General Diet Tips

LifeStyle

• Differentiate between cravings and hunger. Never feed your emotions!

• If you are in a relationship, its always helpful to do things together; eating healthy together and going to a gym together will be beneficial as you can support each other.

• If you are looking for support, join an online support group. You will meet many people with the same goals as you, and you can learn a lot from these people. A good exercise is to blog about your result every week or two. Looking at the results and at your progression will help you feel a sense of fulfillment and can give you the drive you need to progress further.

• Keep yourself busy! - if you have many things to do, you will often think about food less often.

• Know what you are putting into your body. Your body is not a rubbish. Start reading labels. Check the calorie and fat content before you put it in your mouth - Yes this includes beverages. Try comparing the calorie content in beers and sugary sodas, with things like hot dogs, burgers, fries and crisps... you will be surprised!

• Family- It's a good idea to tell your family that you've chosen to eat healthier, however not all your family members may be on board... particularly the ones that are secretly unhappy about their own weight. Make them understand how YOU feel, and that you aren't happy with the way you are treating your body. Make them understand that it is an important journey for you to lose weight and be healthy. It really helps having the support of your family. What definitely does not help is having your aunt forcing you to eat her pudding on xmas day. Maybe letting them know how you feel will also mean that you will have healthy food waiting for you when you go over to their place.

• Don't set over-the-top goals. If you want to lose 50 pounds, you need to break it down. Set an initial goal of losing 10 pounds, see how that goes, then based on the results, decide what your next goal will be. If you know that you are far away from your goal, you are more likely to give up early.

• Never go to the grocery store hungry. Seriously. That place is just a pool of cravings. You need to go there with your defenses ready. Make sure you're not hungry, otherwise the cravings there might get to you.

• Successful weight loss is an equation: exercise+diet = success. You cannot replace "diet" with diet pills, and you cannot lose weight without doing both diet and exercise at the same time. Everybody knows this, but not everyone accepts it.

• Sometimes when you've had a bad day or something's gone completely wrong you end up stuffing yourself with food to relieve stress. It is important to find an alternative to this as you can never know if something might go wrong in the middle of a diet! A very helpful way of relieving stress is playing an instrument or talking to a friend on the phone and "letting everything out". If that doesn't work, buy a punching bag and a set of gloves and the rest will take care of itself~

• It is always helpful to record your eating habits. Habits become so integrated with our every day lives, that we often do not realize that we are doing them, and we only realize that we are doing them when somebody else points it out! Recognize your habits, keep a look out. A habit of simply putting mayo on your veg or extra sugar in your cereal and grated cheese on your mac and cheese- these stop should try to be stopped, if you have a habit of frying your eggs, try to use canola oil or olive oil instead of the fatty oil (canola oil usually comes in the form of a spray and is much more low cal than olive oil). Or even better, boil the eggs.

• If you're having a really bad craving -smell something stinky that will kill your appetite

• When feeling discouraged, think of people that are thin and in shape, motivate yourself, and think that you can be like them soon.

• Spend as least time as possible in the kitchen, it's hard to resist temptations with the fridge a step away.

• Before each bite ask, do I REALLY need this in my body?

• Buy pants or a skirt that don't fit you. Yeah that don't fit you, buy it one or two sizes smaller, leave it in your closet where you can see it. Every time you change clothes, think to yourself "I WILL fit in that". It's a great reminder.