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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.

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!

Health And Fitness “How To” Articles September 26, 2006

Darren Rowse over at Problogger.net hosted a group writing project last week. He managed to get 343 people to write articles on the topic of “How To…”.

Quite a few of the articles were health and fitness related, so I’ve collected links to them below. Makes for some interesting reading!

Besides the interesting articles, the group writing project is also a great way to find out about other blogs on the topics you’re interested in. I spent way too much time surfing around just the sites listed above!

I Threw Out Leftover Chinese Food! July 17, 2006

Chinese restaurant signThis is probably a first for me. We had Chinese takeaway for dinner a few nights ago, and I didn’t gorge myself. I had one nice-sized plateful, and didn’t go back for seconds. It turns out, you don’t actually starve to death during the night if you do this.

The leftover food, as always, was put in the fridge. Leftover Chinese is one of the greatest breakfasts there is!

The next morning, though, the food just didn’t look that appetising to me. The thought of all those calories, the greasy sauce and the stringy meat just sapped the joy out of it. I actually preferred to eat plain old rolled oats!

I kept the containers in the fridge for a few days, you know, just in case. I considered eating it for lunch a couple of times, but chose not to.

In the end, the food got thrown out. I don’t think leftover Chinese has ever lasted more than a day in my fridge before, let alone been kept long enough to require throwing out!

The Power Of Commitment June 22, 2006

Wow, who would have guessed what a difference a “kick in the pants” would make?

On Sunday I resolved to get tough on my diet and try to get my weekly weight loss moving again. I stated that I wanted to lose 0.5 kg this week, and 1 kg next week. As it turns out, I’ve already met this week’s target, and it’s only Thursday!

My daily weight measurements for the past three days have been 91.5, 91.0 and 91.0 kg (previously they had been for a while around 92.5 or 93.0 kg), so the moving average weight loss still has some room to drop before it catches up. This should give me the momentum to reach my target next week as well, and potentially far exceed it if I keep doing what I’m doing. Fantastic!

So what have I been doing? Not a lot, really. I think what was preventing me from losing much weight over the last few weeks was that I was straying from the ‘default’ eating habits I’ve installed over the last 6 months. I’ve been bringing leftover meals to work for lunch, instead of eating my normal healthier lunch. I’ve been having slightly larger meals at night than normal. My wife has baked a few cakes and muffins in recent weeks, and I’ve been bringing them to work as snacks. I also bought lunch at work (mmm, Chinese!) a few times instead of bringing my own.

All I’ve done this week is to go back to my normal habits. I’ve been bringing my normal lower-calorie lunches to work every day again, I’ve reduced the size of my evening meals, and I bring healthy snacks to work instead of cake and muffins. It really wasn’t much effort at all, but it seems to have made a huge impact.

I don’t have much further to go before my BMI reaches 25 (it’s currently 27.6), at which point I’ll officially no longer be overweight. My medium term goal is to try to reach that point before my birthday, August 15. Time will tell!

Daily Or Weekly Weigh-Ins? May 17, 2006

I’ve seen a lot of weight loss programs that recommend you only measure weight and body fat % weekly. From what I can tell, they do that because those figures can vary so much day to day (and even within the day), that people get discouraged by the fluctuations and find it hard to “stay the course”.

The theory is that if you only measure once per week, the cumulative effect of 7 days of weight loss should overshadow the day-to-day variances and you’ll see a drop in your weight. That’s more encouraging than the swinging “Yay! D’oh! D’oh! Yay! Yay! D’oh! …” reactions you get from daily measurement.

While the idea has some merit, I think there’s a much better way.

My weight measurements can vary by as much as 4 kg (9 lbs) over a single day, and my weight loss for a week is usually about 0.7 kg (1.5 lbs). So if one week’s measurement was slightly low (say because I was slightly dehydrated at the time) and the following week’s measurement was slightly high (because I’d recently had a drink, or hadn’t gone to the toilet for a while, or whatever) then I’d be left thinking I’d ‘wasted’ a whole week on diet and exercise only to gain weight. That’d be pretty discouraging! Similarly, if I’d gone off track I wouldn’t see the result until the end of the week, and I’d do several days worth of damage before getting any feedback.

See my article on When To Weigh Yourself for more information on daily fluctuations, and what time of day to weigh yourself.

By using the Hacker’s Diet averaging technique, each day’s measurement only affects your running average by 1/10th of that day’s variance. So it takes a few consecutive ‘bad’ days before your average starts to trend up. Now instead of hoping to make every day equal to or lower than your previous day’s measurement, you’re just aiming to have more days below your average than above it. If you can do that, the average keeps going down and you’re losing weight.

Daily measurements and a focus on keeping the average trending down is a much healthier mindset. It allows you a guilt-free day off every now and then, while still reminding you to do the right thing more often than not and giving you rapid feedback if your trend starts to change.

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When To Weigh Yourself May 5, 2006

Bathroom Scales

Your body weight probably fluctuates more than you realise throughout the day. Mine can vary by up to 4 kg (9 lbs) over a single day, depending upon factors like:

So when is the best time of day to weigh yourself in order to track your weight loss progress?

I like to weigh myself every morning before breakfast, for a number of reasons:

How about you? What time of day do you weigh yourself, and why?

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Illness Helps Weight Loss April 27, 2006

I’ve just spent the last two days out of action with vomiting and diarrhoea. While not a nice experience at all, I did lose 3 kg (6.6 lbs) - more than making up for my Easter weight gain!

I’ve missed a few more days of exercising, but going off past experience that won’t affect my fitness much at all. I’m planning to go for a run tomorrow morning, as long as the threatening rain holds off.

Oh well, I’m better now and happy that this little adventure is behind me.

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Surviving A 1st Birthday Party… April 12, 2006

…with your waistline intact!

Having just survived my third daughter’s first birthday party, I thought it a good time to give some tips on making it through a party without ditching your diet and bursting your belt.

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The Physics Diet April 5, 2006

Here’s an interesting story from physicist Richard A. Muller about how he lost weight using the first law of thermodynamics: The Physics Diet.

Exercise is a very difficult way to lose weight. Here’s a rule of thumb: exercise very hard for one hour (swimming, running, or racquetball) and you’ll lose about one ounce of fat. Light exercise for an hour (gardening, baseball, or golf) will lose you a third of an ounce. That number is small because fat is a very energy-dense substance: it packs about 4,000 food calories per pound, the same as gasoline, and 15 times as much as in TNT.

His solution? Eat less.

It reminds me of a ‘miracle diet’ skit I once saw on the satirical lifestyle show Life Support. Dr Rudi had come up with an amazing new concept for weight loss - “eat less”. Everyone is so caught up in fad diets, cleansing programs, miracle weight loss cures, exercise programs, drugs, metabolic stimulation, therapy and even surgery, that it’s actually funny to hear someone suggest that eating less is an effective way to lose weight!

Of course, if you eat less you’ll need to learn how to deal with hunger. What does Muller recommend? He suggests that you think of hunger as an itch, and you should stop scratching it. He draws inspiration from Lawrence of Arabia, who said, “The trick is not minding that it hurts”.

I told myself that the mild ache was only the sensation of evaporating fat.

Remember, being fat is just as much of a choice as choosing to lose weight. You may not have consciously chosen to put on weight, but once you notice the extra pounds and do nothing about it, you’re choosing to be fat.

Anybody can lose weight. Energy is conserved. Just stop scratching that itch. Of course, you’ll have to sacrifice instant gratification. Is it worth it? You decide. Food is delicious and cheap. You might reasonably choose to take advantage of this unique historical circumstance, and decide to be fat.

Everybody already knows how to lose weight - eat right, eat less, exercise more. You don’t need a doctor or a physicist to tell you that.

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