sweeteners in other products too.
Weight Loss Tips – Distract Yourself
Posted by: | CommentsWhat do you do when you hear food calling you from the fridge or the cupboard? Do you walk zombie-like, with glazed eyes, to the source of the sound? Well, what else can you do?
Anything. You can do anything you like. Just find some way to distract yourself. Make it your automatic reaction when you start thinking about food. Don’t sit there trying not to think about it. Do something else. Go for a walk, do some work, challenge the kids to a game of football, phone a friend, clean the bathroom, wash the car, get the laundry done. In fact anything involving water is generally a good idea. It’s almost impossible to eat while you’re having a shower.
Snack As You Cook
I know it’s best not to pick at food while you’re cooking. You do it almost without thinking, and unless you’re making salad or something similar it can scupper your intentions of losing weight. But let’s be realistic here. Sometimes you have to cook and know you won’t be able to resist. So rather than kid yourself you’ll be restrained and then finding that you give in, the best solution is to have a snack to hand for picking at. Have some apple slices, or a raw carrot, or whatever you need to distract you from the food you’re preparing and divert you towards something lower in calories.
Weight Loss Tips – Hands off the Kids’ Leftovers
Posted by: | CommentsIf you have kids, you’ll doubtless be well aware of the temptations of leftovers. Sometimes they look so revolting you wouldn’t touch them if you were starving, but sometimes they can seem quite appetising. That untouched fishfinger, those cheese sandwiches, the end of that packet of crisps…
Stop! Have you ever added up how much extra food you can consume in a week this way? And when was the last time you stinted on your own food to compensate? ‘I won’t have much, thank you. I had half a sausage, three crisps, a soggy digestive biscuit and some grated cheese earlier.’
So what’s the answer? How are you going to resist temptation? I’ll tell you. You’re going to remove it. As soon as the children finish eating, squirt washing-up liquid all over the plate before you have a chance to snaffle anything off it. Or if you prefer, scrape it off into the compost, or the dog’s bowl (assuming you won’t stoop low enough to eat from these). Better still, train the children to dispose of the leftovers when they leave the table.
Find Something to Do With Your Hands
This may not apply to you, in which case feel free to move on. But lots of us – especially those of us who used to smoke – find that eating gives us something to do with our hands. You’re sitting around in the evening, your hands aren’t occupied, so you fill them with food to keep them busy. If you’re an ex-smoker like me, this is an especially good solution as it even involves raising your hands to your mouth intermittently.
When I say it’s an especially good solution, what I actually mean is that it’s an especially bad solution. It solves the wanting a fag problem, but it creates another bigger problem.
The answer, of course, is to find some other way to occupy your hands. Take up crocheting or sudoku or check your emails or buy a set of worry beads. Anything that keeps your fingers busy so they don’t need to drag you off to the kitchen to find them something to do.
Weight Loss Tips – Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Fist
Posted by: | CommentsAnd before you ask, yes, that’s your own fist. No good finding a huge hulking bloke and borrowing his. Then again, look on the bright side, you don’t have to use a two year old’s fist either.
Look, this whole thing is about moderation, and your fist is as good a gauge of moderation as any. A portion of fruit or vegetables is reckoned to be a helping the size of your fist, so this isn’t unreasonable.
If we’re honest, eating a portion of lettuce or watercress bigger than your fist won’t do you much harm weight-wise. Especially when you allow for all the air in between the leaves. And if you’ve left your salad undressed. This rule really comes into its own for things like mashed potato, cake, chips, red meat, steamed sponge pudding,… oh, you know perfectly well when you need to apply it.