Healthy Weight Loss
If you are serious about losing weight, find a healthy weight loss diet that appeals to your taste buds. If it's one your family can follow, so much the better—that way you aren't making different meals for you and your family.
The form of the calories you take in matters for only one reason: helping you stick with the diet. If you prefer protein, then a higher-protein diet might help you lose weight better than a diet that emphasizes carbohydrates. If you like variety and vegetables, try a Mediterranean approach. If you believe that eating fat makes you fat (it doesn't, anymore than eating protein or carbohydrate makes you fat), then try a low-fat approach like one of the Ornish plans.
Better yet, build your own healthy weight loss plan. It should provide plenty of choices, have few restrictions, and be as good for your heart, bones, and brain as it is for your waistline. It should be a diet you are excited about trying, or at least not dreading. Most important, it should deliver fewer calories than you usually take in.
What's the best way to determine that? If you can see a nutritionist, she or he can help you figure out how many calories you usually consume. The process usually involves keeping a diary or record of everything you eat, drink, and nibble on over the course of three days. This can be converted to calorie counts and your daily caloric intake. You can also do this yourself online, suggests study co-author Kathy McManus, R.D., director of the nutrition department at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Many web sites offer online food diaries that automatically calculate your calorie intake. Some you have to pay for, others offer up ads for diet products. A free, and ad-free, site worth trying is SuperTracker, set up by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support its new food pyramid. The site also has an exercise tracker.
Once you know how many calories you take in on an average day, you can set a target for the future. A 500 calorie deficit is a good place to start. Do that for a week, and you'll lose a pound of fat (which is the equivalent of 3,500 calories). You can adjust your diet to take in 500 fewer calories a day. Or you can cut back by 250 calories (the amount of calories in a 20-oz bottle of sugary soda pop, a 16-ounce vanilla latte, or a jelly donut) and exercise long enough to burn an extra 250 calories (walk an extra 2 miles, take 5,000 more steps, swim for an extra 20 minutes, or do whatever exercise you prefer). This kind of healthy weight loss plan doesn't have a catchy name. But it has something better—a proven record of success.
David Ogden
CEO TheInterBiz LLC
Phone 386 308 1956 after 6PM EST
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