Is Real Change Possible? This Year Make a Weight Lose Resolution You Can Keep

Most of us have dieted to lose weight, only to gain it back again within a few weeks or months. It isn’t that diets don’t work. It’s that they don’t last. Most diets are so unpleasant, inconvenient, boring, complex, or expensive that they are difficult to stick with for very long. When you quit the diet, the weight returns.

Think of excess fat as a collection of calorie-adding habits. Lose the habits and you will lose the fat. Each time you give up one of these habits (all other things being equal), you will lose fat until your body naturally settles at a lower weight. The key to making these habits stick and successfully keeping the weight off is to create your own weight loss plan—one custom made to fit your particular needs, abilities, and preferences. When designed correctly, this custom plan is your easiest path to a naturally thin lifestyle and body. While each person’s optimal plan is unique, every plan for permanent weight loss should have the following elements:

Personal Preferences
There is no single formula for natural, permanent weight loss. You don’t need to make yourself miserable. Eating yogurt can help you lose weight, but if you really don’t like yogurt, don’t include it in your plan. There are plenty of other things you can do to lose weight naturally.

Changes You Can Live With
Include in your plan only those things you are willing to make lifelong habits. Giving up desserts for a month to lose weight may accomplish that goal, but the lost weight will return just as soon as you start eating desserts again. A better approach might be to limit yourself to one dessert a day, with more allowed on a few special days, and to make it a lifelong habit. You’ll lose less weight, but the weight you lose won’t be coming back. Permanent weight loss requires permanent changes in habits.

Easy Ways to Control Emotional Eating
We often eat for emotional comfort, not because we are hungry. This is called emotional eating. The best way to prevent emotional eating is to learn how to regulate your emotions in other ways. These may include getting more social interaction or using techniques such as meditation or mindfulness to calm your emotions.

Quick Ways to Calm Cravings
Cravings for junk food can crush even the strongest resolve and wreck your attempts to lose weight. The key is not to have more willpower, but to know how to make the cravings weaker so the willpower you already have does the job. For example, taking a brisk, short walk has been shown in scientific studies to reduce chocolate cravings.

Smarter Exercise
Trying to lose weight by doing exercises you hate is a recipe for failure. Find ways to get exercise that you enjoy. Even better, exercise with someone else. You’ll stick with it longer. Do exercises that build muscle, not just burn calories directly. The new muscle will boost your metabolism so you burn more calories even while you’re sleeping.

Removing the Temptations at Home
It’s usually easier to remove temptations than to resist them. Get rid of the junk food in your house. Try to avoid places that tempt you to overeat. Stock your refrigerator with weight loss foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables, yogurt, nuts, and whole grains.

Making the Easiest Changes in Habits First
Your weight loss plan might include forming new habits such as meditating daily, eating more whole grains for breakfast, eating sweets only once a day, and exercising five days a week. Don’t try to develop all of your weight loss habits at once. Start with the ones that are easiest. After you have reaped the weight loss rewards of the easier habits you will have extra motivation to tackle habits that require more effort.

Not Expecting Quick or Immediate Results
It’s better to lose twenty pounds over the course of a year than to lose twenty pounds in a month then gain it all back. Changing habits takes time. You probably gained your extra weight slowly, one habit at a time. Let yourself lose it the same way.

After two or three weeks with each new habit, it will begin to feel natural, and you will be a naturally thinner person.

Find more help for making your New Year’s weight-loss resolution a success in The Diet Dropout’s Guide to Natural Weight Loss.

Now on iTunes!

Exercise Makes You Happy!

That’s according to scientists at Harvard University who conducted a study to find out what kinds of everyday thoughts and activities make people happy. Over two thousand iPhone users participated in the study. The researchers created an iPhone app to prompt the participants at random times as they went about their daily lives. Each time they were prompted by the app, the participants were to report on what they were doing, thinking, and feeling. Those who were exercising reported feeling happier than those who were working, shopping, eating, visiting, watching TV, reading, playing, relaxing, listening to music, or at their home computer. In fact, except for “making love,” exercising was the activity most strongly associated with happiness.

You can read more about the happiness study on Harvard’s web site, and see the complete report here.

Relevance to Natural Weight Loss:

Weight Loss Tip: If you don’t exercise regularly, maybe it’s time to give it a try. Find an exercise activity that you can enjoy. Exercise doesn’t have to be all push-ups and crunches. For even more enjoyment, exercise with a friend.

Count the Exercise Cost of Calories

A bottle of sugary (non-diet) soda contains about 250 calories. That’s a lot. Reminding yourself of this fact can give you the extra motivation to pass up the soda and go for a drink of water instead. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health think they have found an even better motivation: exercise cost.

To test their theory, they created a sign with the words “Did you know that working off a bottle of soda or fruit juice takes about 50 minutes of running” and posted it in a corner store frequented by thirsty adolescents. The presence of the sign reduced the odds that an adolescent would purchase a sugar-sweetened drink by about 50%. This worked even better than their sign that said “Did you know that a bottle of soda or fruit juice has about 250 calories?” If it works for thirsty teenagers, maybe it’s worth a try!

You can read more about the exercise cost of calories study on the school’s web site.

Relevance to Natural Weight Loss:

Weight Loss Tip: When you are tempted by junk food, think about how much exercise it would take to work off the extra calories. If it seems worth the cost, commit to doing the exercise before taking the first bite.

Walking Helps Prevent Chocolate Abuse

Walking can help you lose weight, and it’s not just because of the exercise. In a study by scientists at the U. of Exeter, chocolate lovers who were asked to take a brisk 15-minute treadmill walk before beginning work snacked on only half as much chocolate as study participants who were allowed to skip the walk and rest instead.
In an earlier study by the same group, a 15-minute walk was found to significantly reduce chocolate cravings.

You can read more about the walk to eat less chocolate and kill the chocolate cravings studies on the ScienceDaily web site.

Relevance to Natural Weight Loss:

Weight Loss Tip: Get up and take a brisk 15 minute walk before your usual chocolate craving time. If walking isn’t convenient, try a different exercise. And remember, just trying not to think about chocolate doesn’t work.

More Breaks, Less Weight

In a study of nearly 5,000 US adults, researchers found that those who took more breaks from sitting tended to have smaller waists. The link between more breaks and a smaller waist was significant even after taking into account total time sitting and daily exercise habits. Several recent studies have shown that sitting is generally bad for your health. This study gives hope that a few more breaks during the day may help to counteract some the negative consequences of all of that desk time. Dr Genevieve Healy, the University of Queensland researcher who led the study, said: “Our research showed that even small changes, which could be as little as standing up for one minute, might help to lower this health risk.”

You can read more about sitting study on The European Society of Cardiology’s web site.

Relevance to Natural Weight Loss:

Weight Loss Tip: Make a goal of standing up to stretch or walk around once or twice an hour. You might also try standing up whenever you take a phone call, or moving the trash bin away from your desk so you will have to get up and walk to it. (Hey, I can do that right now!)

Is a New Baby as Good as a Gym Membership?

Probably not, according to a study published this week in the journal Pediatrics that investigated the eating and exercise habits of parents with small children. The study of 1,500 men and women found that, not only were the mothers heavier than their counterparts without children, but also that they ate about 370 calories more each day and exercised an hour less each week. Sugar-sweetened drinks and saturated fats contributed substantially to the extra calories. The researchers didn’t find a significant difference between fathers of small children and their childless counterpart in weight or eating habits, but did find that the dads exercised about two hours less per week.

Relevance to Natural Weight Loss:

Weight Loss Tip: If you will soon be a new parent, be prepared for an interruption to your regular eating and exercise habits. Make a special effort to reserve some time for exercise, and be careful with those sugary drinks and processed meats.