Literally everyone has weight issues and the older you are the harder it is to keep the weight off or lose it if you have gained it. Food is an addiction and unlike drugs and alcohol we can not give it up completely, eating properly is a constant struggle. If you have some willpower dieting is actually easy, keeping the weight off is not since it requires constant vigilance.
You MUST see a doctor if you intend to lose more than 10 pounds
You should see a doctor before you start any dieting in order to check for medical conditions that will affect your diet and then see you doctor again every two or three months as they suggest.
You CAN NOT lose more than a pound a week without hurting yourself, so don’t try to
We all have friends who say they have lost five ponds in a week, they are lying to themselves. During the first week of a diet these people do not drink enough water and they drop water weight, which will come immediately back, not real weight.
Your body normally consumes about 2100 calories a day. A moderate, doable diet is about 1500 calories a day. That means at the end of the week you have saved 4200 calories or since a pond of fat is about 3500 calories, you lose just over a pound a week. If you exercise you consume more calories and lose more weight.
Yes you have heard of people on 900 calorie a day diets, but any diet below 1200 calories a day MUST be doctor controlled (you get to see him/her and do blood tests every week) because you can do very bad permanent things to your body.
Sugar and starch are your enemies
Carbohydrates (sugar and starches like bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, corn) are where the body gets most of it’s calories and for the most part they are useless except for that. By eliminating carbohydrates from our diet it becomes easy to lose or maintain weight.
On a diet some fruit is ok but fruit juices and dried fruit (including raisins) are not because they have a lot of sugar,
We generally do not eat much fat except in conjunction with carbohydrates (butter on bread, fried potatoes or chips, mac and cheese) which makes both of them worse. Your body needs a small amount of fat so a tablespoon or two of light salad dressing is ok. For milk products you should use low fat or no fat versions (low fat or non fat yogurt or sorbet instead of ice cream, lite or skim milk cheese, skim or 1% milk in coffee).
Any nut is terrible for you. Nuts are all fat and thus all fat and thus all calories.
You MUST eat four ounces of protein a day.
Four ounces of protein is about six ounces of fish, chicken or steak before cooking. Your body needs that amount every day and if you do not get that amount by eating it, your body will cannibalize muscle and nerve tissue to make up the difference. It breaks my heart how many women have destroyed their breasts (where did you think your body would look for easily consumed protein?) and have had to have implants because they tried starvation diets. It will also make your “booty” sag if you do not get enough protein.
You MUST have a salad or green leafy vegetables (spinach, lettuce, kale) every day.
Unless you eat green leafy vegetables you WILL get constipated badly on a diet and it will HURT and may cause you permanent internal damage (trust me, I know, I have violated this rule). You need fiber and wheat fiber has too many calories so stick with green vegetables.
You MUST use more salt when on a diet
Eating more salt would seem counter intuitive since salt causes you to retain water but two things counteract that, you are drinking more liquids which will pull salt out of the body and much of the salt in your diet comes from baked goods like bread.
The reason for this rule is that on a diet your blood sugar levels are lower and if your blood pressure drops due to too little salt you will end up fainting. I have seen this happen twice, fortunately both times there were people there to help and everything was ok. I worry about it happening while someone is driving or if the person falls and hurts themselves.
You MUST drink 4 eight ounce glasses of liquid a day, you should drink 6
Your body needs water to function and when we diet we forget to drink it.
I hate water but now they have flavoring drops from Dasani and Crystal Light which makes it bearable. You can drink diet soda for two or three of them but remember soda is bad for the teeth and most contains caffeine so you will end up buzzed if you drink too much.
You MUST take vitamin pills, you need twice as many as normal.
If you were eating normally a standard “one a day multi vitamin with minerals” would be enough, whatever the pill lacks is made up by the food you eat. Since you are dieting by definition you are not eating normally and “one a day” pills won’t do it for you. Take two, one in the morning and one in the evening.
Alcohol kills diets
Alcohol hurts you in three different ways. First it lowers your inhibitions and impairs your judgment so you end up eating too much or the wrong things or both. Second alcohol has nearly twice as many calories per gram as sugar. And last and most important alcohol is a poison (remember it is used to sterilize wounds), the body has to neutralize it by converting it to sugar before it does anything else, therefore not only do you end up with more sugar in the bloodstream being converted to fat but the body has a longer time to process the meal which also releases more calories that get converted to fat.
Do not eat before bedtime
The body repairs itself while you sleep (one of the reasons good sleep is important). That process can not start until digestion ceases. If you eat late you finish digestion very late in your sleep cycle, your body never gets a chance to repair itself and you age much quicker.
If you slip and eat too much, being good the next day helps.
Unlike a drug or alcohol addiction you can not swear off of food. Sometimes you will slip and eat too much or drink too much alcohol. What is important is not that you have slipped but rather to get back to your diet. If you go back to being good the next day and reduce your morning calories by half your body will take some of that excess calories from the day before and burn them as opposed to turning them into fat.
Dieting as a diabetic is hard but you can do it
As a diabetic your body does not consume sugar properly or promptly. Instead it pushes the sugar out of the bloodstream and into the liquid water between cells (intra-cellular glucose). This has two bad effects, it increases the amount of water you retain and if you get infected it can be very bad because the bacteria thrive on the sugar. When you diet it takes a very long time to burn off this excess sugar before you will actually lose real weight, so hang in there, positive results will come but it may take months. As a diabetic you MUST see a doctor before you try dieting and have regular checkups to monitor your insulin levels.
Diet plans
We have seen many diets and diet plans come and go but have personally only found two we can recommend based on personal experience.
Many people need support and encouragement when they are dieting, that support makes it easier to resist temptation (since you would be failing the group) and get back on track when you slip. For this type of diet support joining a meeting at Weight Watchers (www.weightwatchers.com) is a good choice.
Other people like very structured diets where they know exactly what is allowed and what is not. If you are one of those people and have 90 dollars a week for prepackaged snacks (remembering that that is your total food bill except for dinners), then Medifast (www.medifast1.com) may appeal to you. On their plan you have five of their snacks or shakes a day and then a reasonable dinner of steak, chicken, or fish and some greens as a salad, spinach, green beans, etc. I recommend the Oatmeal Raisin bar and the Cinnamon pretzels. The Strawberry, Lemon and S’mores bars are also good as are the Honey Mustard pretzels. If you like shakes the chocolate, vanilla and orange are great.
Do not weigh yourself more than once a week
During any week because of water retention you weight can go up or down if you measure it every day. This is enough to drive you crazy. If you are not part of a group (which should ave a group weigh-in once a week), pick a day and a time when you will weigh yourself once a week (preferable in the morning after you have used the bathroom). Always wear the same weight of clothes (if you just got up it could be what you sleep in). This allows you to do a consistent comparison and truly judge your progress.
Maintaining your weight
The hardest thing to do is keeping the weight off once you have lost it. The problem with most diets is they have you in unnatural eating patterns that you can not maintain after you end the diet so you go back to the old ways having learned nothing.
Lunch is the hardest meal since sandwiches are part of our lives. Choose sandwiches with reasonable amounts of bread, sliced bread instead of a roll, English muffin instead of a bagel. Stay away from mayonnaise and tuna, egg or chicken salad.
Think about what you have learned here. Small meals during the day to keep you from getting hungry. A very healthy dinner with 6 oz. of meat, fish or chicken and green vegetables and a salad. Never having carbohydrates (bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, sugar, cookies, cake pie, candy, nuts) since they add only calories and not nutrition. Having non-fat or low fat yogurt or sorbet instead of ice cream. Simple rules that will keep the weight off.
*we hope you take away some great information from this article, but keep in mind that we are relationship experts, not doctors. As with all the advice we offer, take what you believe will be most useful to you but in matters of health, we urge you to check with your own health care professional.
Submitted by Tony for LeatherandLaceAdvice.com
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