If you dont want to attempt a full-blown diet, you can make some simple adjustments to your eating habits to help you shed unwanted pounds.
Eat three meals a day
Eating regular meals keeps you from getting hungry and your body from experiencing "intermittent starvation", which in turn promotes storing rather than burning calories. Breakfast is the most important meal. 'At any weight loss clinic, 70 percent of those who walk in the door don't eat breakfast".
Eat protein at every meal
Unlike high carbohydrate foods that provide quick energy but leave you feeling hungry soon after, high protein foods help ward off hunger between meals - which can keep you from snacking. Lean protein sources include meat, fish, turkey, chicken, string cheese, non-fat yogurt, cottage cheese and natural peanut butter. "If you're hungry two hours after a meal you know you didn't get enough protein".
No white at night
White refers to rice, potatoes, bread, corn - and includes dessert. Eliminating these high-carb sources is where calorie cutting is achieved. "You have to take some calories out of your diet to lose weight. Take out these starch calories. They're high carbohydrates that are basically converted to sugar and have no real nutritional value."
Our heart doctor says that numerous patients and friends have lost weight following the recommendations, including his mother, who dropped 35 pounds and was able to stop using insulin.
Exercising portion control
Martha McKittrick says the simplest diet adjustment you can make is - eat less. The registered dietitian on staff at The New York Presbyterian Hospital says that exercising portion control is not easy for many dieters. "A lot of people take an all-or-nothing approach when it comes to putting food on their plate," says McKittrick.
She also says that dieters must have a realistic idea of what they eat. She suggests you keep a food record - writing down what you eat each day. Online dieting services such as fitday.com can make it easy to log what you eat and let you take advantage of the calorie calculating and other tracking features such sites offer. "People don't think they eat that much. But when you start tracking what they eat on a typical day it can be very eye-opening," McKittrick says.
Dieters also need to keep in mind the basic math behind losing weight, McKittrick says. Because a pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, you need to take away 500 calories every day to lose a pound of fat a week (or reduce your weight gain by a pound a week).
McKittrick suggests adding these simple calorie-reducing steps to any diet:
- Leave the cheese off your sandwich and lose 200 calories
- Use mustard instead of mayonnaise and lose 100 calories
- Use fat-free salad dressing instead of regular dressing and lose 100 calories
- Drink water (plain, flavored or seltzer) instead of regular sodas and lose 150 calories
- Eliminate that second glass of wine in the evening to lose 100 calories
- Remove the skin from a cooked chicken breast to lose 100 calories
- Switch from a bagel to an English muffin in the morning to lose 200 calories
- Switch from a deli tuna salad sandwich to a turkey sandwich to lose 250 calories
Calorie cutters should also be wary of fancy coffee drinks, adds McKittrick. A large mocha frappuccino contains over 400 calories. Premium ice cream is another diet destroyer. Eat sorbet or low-fat frozen yogurt pops instead of a bowl of premium ice cream, she says.
Of course, the other way to take away calories is to burn them off with exercise. McKittrick says combining exercise with calorie-cutting is by far the most effective way to lose weight.
