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A Big List Of “Top 5″ Health Articles May 12, 2007

The Problogger “Top 5″ Group Writing Project is now over, with literally hundreds of entries submitted. It took a while, but I’ve gone through them all and pulled out all the ones relating to dieting, weight loss and fitness. Enjoy!

And, of course, my own entry:

What Do 300 Calorie Meals Look Like? May 11, 2007

Check out this great page of photos of 300-calorie meals. If you’ve ever wondered what healthy portion sizes look like, this is for you.

Low calorie food doesn’t need to be boring!

5 Easy Daily Habits To Put Your Weight Loss On Autopilot May 10, 2007

This post is part of Darren Rowse’s “Top 5″ group writing project over at Problogger.

Weight loss is not about dieting, denial, punishment, guilt and sweating. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you need to modify your ‘default’ daily habits and adopt a healthy lifestyle.

If the habits you currently have are making you fat, you can’t expect to lose weight without changing them!

The good news is that you don’t need to make drastic changes to begin having an effect on your weight. Just a few simple changes, which you can phase in gently using my 30 day trial technique, will make a good start.

1. Eat Breakfast

Start your day properly. Get in the habit of having a good, healthy, satisfying breakfast that won’t leave you feeling hungry by 10 o’clock.

I usually have a bowl of oats topped with a handful of chopped dates for flavour. You can make it up using hot water or milk – I use water, just to reduce the calories a little more, but low fat milk would be fine too. Honey works well if you want to sweeten it, although the dates do a pretty good job of that by themselves.

Oats are a classic ‘low-GI’ food, meaning they take a while to digest and will deliver energy over a longer period than high-GI foods. This means they’ll fill you up, and you won’t feel hungry again in an hour.

If you have juice with your breakfast, make it a small glass. Drink a large glass of water if you’re still thirsty. This leads into my next habit…

2. Avoid Drinking Calories

It’s easy to slip hundreds of extra calories into your daily intake through poor drink choices. A can of Coke has 155 calories. One cup of orange juice, although seemingly healthy, has 100 calories. One cup of whole milk has 150 calories, while a cup of fat-free milk has around half that (85 calories).

Make a simple rule for yourself to avoid drinking calories as much as you can.

Drink a lot of water. This is good for you in many ways, besides just quenching your thirst. As you lose weight, the breakdown of your bodyfat will release toxins into your blood which are filtered out by your kidneys. Drinking lots of water ensures these toxins are flushed away efficiently rather than concentrating and causing problems.

You can drink as much black coffee or tea as you like. If you’re used to having cream and sugar, try reducing them slowly over time. I used to have coffee with milk and two sugars; I cut out one sugar, then a few weeks later cut the other, and some time later was able to get rid of the milk as well. I do still enjoy a latte occasionally, but my everyday coffee is now black.

Diet softdrinks are fine, if the chemical cocktail they contain doesn’t bother you.

3. Reduce The Junk Snacks

I used to eat a lot of cakes, biscuits and muffins during the day. If you read the packets, you’ll probably be surprised to see how many calories are slipping into your mouth when you’re not paying attention!

Just one Tim-Tam (my favourite chocolate biscuit) has over a hundred calories! And who eats just one anyway? :-)

Cut out the junk snacks and you could remove hundreds of calories from your daily intake. Instead, eat fruit and raw vegetables (carrots, celery, cherry tomatoes, etc are great). Popcorn (without the butter!) and pickles are two very low-calorie snacks.

4. Don’t Get Hung Up On Daily Weight Measurements

Measure your weight every day, but focus on your 10-day moving average rather than your daily measurements.

I use PhysicsDiet.com to track my weight. They also have great forums where you can swap tips with others.

5. Pay Attention To Calorie Labels On Your Food

Have a look at the back of the packet on all the foods you eat. Take note of how many calories various foods contain.

For my height and weight, I burn roughly 100 calories for every kilometer I run. So if I eat 3 Tim Tams, I have to run 3 km to burn off the calories. A can of Coke would mean another 1.5 km. It adds up quickly!

Read about about how many calories various foods contain, and then read about how many calories various exercises burn.

While you’re looking at these numbers, bear in mind that 1 pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories. So if you can remove 500 calories per day from your intake (or burn 500 extra calories per day), you’ll lose around a pound per week. That’s a good, healthy, sustainable weight loss goal.

Just being aware of how easy it is to eat hundreds of calories, and how hard it is to exercise them off, made a big difference in my attitude to eating.

Summary

You don’t have to dive in boots-n-all to start losing weight. Ease into it by taking on a few of these daily habits. It really doesn’t have to be painful!

If you can make your everyday habits healthy, you can enjoy the special occasions without guilt. You’ll be confident in the knowledge that the consequences of any dietary ‘lapse’ will be corrected within just a few days once things get back to normal.

Gain 34 lbs Of Muscle In 28 Days! May 2, 2007

I was reading some more of Tim Ferriss’ blog, and saw his recent article From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks. He has plenty of before-and-after photos to illustrate just how much of a difference this is. Amazing.

In it, he details the diet and exercise regimen he used to gain 34 lbs of muscle, while losing 3 lbs of fat, in 28 days. The diet is the same one I linked to yesterday, so I won’t repeat the details here, but the exercise program is interesting.

Basically, he only worked out twice per week. The workouts featured only a small variety of exercises (4-7 multi-joint exercises), and he did each one very slowly (5 seconds up, 5 seconds down) and repeated until failure (i.e. he couldn’t lift the weight another time) with a 3 minute break between each exercise.

I don’t have any weights or anything, but this approach sounds interesting. Any ideas for how to weight-train when you don’t own any gym equipment? Can it be done with common household items?

Post your ideas below!

How To Lose 20 lbs Of Fat In 30 Days May 1, 2007

Tim Ferriss has been popping up all over the place lately, mostly in relation to his new book The 4-Hour Workweek.

Of more interest to us here, though, he recently posted an article on How To Lose 20 lbs Of Fat In 30 Days.

His basic strategy is a “slow carb” diet with four simple rules:

  1. Avoid white carbohydrates (bread, rice, cereal, potatoes, pasta)
  2. Eat the same few meals over and over again (concentrating on proteins, legumes and vegetables)
  3. Don’t drink calories (lots of water, no juice, milk, or soft drinks)
  4. Take one day off per week (keeps the metabolic rate up – my favourite rule!)

I’m going to try this out for the next month (doing one of my 30-day trials!). I probably won’t be too strict about it, since I have to fit in with other people’s eating habits, but I’ll stick to it as much as I can. I’ve found in the past that controlling my ‘default’ diet (i.e. what I typically eat day in, day out, when nothing special is happening) is the key to permanent weight loss.

I’ve already changed my lunch from a cheese sandwich to canned tuna and beans, which seems to fill me up better as well. I’ve cut milk from my coffee again, and am drinking heaps of water. When I am served white carbohydrates, I’m only eating half as much of them as I used to and loading up on the vegies.

I’ve been doing this for about 4 days now, and my daily weight measurements have dropped 1.5 kg in that time. Time will tell whether it’s a trend or a glitch!

Julie Bonner is also trying out this diet. Good luck, Julie!

Weekly Weigh-In 2007-03-04 March 4, 2007

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What a week!

This week has been my biggest weekly weight loss ever – the only problem is, I’m not sure what I did to achieve it!

I ran, I watched what I ate, I drank heaps of water, etc. All the usual stuff that I normally do. One possible difference is that there were no ‘days off-diet’ this week. Normally I have a meal or two each week that’s a bit of a blow-out, such as a roast dinner at the in-laws or a lunch with workmates. I don’t go overboard, but they’re not exactly calorie-restricted meals, either. This week I had none of those.

Maybe I need to try doing that more often :-) .

Weekly Weigh-In 2007-02-25 February 25, 2007

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With the two big weekends (wedding and holiday) now behind me, the weight is starting to drop off again. It feels great to be back down below 90 kg on my daily weigh-ins!

Weekly Weigh-In 2007-02-18 February 18, 2007

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A slight weight gain this week. Hmm. I was expecting that, though, with the wedding last weekend and a group holiday with a bunch of other families this weekend.

I found it very easy to slip back into weight-loss-mode after each weekend, though. A couple more 10km runs and I’ll be losing weight again :-) .

Running 5 km Is Easy Now! February 15, 2007

Since doing that 10 km run last week, I’m now finding 5 km runs fairly comfortable.

In the past week I managed to complete a 5 km course I’ve struggled with in the past. The course goes up and over several coastal headlands, with a particularly hard hill leading up and around the lighthouse at the half-way point. I’ve never been able to run all the way up that hill; I have to walk for a minute or two and catch my breath.

This week, though, I ran right up and over the hill without a problem. I completed the 5 km in 29:45, which I was pretty happy with. I felt great afterwards, coming home and telling my wife what I’d been able to achieve.

Last night, I ran the same course again and did it in 26:45! I knocked a whole 3 minutes off my time! As I mentioned in Breaking Barriers, it seems that once you get it into your head that you can break a barrier, you really smash it. (Note that the 5 km run I mentioned in that post was mostly flat – I’m now running a very hilly course in close to the same time!)

Weekly Weigh-In 2007-02-11 February 11, 2007

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Another great week for running and weight loss!

The big news of the week is that I fitted into my suit for the wedding, and had a great time. I enjoyed a lot of great food, so you might notice a little ‘blip’ on next week’s weight graph :-) .

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