So now you have decided exactly where you want to end up. You have your goal in site. Now what you say. Well now we have to work out how to achieve it.
The best way to achieve any major lifestyle change is slowly. To suddenly halve our intake of calories can be detrimental to our bodies and probably not that efficient when our bodies get the shock of their lives and decide to start gearing up for a famine by storing more fat. This is probably the easiest way to fail. Too much too soon.
So we need to start thinking about what little baby steps we can make before we can run.
Here are some of the ideas I have had to help get me started:
1. Replace soft drink and fruit juice with water
Big deal you say. That's easy you say. I knew that one all already, tell me something new. Well this one is probably harder than it sounds. Our bodies become addicted to the sugar in these drinks. This is actually a harder one than you might think. Its probably the very first step you should take and you should probably do this one for at least a week before any other step.
Why is what you will be asking about now. And I say this speaking from experience. The withdrawal from the sugar is not easy. You will crave it and you will be prepared to fight tooth and nail for it. But you have to be strong. Like any drug it takes a while for it to get out of your system. It took me at least a week for the worst of the cravings to go away. I'm now six months into this part of my weight loss. And now, soft drink is tastes disgustingly sweet and I do not crave it. I sometimes slip up but it only takes a couple of mouthfuls before I find myself feeling sick from its excessive amounts of sugar.
And if we think about how much sugar is in a soft drink or fruit juice this can help. I found one soft drink I was consuming regularly that had 60 grams of sugar in each drink. Most of the others had about 40 to 45 grams of sugar. That is an huge amount of sugar in one hit. And a huge amount of calories. So as a first step in cutting calories this is a really good starting point.
To help me with my cravings I started reading the labels of the drinks to see how much sugar was in them. And I was disgusted to find it next to impossible to get a soft drink or fruit juice (other than diet ones which are whole other story) with less than about 40 grams of sugar. 65 grams of sugar is about 240 calories. And that is how much a 600 mL bottle of soft drink will set up back. Check out this great link that has some very visual demonstrations of the amount of sugar in soft drink. http://www.sugarstacks.com/beverages.htm
So if you are consuming 240 calories in one bottle of drink and you consume two a day, if we are talking about a 1200 calorie diet you have used up nearly half your daily calories in two drinks. Water is free of calories and can help you feel better. So generally a very good place to start with weight loss is simply to drink water.
However you should invest in a stainless steel drink bottle. You will avoid contamination from plastics and help out the environment as virgin plastic has to be used to make the disposable bottles used in water you buy from a store. Virgin plastic is plastic made from raw materials. By using a drink bottle and refilling it (its rare to find taps that aren't safe to drink from but you should still check when filling your bottle) you are taking plastic out of the environment and not lining the corporate pockets of companies wanting to sell you something you can generally get from a number of places for free.
2. Eat smaller portions and stop the boredom eating
This might sound obvious but how many of us stop and think about how much food we each eat at one sitting? If your like me you go until your full and then some.
Eating less is another easy and effective way to lose weight. And it's not a major change in diet either. So if you go to a fast food restaurant order a small meal instead of a large. That's a great first step. Or when you have your dinner at night, cook your usual amount then put half on your dinner plate and the other half away for lunch the next day. You just saved yourself a couple dollars with that idea. I often cook up too much for my husband and I and freeze the left overs for his lunch. His work mates get jealous when he gets roast dinners for lunch and they don't.
This is another challenging thing to do but once you get through the first couple of weeks you will be ok. Your body gets used to consuming a set number of calories so reducing them can be a bit difficult. You will be hungry for the first week or two. And it will be all consuming hunger. This is because your body is adjusting.
Cutting the boredom eating is another good way to reduce calories. We all know about boredom food. That packet of chips we munch on while watching a movie or the packet of chocolate biscuits while sitting at the computer. The food we don't really need but the food we eat because its habit or because its there and tasty and who doesn't like to sit down and eat a bar of chocolate as something to do? I'm guilty of this one.
But giving up my boredom eating has helped me a lot. I try to stick to meal times and smaller meal sizes for when I eat. The in-between stuff is usually not because I'm hungry but because I need something to do with my hands. Most health professionals advocate a little and often type of system which means your not as likely to over eat but I personally go with a eat when your hungry system and then make the choices healthy ones. Also if I must snack I try to restrict myself to fruit and veges so at least I'm making it healthy.
A single chocolate biscuit can contain roughly 70-100 calories depending on the biscuit. For me it would take me about half an hour of walking briskly to burn off one chocolate biscuit. Just one biscuit. You can enter your own details into this website Calories Burned Calculator and find out for yourself how many minutes you would need to walk briskly to burn off one chocolate biscuit then ask yourself "is it worth it?"
My next post will continue on this theme of small changes to start stepping in the right direction.
Calorie information source
http://www.nutracheck.co.uk/calories/calories_in_biscuits/calories_in_biscuits.html
http://www.mydr.com.au/tools/calories-burned-calculator
Image sources
http://www.sheeshalounge.com.au/images/screenshot/soft_drinks.jpg
http://healthylifejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/glass-of-water1.jpg
http://www.thenutritionpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/fruits2.jpg
http://photos2.demandstudios.com/DM-Resize/photos.demandstudios.com/162/246/fotolia_5790079_XS.jpg?h=10000&w=400&keep_ratio=1
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