Tips and Tricks to Staying Slim
As a realist, I know and understand that not everyone is meant to be that perfect size 6. I also know that not everyone has hours of time per week to work out, let alone get to a gym. So what does the average, eat on the go, stressed out to the max, time crunched person do to stay fit? Well, the following tips and tricks may not make us all fitness magazine cover models, but they will help us to be just that much slimmer.
Of course the most important thing to remember when you make the decision to change your diet and/or add exercise to your routine is to talk to your doctor. Every person’s body is unique and yours may need special considerations.
The first thing that you need to learn, the plain and simple truth, is this�.are you ready�you must burn more calories than you consume in order to lose weight. If you take in more calories than you burn you will gain weight or, at the very least, continue to maintain the same weight. This is true regardless of the type of diet plan that you are on. Shake diets, grapefruit diets, green food diets, all of them take calories in to consideration when meal planning. The creators of these diet fads understand this rule and have only repackaged it to make it look like a new idea. The truth is that if a diet does not drop your calorie intake below the number of calories you are burning, than it simply will not work. These fad diets aside, the healthiest way to burn more calories than you consume is to exercise regularly and regulate your caloric intake to a healthy level.
So, how do you know how many calories you should be consuming daily in order to stay healthy and still lose weight? The best way to find out your ideal calorie in take is to consult a doctor or nutritionist. If you are unable to do that, then there are plenty of sites on the internet that will do a general calculation for you. You fill out a form with your height, weight, age, and gender then the site will calculate the amount of calories the average person that size needs to consume in order to stay healthy. A very good site to visit is the Discovery Health website (http://health.discovery.com). However, I strongly recommend consulting a professional who can tailor this number specifically to you and your needs.
Next, we need to look at how to fit calorie counting in to your fast paced lifestyle. What I try to do is to look at my calorie in-take on a weekly level. I have found that this helps me to stay more on track with my diet. I don’t beat myself up over that slice of chocolate cake that I just had to have yesterday. I can just eat light today and maybe a little light tomorrow to make up for it. If you try to keep your weekly calories low instead of your daily calories it is much easier to stay on top of your diet and you are less likely to give up. Most people abandon their diets because of one or two days worth of slip ups. By working with a weekly calorie in-take diet, things are much more flexible and easier to maintain.
This brings us to our first calorie cutting tip. Try replacing your normal latte with heavy cream or sugar packed soda with its respective diet replacement or better still water! You would be shocked how many calories you can cut from your diet by replacing high calorie drinks with low or no calorie drinks. One 12fl oz can of cola has 155 calories as apposed to a diet cola which has none, that’s right 0. To put this in to perspective, you can burn some where around 150 calories by taking a leisurely half hour walk. That means that if you take a 30 minute stroll around the neighborhood you still have not burned off that one can of soda. It hardly seems worth it when you look at it that way, right?
Now, I know what you are thinking, if you are not a water drinker, but there are a wide variety of flavored water drinks on the market now. They are a great alternative to sodas and sports drinks. Give them a try and I think that you may be surprised by the flavor. You will also feel good knowing that you burned 5 or 6 calories by lifting and swallowing that water with no calorie intake from it. See, you are already ahead of the game.
There are also many things you can do to cut the amount of calories that you take in from meals as well. I have found that the easiest place for me to cut calories is from my lunch at work. It is, as it is for most adults, the only meal a day that I have complete control over. This does take some discipline if, like me, you work in an office that orders out a lot. If this is the case try to order salads or other light foods, if that is not an option try controlling your portions.
When you can’t cut calories by changing what you eat then you cut calories by changing how much you eat. Most of us eat what we like and therefore we will eat until we are completely full. Instead, try just eating until you are satisfied and no longer hungry. Portion control is another great way to cut calories from your diet at home, where it is harder to control what you eat. When you have a husband or wife and maybe even kids involved in your meal planning it becomes less about your diet and more about a quick meal that everyone likes. Not everyone has the luxury of cooking a separate meal for themselves; working adults today just simply do not have that kind of time on their hands.
Cutting your calories will make you lose weight, it will not however make you fit. In order to get fit we need physical activity. You need to build and tone your muscles. The more lean muscle mass that you have the more calories you will burn at rest. Meaning the higher your metabolism rate will be.
Taking walks is probably the easiest and most under rated forms of exercise. If you can leave your house and walk away from it for 15 minutes then walk the 15 minutes back, you have just exercised for a half an hour. If you are 150lbs. and you do this at a brisk pace you will burn around 200 calories. If you can do this 3 times a week you have just burned 600 calories for the week. As time wears on your should increase your speed, all the way up to a jog. You can roughly judge your progress by how far you make it from the house in your 15 minute time limit.
There are hosts of ways to boost the amount of calories that you burn during your daily routine. You can burn a lot of calories a day just by keeping yourself moving at work. Instead of emailing a co-worker walk over to their desk. When you are at your desk, keep your legs moving. When you go grocery shopping, don’t skip any isles, walk them all. Bag your own, and make the bags fairly heavy if you can. Instead on sitting on the couch and watching your favorite TV show, try laying on the floor and doing some sit ups or doing a couple of squats. I used to work out during every commercial break.
There is an almost endless amount of ways to add physical activity to your everyday life. You however, are the main ingredient in your quest to getting fit. Though you do not have to spend hundreds of dollars or hours of time at the gym you do have to make wise choices when it comes to your food, and you do have to take the time to exercise. Just remember that small changes can make a big difference.
