Effective Weight Loss Tips: A Holistic Approach

YOU On A Diet Tips

You on a Diet Tips

To lose weight, you need to:

• Eat
• Know your body
• Understand the beauty of your internal organs to appreciate what you can do to influence them.
• Stay satisfied
• Enlist a friend, family member, or new cyber buddy as your partner.
• Know that it's OK to make mistakes. As long as you quickly get back on the right road, you won't travel too far down the wrong one.

Eating Strategies for YOU

• To help make eating automatic, pick at least one meal a day to alter and have the same foods every day for all other meals.
• Eat throughout the day so that you're constantly satisfied. The less you eat, the more likely you are to sink into starvation mode and make your body want to store fat.
• Inspect food labels. Limit saturated fats to less than 4 grams per serving, and avoid all trans fats. Don't buy foods where high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or another simple sugar, is more than 4 grams per serving, or one of the first five ingredients. You're avoiding simple sugars in foods not just because of the calories but because they induce highs and lows in blood sugar that put you into a cycle of craving more high-calorie foods.
• Drink a glass or two of water before you eat. Your perception of hunger signals may actually be thirst signals.
• Keep on hand emergency foods and items that can help you kill cravings, like V8, carrot sticks, an apple, or even Listerine breath strips.
• Keep a log of how hungry you are on a scale of one to seven (one being famished, seven being gorged). Try to stay in the three to four range at all times by eating moderate amounts of food throughout the day.
• Two spices have been shown to aid in waist management: red pepper and cinnamon.
• Realize that it's OK to make mistakes. The key is getting back on the right road, not beating yourself up over them. Use YOU-Turns to right yourself as soon as possible.

For more tips, see the next page.

Best Measurement

Remember that waist is more important than weight. Belly fat is one of the strongest predictors of health risks associated with obesity. Ditch the scale in favor of the tape measure. Ideal is 32 1/2 inches or less for women, and 35 inches or less for men.

Other Strategies for YOU

Activity Strategies

• Walk thirty minutes a day every day. No excuses. Then call your support partner after you do it.
• Start a strength training program focusing on core muscle (legs, abdominals, and upper body) in the form of twenty minutes two or three days a week.
• Stretch every day after physical activity to keep your muscles loose and pliable, to help you prevent injury.
• Do this exercise any time you want: Suck in your belly button and squeeze your butt as if you're pulling up tight jeans. It helps with posture and strengthens your abdominals.
• Get up and go. Anytime you can move at work or at home, do it.

Who Woulda Thunk It Strategies

• Get seven to eight hours of sleep a night. Lack of sleep promotes hedonistic eating as you search for something to boost chemicals in your brain. Your brain needs sleep to regenerate these chemicals, and sugary foods help release the diminished supply of chemicals you have, to make up for the lack of sleep.
• Play video games. Keeping your hands full keeps them off the coconut muffins.
• Have healthy, safe, monogamous sex. Satisfying one appetite center of your brain can help satisfy another.
• Ask your family what your parents and grandparents looked like when they were eighteen, to give you a sense of what your ideal body should look like.
• Get tested: blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation), and certain hormone levels, depending on your weight situation.

Medicine Cabinet Strategies

• Take two aspirin (162 milligrams) every day to decrease arterial inflammation and health risks associated with obesity. Consult your doctor first.
• See your doctor about prescription drugs associated with weight loss if you hit a waist plateau on the plan (see appendix).