Do You Find Healthy Eating & Losing Weight To Be A Challenge?
Losing weight is never an easy task, especially when there’s thousands of so called miracle diets on the internet which funnily enough never seem to return any sort of positive results, with the exception of completely cutting down on what you eat with the odd stick of broccoli here and there.
Losing weight doesn’t have to be an impossible job though, it’s just important to follow these simple steps.
Tip #1 - Always make sure you’re in a calorie deficit.
If you’re one of our regular readers of our blog pages, you’ll probably have already seen this information a few times from some of the Personal Trainers and Athletes. Now as important as this information is, what actually is a calorie deficit? A calorie deficit is where you consume less calories compared to the amount required to maintain the current body weight. To calculate the amount of calories you should be consuming, try and track the amount of calories you’ve burned off, such as using an iWatch, FitBit or other monitoring device. The amount displayed on there then needs to be added onto the average amount required to maintain a healthy body weight, which is 2,500kcal (10,500kJ) a day for men and around 2,000kcal a day (8,400kJ) for women. These are only averages though, so won’t be 100% correct, but are a useful base to guide to plan your meals and exercise around.
Tips #2 - Incorporate more fruit and veg into your diet
The biggest issue when it comes to dieting and trying to lose weight is that most participants are usually still hungry after they’ve eaten their meals, and can’t seem to fight off that feeling of hunger. Now although they’re not usually the most filling, you can help to trick the brain into thinking you’ve actually eaten more due to the motion of putting it into your mouth and consuming it. These foods are also high in fibre, meaning you can also lose weight at a higher rate…if you know what I mean. Adding more vegetables onto your plate each meal as well will make the plate look bigger, automatically helping you to add less carbohydrates and fatty food alongside it.
Tip #3 - Alter your snacks
Similar to the previous tips, snacking and the urge is a big issue when it comes to dieters, mainly because they don’t feel full with their new look meals. However, just because you’re trying to lose weight and be good, doesn’t mean you can’t still snack and have little nibbles here and that. Instead of binging on chocolate bars and sweets whilst watching the tele, try eating a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts. A lot of people find snacking on fruit can help to reduce to cravings for something sweet, such as MyFreshBox Athlete Joe Leyland who actually says this in his article where he answers our questions.
Tip #4 – Treat yourself, but not all the time!
When most people here of allowing a cheat day into their diet, they set aside one day a week in which they’ll go crazy and order a massive takeaway. However, there isn’t any real proof that incorporating a cheat day into your diet helps, ‘refeeds’ are useful for professionals within the weight watching industry but that’s a completely different matter. When it comes to rewarding yourself for your hard work, I’d advise having this once a fortnight at most. Most places that offer weight support that suggest to do a weekly cheat day, are usually saying that to in fact stunt your weight loss, meaning you stay signed up and paying for their service for longer. However, it can seem like a long journey of non-stop dieting and eating food that you don’t particularly enjoy, so it’s not wrong to reward yourself with a takeaway here or there, but make sure you have been good in-between, and try and limit what you choose from these places, as essentially you could just be undoing all of the hard work from the previous week.
Tip #5 - Switch out the sugar
One massive weight loss tip that I found worked for me was to switch from drinking full fat drinks to their sugar-less (or reduced) counterparts. I used to be a big drinker of Coke and Pepsi, so I opted to switch to their ‘Diet’ versions, and it ended up with me preferring the taste of them over the regular drinks. Although they’re still not good for you, they do contain less calories, making them more appropriate for people that are trying to shred down and burn a few pounds. If you want to go to the next level, you could try swapping out fizzy drinks for juice based drinks, such as cordial which is mixed with water, and even drinking straight water if you enjoy its taste as being the next step.
Tip #6 - Ditch the typical nights out
Everyone will have a different picture of the usual night out, but you know which ones I mean, a beer fuelled boogie ending with a big kebab. Now the end of that sentence right there is the issue. I’m not trying to save don’t go out and enjoy yourself, but when you do try and moderate what you drink, as a lot of the alcoholic beverages that most people drink are high in calories, so have a look beforehand (when sober!) and see what other alternatives there may be, and try and avoid raiding the chip shop before bed.
Tip #7- The Big One
Now Tip #7 and probably the most important tip there can be. Make sure the diet you choose to follow is maintainable, and most importantly you enjoy doing it. Dieting isn’t going to be easy, and most of the time you don’t enjoy doing it, which is why probably why you ended up packing it in. but there’s no point in choosing a diet routine where you plan on eating only 1 chicken salad each day and that it, because for 99% of us that’s just not attainable at all. So instead, choose something that’s got all the calories counted for you and can offer delicious food. This way you know exactly how much you’re putting into your body, allowing you to orientate your workouts around this information and ensure you’re losing weight whilst still eating tasty meals.
