The best way to stay healthy is to ensure that you eat a well-balanced, nutritious diet and regularly partake in physical activity. Not only will this keep you healthy, it will also reduce your risk of illness and disease, and help you maintain a healthy weight.
The key to losing excess body fat is to make small changes to your lifestyle. This will involve changing both your eating and exercise habits. Making these changes should be maintained as part of your ongoing lifestyle. This will ensure that the weight stays off for good!
Avoid Skipping Meals
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It is always recommended that you do not skip any meals. Skipping meals results in eating more when you do eat and also eating unsavoury snacks. Studies have shown that eating bigger meals less times can result in increased stomach capacity.
This will likely result in you needing to eat more to feel full. Don’t starve yourself if you are trying to lose weight!
Yoyo Diets Will Weaken Your Metabolism
Many people out there trying to lose weight have tried every diet under the sun. Most often, people find that they lose weight initially, only to find it goes straight back on when the diet stops!
Continuous dieting results in your body shutting down its metabolism during these semi-starvation periods.
If you lose weight too quickly you also find that your muscle deteriorates. Muscle is what burns calories, not fat. So by lowering your muscle definition, you are effectively reducing your calorie burn each day!
Dieting in this way can also have a detrimental effect on your health, and over time, can increase the risk of developing coronary heart disease, regardless of body fat levels.
The recommended rate of losing weight should be no more than 1kg per week.
When and Why do You Eat
There are a number of eating habits that can lead to weight gain. Some of the most popular include
- Night Eating
- Emotional Eating
- Social Eating
You should try to stick to regular meals and healthy snacks and avoid unplanned or habitual eating. This will help you to lose weight.
It is also a good idea to keep a food diary of what you eat and when you eat it. This can then be reviewed to see if you are doing any of the above as some people do not realise how much they actually do eat.
If you do suffer from stress or emotional problems, you will find that doing some stress-busting exercises are much better than eating.
Healthy Eating Tips
Below you will find a list of tips to help you reach your weight loss goals:
- Avoid yoyo dieting
- Eat a wide variety of foods from all food groups
- Increase the amount of fruit and veg you eat
- Avoid foods with added sugar and salt
- Try and balance any extra food with extra exercise
- Cut down on alcohol
- Switch sugary drinks to water
- Avoid using food for comfort
- Drink plenty of water every day
Get Moving
It is important to exercise when you are trying to lose weight because it prevents muscle loss and keeps your metabolic rate at a higher level.
Exercise is no longer a part of people’s daily routine as work and home life become more demanding, but you should try and fit in at least 30 minutes of exercise each day. You should include strength training as this is known to burn fat for longer after training than cardio.
Another thing that exercise does is increase your energy levels and your mood. This may help prevent emotional eating.
The Bottom Line
The key to losing weight is to ensure that you burn more calories through exercise and daily activities than you take in from the food you consume.
A healthy male adult should aim for no more than 2500 calories a day and 2000 for an adult female. 2500 calories is around a pound of fat, so, if you consume 2500 calories less per week you will on average lose a pound in weight.
Remember, eat a healthy balanced diet and exercise regularly.
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