8 TOP TIPS TO LOSING WEIGHT (AND KEEPING IT OFF)

Do you want to lose weight? The good news is you can use the following eight tips to support your weight loss help to keep the weight off.

1. Keep a food diary. This will help you identify baseline eating habits. Measure portions and read nutrition labels. Find an app or a food tracker (myfitnesspal) to input the recorded information for a summary of calories, carbohydrates, protein, and fat. Seeing what you eat written down makes sure you don’t suffer from eating amnesia.

2. Be realistic and make sensible changes to your diet that you can adhere to. If the changes feel too drastic you won’t stick at it. instead, consider a more realistic opportunity for change.

3. Assess your cupboard and fridge contents. Clean out foods that are inconsistent with your eating plan (hard if you have kids I know), However everyone benefits if you load up on healthier, nutrient-dense foods. 

4. Try reducing quantities by using smaller plates, and taking longer to eat your meals.

5. Incorporate an achievable physical activity into your day. This has to be something you actually enjoy and find relatively easy to incorporate into your daily routine. Ideally, you need to be doing about three x 10-minute activity bouts, or 1 x 30 minute class, per day. This could be as simple as doing the school run, walking the dog, cleaning the house (with gusto) or having a boogie to your favourite tunes. Or coming along to one of my fitness classes! which leads me onto…..

6. Gather support and surround yourself with like-minded people. Social support is very important for weight loss success. Social circles also predict health behaviours. Reach out to like-minded family and friends who are practising healthy behaviours. If none are, it’s even more reason to look for a group or fitness class to join.

7. Invest in some scales and a measuring tape. By keeping tabs on your weight and more importantly your size, you can see when regain begins and make the necessary adjustments to stop it. In fact, studies suggest this is a key behaviour of people who lose weight and keep it off (Coughlin et al. 2013).

8. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Think about the long term. There isn’t a quick fix or a magic potion. You’re thinking years, not weeks or even months before you can say you have changed an eating/fitness habit and made it a lifestyle. So many people start on a new healthy lifestyle program and have lost motivation by week 6. They either aren’t patient enough, they aren’t seeing changes fast enough, or they were too drastic from the outset and weren’t able to sustain their plan.

Is There a “Best” Diet?

Losing weight isn’t so much about which eating plan you follow to lose weight, but rather about whether you can create enough of a caloric deficit to lose weight and keep it off. While the “best diet debate” may continue indefinitely, most scientific evidence supports a clear conclusion: When it comes to weight loss, it doesn’t matter which diet a person follows, as long as he or she can stick with it (Johnstone et al. 2014).