The best diet is the one you don't know you're on. In other words, small changes in what and how you eat could result in long-term weight loss.
Weight loss greater than 0.5 to 1.0 pound a week tends to make a person feel deprived. The long term result is that a person tends to gain the weight back - and then some. That is much less likely to happen when weight loss is more gradual.
Examples of a few simple changes are listed below.
The same thing works with burning calories: walking one extra mile a day is 100 calories and 10 pounds a year.
Imagine weighing 20 pounds less next year - and keeping it off permanently without ever feeling deprived.
These types of changes - getting rid of a few bad habits - can add up to permanent weight loss.
If it only were that simple.
If you burn 500 calories more than you take in every day, you will lose about a pound a week. But once you've lost roughtly 10 percent of your body weight, cutting 500 calories a day isn't enough to keep losing a pound a week because your body - afraid of starving - starts to burn fewer calories.
"The body becomes a more efficient engine," explains Rudolph Leibel, co-director of the New York Obesity Research Center at Columbia University. "It's gone from being a Cadillac to a motocycle. It's getting more miles per gallon, and it's a smaller vehicle."
What can help? Move more to burn more calories. And do strength training to build muscle (which burns more calories than fat).
In a recent study, women who gained less than 5 pounds over 13 years were active for about an hour to 90 minutes a day. Most were walking but if you do something more vigorous like running or jogging, swimming laps, or playing tennis, you can do 30 minutes. The bottom line is that 30 minutes a day will help keep the pounds off but only if it is vigorous. Since most people don't push it hard every workout every day, going to 60 to 90 minutes a day may be needed.
Contrary to popular belief, chewing and swallowing the celery does not burn the calories, rather it is the act of digesting the tough cellulose that accounts for the energy expended. The same can be said of drinking a cold, low-calorie drink -- the body burns more calories warming the liquid to body temperature than are typically consumed.
As good as this may sound, in a world where it takes 3,500 calories to work off a single pound of fat, feasting on celery would make only the merest difference.
Celery is not the only so-called negative-calorie food out there. If properly prepared, digesting cauliflower, cucumbers, spinach, and many others can cause your body to burn more calories than you ingest. But before you embark on any crash diet, just remember that your body needs a certain amount of calories per day to function. Eating some of these "negative-calorie" fruits and vegetables may help you control cravings and lose weight but should be only part of a balanced diet coupled with exercise.
And for the record, celery with peanut butter or ranch dressing does not count as a negative-calorie food!
1. Lose weight without diet or exercise!
Achieving a healthy weight takes work. Take a pass on any product that promises miraculous results without the effort.
2. Lose weight no matter how much you eat of your favorite foods!
Beware of any product that claims that you can eat all you want of high-calorie foods and still lose weight. Losing weight requires sensible food choices.
3. Lose weight permanently! Never diet again!
Even if you’re successful in taking the weight off, permanent weight loss requires permanent lifestyle changes.
4. Block the absorption of fat, carbs or calories!
Doctors, dietitians and other experts agree that there’s simply no magic non-prescription pill that will all you to block the absorption of fat, carbs, or calories.
5. Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!
Losing weight at the rate of a pound or two a week is the most effective way to take it off and keep it off.
6. Everybody will lose weight!
There is simply no one-size-fits-all product guaranteed to work for everyone.
7. Lose weight with our miracle diet patch or cream!
There is nothing you can wear or apply to your skin that will cause you to lose weight.
8. Lose weight with magic or miracle foods that burn fat.
Foods don't burn fat — they create fat when we eat more than we need.
9. Lose weight eating one kind of food.
Watch out if the diet emphasizes bizarre quantities of only one food or type of food, such as eating only tomatoes or beef one day or unlimited bowls of cabbage soup or grapefruit. These foods
are fine as part of an overall healthy diet, but eating large quantities of them could lead to unpleasant side effects — like intestinal gas, bloating, flatulence and bad breath — as well as nutritional imbalances that could seriously impact your health. Emphasizing only one food or food type is also boring and often leads to disappointment when a person can't stay on this unrealistic type of diet.
10. Lose weight without exercise!
Simple physical activities, like walking or riding a bike, are one of the most important ways to lose weight and maintain weight loss. Yet many "fad" diets don't emphasize these easy changes. Any increase in physical activity will help you burn more calories.
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