A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good

One of the biggest mistakes most people make when undertaking a new diet is to completely cut out the foods they love. This is the single biggest cause for the binging sessions that ruin a diet and, in some cases, end it all together.

It is incredibly likely that at least some of your favourite foods are high in fat, and therefore every diet in the land will tell you to forsake them. However, you should always view a diet as a lifestyle change, or you’ll spend your life yo-yoing from one weight to another. Looking at it like this, is it really possible that you’ll never touch your favourite foods, ever again? Of course not, and that’s why diets tend to fail.

The key word here is ‘moderation’. There is truly nothing wrong with having a curry on a Friday night, so long as it isn’t every Friday night. Make it a monthly event, set in the calendar, that you can look forward to. But you must be strict – if you break and indulge in a curry before that set date, the date needs to move back another four weeks.

If a calendar-strict system of operation won’t work, then perhaps altering the days on which you diet will. Try dieting 80% of the time, or put simply, on week days. Most of our socialising – and therefore, our indulgent eating – happens on the weekend anyway. So make Saturday and Sunday a diet-free zone and indulge. You aren’t going to lose weight as quickly this way, but it definitely is more conducive to building a slimmer lifestyle that you can stick with for years.

Then there are the small changes you can make to your favourite foods that keep the essential reason you enjoy them but lower the fat content. Making foods more diet friendly takes a little effort, but it’s worth it. For example, a typical English fry-up is calorie laden and would make most dieticians scream with horror. Yet with a little alteration, it might be a little heavier than salad, but it’s not in the red zone. To begin, switch from frying or scrambling eggs to poaching. When choosing your bacon, be selective, buying cuts with as little fat as possible – then grill, not fry. You can also try microwaving bacon, which is even better, but it is something of an acquired taste. Switch the butter for your toast to a low fat one, grill your sausages, leave a tomato uncooked and use low-fat baked beans. Small changes, but big ones when it comes to fat content.

One Step At A Time

Most people embarking on a diet set a goal weight, after which they intend to indulge in a little retail therapy and buy clothes in their new and improved size. While this may seem like a good motivational factor, in fact it can sometimes have the opposite effect – especially when that target weight is many, many months away. After all, that dress in a smaller size you love right now might not be available in six months time.

So why not try a stage-by-stage investment in new clothes, rather than one big bulk buy upon reaching a target weight. Start by, as you usually would, setting a target weight. For ease of maths sake, for this example let’s say you wish to lose four stone. Take your target weight and divide it into quarters, so in this case it would be one stone a time. At the end of each quarter, having achieved your goal weight, go and buy some new clothes in your new size.

The effects of this are two-fold. The most obvious of this is a reward for hard work much sooner than most originally expect. You’ll find going in to a store and buying clothes in a smaller size, that look and feel better, an exciting experience and it should hopefully motivate you to continue. Most diets require good motivation for them to be successful and this is one of the best ways to do it. Shopping will also give you fresh determination, as you may see things that don’t fit yet, but you know if you continue will fit.

Then there’s a slightly more cynical advantage, but an important one nevertheless. As you purchase your new clothes at quarterly intervals, throw away some of your biggest current clothes. This will create a sense of ‘no going back’ – if you don’t continue with your diet, you’re going to have to go and buy new clothes that are a size you’re not comfortable with. Having clothes in your largest size readily available isn’t great for motivation, as it’s too easy to just think it doesn’t matter and slip back into your old wardrobe. Regular treats and rewards, while kissing goodbye to your old clothes and size, will see your diet a success.
After all, that dress in a smaller size you love right now might not be available in six months time.

So why not try a stage-by-stage investment in new clothes, rather than one big bulk buy upon reaching a target weight. Start by, as you usually would, setting a target weight. For ease of maths sake, for this example let’s say you wish to lose four stone. Take your target weight and divide it into quarters, so in this case it would be one stone a time. At the end of each quarter, having achieved your goal weight, go and buy some new clothes in your new size.

The effects of this are two-fold. The most obvious of this is a reward for hard work much sooner than most originally expect. You’ll find going in to a store and buying clothes in a smaller size, that look and feel better, an exciting experience and it should hopefully motivate you to continue. Most diets require good motivation for them to be successful and this is one of the best ways to do it. Shopping will also give you fresh determination, as you may see things that don’t fit yet, but you know if you continue will fit.

Then there’s a slightly more cynical advantage, but an important one nevertheless. As you purchase your new clothes at quarterly intervals, throw away some of your biggest current clothes. This will create a sense of ‘no going back’ – if you don’t continue with your diet, you’re going to have to go and buy new clothes that are a size you’re not comfortable with. Having clothes in your largest size readily available isn’t great for motivation, as it’s too easy to just think it doesn’t matter and slip back into your old wardrobe. Regular treats and rewards, while kissing goodbye to your old clothes and size, will see your diet a success.

Dear Diary … A Way To See What You’re Doing Right – And Wrong

A diet should be approached almost like a training regime for a major sporting event. You can just pick up a book and follow it, but investing a little more time and preparation into your diet, what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to achieve will pay dividends in the end.

The first thing you should do is identify any food triggers you have. People rarely eat due to hunger and hunger alone, so try and figure out what circumstances, situations or events are more likely to make you reach for the biscuit tin. Classic comfort eating is a good start, but also look at social interaction and if you eat more or less after a busy day at work. You need to learn your eating patterns, which may sound odd, but few people are actually fully aware of why and when they eat on a long-term basis.

The easiest way to do this is to keep a food diary for at least a fortnight – a month is better – prior to starting any dietary regime. Write down the time of day you ate, what you ate, how you were feeling at the time and if you were hungry. Keep this as precise as possible with as much information as possible – after a couple of weeks, you should begin to see a pattern to your eating. You’ll probably find that you eat higher fat food when you’re tired or smaller portions when you’re in a rush, but the key thing is to identify behaviour unique to you.

Armed with this information, you can plan a diet properly. If you’ve found you go for the quickest option when you’re tired, you can prepare a low-fat meal in advance which is ready when you need it. You can also identify ‘danger points’, such as social occasions, and while you don’t need to stop going out, just being aware that you’re likely to eat more while socialising gives you power to control it, such as by cutting down on food during the day or eating within moderation while out.

And remember to note down everything you drink as well, particularly alcohol. With this information, you can tailor a diet to suit you and help ensure success.

Herbal Tea Gets The Green Light

Like coffee, green tea will induce some amount of thermogenesis in the human body through its caffeine content. No-one will drink coffee for its weight-loss possibilities, though, partially because the average coffee drinker will add sugar and/or milk and partially because it’s such an established part of many people’s day anyway. From a scientific point of view, however, there is another good reason that people favour green tea for weight loss. This is the fact that green tea contains a high level of what are known as “catechin polyphenols” - clever little antioxidants that have all manner of health benefits which go beyond weight loss. They have also been shown to lessen the signs of ageing, and have certain antibiotic properties.

Certain green teas have also been seen to have an effect on the body’s release of carbohydrates, resulting in the burning of fat and more constant blood-insulin levels. Of course just drinking green tea won’t see you losing weight at a noticeable pace. Unfortunately, you can’t just eat what you want and then drink green tea, but as part of a sensible diet it can make a real difference. Even if you don’t lose any weight for whatever reason, the other attendant health benefits of drinking green tea make the practice worthwhile.

The practice of drinking green tea for weight loss is without question gaining currency, although its effectiveness is debated. Some people say that misinformation is rife, with the idea persisting that green tea in isolation will solve people’s weight problems. However, the same is true of any scheme to lose weight. Nothing will work in isolation to make the weight just drop off. Diets such as the SlimFast plan make very clear that no simple scheme exists to drive weight loss without significant input from the dieter. Clearly it is naïve to expect a simple, immediate result from just one thing, and the most important phrase to remember is “as part of a calorie-controlled diet”. What is certain is that, if you drink green tea and watch what you eat, the results will come, particularly alongside a decent physical exercise plan.

The GI Diet – Do You Want To Be Fighting Fit?

Countless people, no doubt, have heard of the GI diet and assumed it has something to do with GI Joe, the fictitious American soldier of television cartoon fame – or less flippantly but still inaccurately they imagine it has some connection with the American troops of World War II, where the abbreviation “GI” stands for either Government Issue, General Infantryman or Galvanised Iron depending on whom you listen to. This is a common misconception, but a misconception nonetheless. The term GI in reference to a diet applies to the “Glycaemic Index” of different foods, and the theory that judging foods by their Glycaemic Index can allow the dieter to lose weight and live a more healthy life.

A food with a high GI will break down very quickly in the digestive system, as a result releasing glucose into the bloodstream and providing what is commonly known as a “sugar rush” – a short-term boost that will give a person a sense of energy and well-being. A low GI means that a food will break down slowly, giving slow-release sustained energy throughout the day, and will therefore not have the common “crash” effect present when a sugar rush expires and leaves the person with an energy debt, feeling shaken, tired and often depressed.

The GI diet was developed by research scientist Dr. David Jenkins nearly 30 years ago at the University of Toronto, and came about as a result of a study into which foods would help diabetics control their blood sugar level. The Glycaemic Index is concerned with how quickly the energy is released into the body, and the higher GI a food has, the quicker it is broken down in the digestive system. Thus a food with a low GI is considered a good thing.

Foods with high GI include corn flakes, croissants and white bread – traditionally breakfast foods which are considered to kick-start a person’s metabolism. Adherents to the GI diet point out that these foods may get the day off to an energetic start, but are partially responsible for a mid-morning “crash” which can leave you hanging on waiting up to two hours for lunch to top up your energy levels. It is generally held that a better option is to eat fruit or grainy breads for breakfast, as their lower GI will keep a steady level of energy going for most of the day.

The Atkins Diet – Curb The Carbs And Watch Weight Fall Off

The early part of the current millennium saw a huge, and fairly short-lived, obsession with “low-carb” diets based on the principle that the real enemy in the war on weight gain was carbohydrates. The most famous of these diets, and the most lucrative for its representatives, was the Atkins diet. If someone visited your house in the earlier years of this decade and politely declined your offer of a sandwich, the most likely next sentence out of their mouth would have been “I’m on the Atkins”. No further explanation was necessary. You couldn’t move for newspaper articles analysing the Atkins diet.

The diet was developed by and named for the US physician Dr Robert Atkins, based on his theory that too many diets concentrated on saturated fat as the major problem causing weight gain and heart disease and that a more beneficial diet could be built around the principle of cutting out refined carbohydrates (such as sugar and flour) and “trans fats” (unsaturated fats with no real nutritional value, used for their greater durability and their usefulness for baking). All these technical points tended to get brushed aside, though, as the Atkins diet had a few more headline-grabbing properties.

Chief among these properties was the fact that Atkins allowed for a liberal amount of all meat products which, as a consequence, led to a great number of people deciding that they could happily go on a diet – and quite happily give up on bread – if in so doing they could eat sausage, bacon and egg for breakfast every morning and eat steak every night. Though this wasn’t a particularly wise approach, and indeed was not advised by Atkins, the more scientific side of the Atkins Nutritional Approach (to give it its full name) didn’t fit into the headline-and-short-article approach favoured by mass media outlets.

A heavily technical approach to the Atkins Diet certainly bore results and saw weight loss, with losses of up to ten pounds a week not uncommon. But the process of ketosis, which drove the weight loss in this approach, led to bad breath, body odour and in some cases the sparse growth of thick black body hair, and the pick and mix approach taken by some adherents proved incompatible with weight loss. Atkins Nutritionals, the company founded by the doctor, filed for bankruptcy in January 2005.

Cutting Down Doesn’t Mean Cutting It Out

People go on diets for all sorts of reasons: health, cosmetic, personal well-being. It would take a very strong person to never have any kind of anxiety over their weight, whether they be male or female, young or old. The benefits of dieting are obvious, and are extolled far and wide – especially in this day and age when we as a species are, more than ever, fixated on looks and weight. Although glossy magazines are frequently and often correctly criticised for contributing to a widespread sense of poor body image chiefly but not solely suffered by adolescent girls, diets come with a real sense of pressure – lose weight or bear the consequences!

Sticking word for word to a diet plan is, in these circumstances, a real strain on anybody. Having no room for manoeuvre only serves to increase the pressure and for many people the added pressure can lead to a damaging collapse. Think for a moment of people who drink too much – having to stop immediately and completely can often have terrible consequences, with a week or so of cold turkey leading to a damaging and depressing binge. Cutting down on “naughty” foods can be viewed in the same way. Complete bans on rich sauces, juicy cuts of meat and sweet cakes might easily read like a charge sheet, and a fortnight of tofu might just lead someone to rebel and make a defiant decision to eat a pizza loaded with toppings – and this can have really damaging results.

It’s much better to live by a motto that doesn’t sound like it would fit above the gates of a maximum security prison. A good one is “Moderation in all things – including moderation”. Of course it’s a bad thing to have pasta with rich sauce one day, gooey pizza the next and deep-fried goodies afterwards, and to add desserts into the bargain. On the other hand, life is for the living and it would be a depressing existence if you didn’t indulge yourself once in a while. Just make sure it is once in a while, and not once a day!

Go Green For Weight Loss

It is accepted that in order to lose a pound over a week of dieting, the dieter must cut down their calorie intake by 3500 calories. This sounds like a lot, even when you break it down over the course of seven days – 500 calories a day amounts to a full meal in some cases, which is a lot to cut out of your daily diet. That being said, if you look at your daily diet you can always find a few calories to cut out here and there – whether it be by replacing chips with rice, using light salad dressing, or replacing white bread with a more wholesome alternative.

Drinking green tea has been talked about as a way to aid weight loss, and it certainly has its place. A process known as thermogenesis – whereby the human body produces its own heat – can give the body an extra boost, and Japanese scientists have discovered that drinking five cups of green tea a day will lead to a person shedding up to 80 calories. Now, the mathematicians out there will have figured out that, at a rate of 80 calories per day, it would take nearly 44 days to drop a pound. But looking at your diet, ask yourself – is there something in there that could be replaced by green tea?

Many people, for example, will have a few glasses of Coke a day. As one 250ml glass of Coke contains 105 calories, if you drink five glasses of Coke a day the total calories from that amounts to 525. If you were to replace those glasses of coke with cups of green tea, the overall difference would be an impressive –605 calories per day, which adds up to –4235 a week, a loss of one pound with a bit to spare. It needn’t be Coke that you cut out, of course. For you there may be something else that you feel you could happily say goodbye to. It’s up to you to find what you can cut out, make the change and enjoy the benefits.

Get In The Zone

The Zone diet is another diet that works by assigning limits to different food groups, meaning that the dieter needs to prioritise and balance their eating habits. It differs somewhat from diets such as the Atkins and GI diets in that certain foods are not strictly proscribed or discouraged, but instead a quota is assigned based on which out of three different groups they fall into, or more accurately which of three “zones” the foods take their calories from. The “Zones” are essentially three different nutritional values, all of which play a part in dieting at some level. The three selected zones are carbohydrates, proteins and fats.

The diet was developed by the Californian biochemist Barry Sears, after he became aware that the men in his family were disproportionately prone to heart attacks. Fearful that he would die from an attack like his male relatives, Sears drew on his knowledge to create a diet that would significantly reduce all risk factors and allow him to break the tragic cycle. The diet that he created is based on a ratio or quota system which recommends that the adherent takes their calories from carbs, protein and fat, with a percentage value assigned to each. Specifically, 40% of calories should come from carbohydrates, with 30% each coming from the other “zones” – thus no one source has a dominance and the dieter can benefit from a balanced diet.

Independent studies comparing different diets have reported that as far as set diets go, the Zone has a high success rate, with weight loss being significant but measured, and fat loss being accompanied by a simultaneous gain of muscle mass. Additionally the adverse effects reported most often by dieters, such as fatigue and hunger, were rarer than with other diet plans and, where they were reported, greatly reduced. Conversely there are those who point out that little study has been done into the long term effects of the diet, and that it over-emphasizes protein in a person’s diet – which critics say could be more likely to cause heart attacks than prevent them.

Incentives Make The Hard Times Easier

So many of us lose weight for cosmetic reasons – it’s probably the most common factor in keeping the weight loss industry going. While it may seem shallow, it’s an unavoidable truth – personal vanity it may be, but we all want to look good, and want people to notice that we do. You can be happy in a long term relationship, but it doesn’t change – even if you don’t want to attract a potential new love interest, it’s always a confidence booster to know that when people look at you they like what they see. Everybody likes positive feedback, there’s no shame in it! Being asked “Have you lost weight?” can really make a person’s day – whether or not they’ll admit it.

Aside from the obvious cosmetic effect of losing weight, it has another advantage. Though it’s not at all fair, it’s an undeniable fact that being a certain weight will open the door to a wardrobe full of nice clothes. The refrain is heard far and wide, depressingly often: “That’s a lovely shirt/top/dress, but they don’t have it in my size”. The people who need the least help to look “good” have access to an endless stream of clothes that flatter their shape. It’s not really the way things should be, but we can’t change it, so we must look for a way to turn it to our advantage. Difficult, but not impossible.

How can we do this? Well, it’s simple, we incentivize ourselves. Losing weight is hard, but when you have something to aim for discipline comes a lot easier. Keep a photo of that piece of clothing that you really covet, and if you want you can even stick it to the fridge door. When you’re about to go and grab a pudding, stop and think whether the sweet taste is worth passing on the confidence boost of wearing that outfit. And once you’ve slimmed down to your ideal weight, go and buy that garment. Buy a couple – the joy of wearing something attractive is incentive enough to want to keep that weight off so that you can keep wearing it.