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If you're setting out to lose weight, here are some tips. Acknowledgements to World's Healthiest Foods for most of the nutrition facts given here.
Body mass index (BMI) is the standard measure of whether you are overweight. It works by comparing your weight to your height according to a mathematical formula. Go to an online body mass index calculator and find out your body mass index if you don't already know it. This will indicate how much excess weight you have for your height. To find your goal weight, use a BMI chart. You should be aiming for a BMI in the low 20s. (Be aware, though, that if you are very muscular BMI may not be an accurate measure.)
The reason you have extra weight is that you have been eating food that your body doesn't immediately use. In other words, there is more energy supply than there is demand. Your body is descended from generations of bodies that couldn't rely on this being true in the future as well, so the extra energy supply is put in a "warehouse", stored for later use – and "later" has not yet come.
To lose weight, you need to stimulate your body to use up this stored energy. This is done by a combination of reducing your intake of food, eating different foods which won't be stored as readily, and increasing your metabolic rate (the rate at which you use energy). You increase your metabolic rate through exercise, through eating foods which help the metabolic process, and through using hypnosis to tell the parts of your brain that control metabolism that they need to wake up their ideas. (That's where I come in – for that, and for helping your motivation to start the healthy food and exercise and stick to it.)
The excess energy you've built up is stored in two different ways. The way that's more quickly accessible to your body is as glycogen, and this must be used first before the rest of the energy – stored as fat – gets broken down and used up in turn.
This means that when you start to lose weight, you are losing the glycogen, and because this is easy to break down the process goes relatively quickly. However, once you have burned all the glycogen, your weight loss will slow down because getting energy from fat is a slower process. It's like you've cleared out the supplies at the front of the warehouse, and now you're getting things out of long-term storage where it takes more maneuvering. If you know to expect this slowing down, you won't be as likely to give up and regain the weight.
Slow weight loss is good weight loss. If you lose weight too quickly, your body will panic and try to get it back – it thinks you're going to starve to death. And when you regain weight after losing it, the proportion of lean mass to fat mass can be changed and this can make it harder to lose that weight again in the future, as explained in this article.
Tracking your weight loss can be motivational (though be aware that sometimes your weight may go up instead of down for a short time). Fridge Graph is one free online service where you can track your progress.
If a particular food is not in your house (or your car, or at your desk, or wherever), you can't eat it. If you don't buy it in the first place, it won't be there.
Read over the tips below. Have the healthiest snack you can rustle up out of the food you have already, so that you're not feeling hungry when you go shopping – a hungry shopper is more likely to buy instant-gratification food. Then go out and buy good, healthy food. Give your less healthy food away to someone who doesn't care, and don't buy any more.
Always eat breakfast, and a good one. Don't skip this or any other meal.
My recommended breakfast (for anyone, not just people losing weight – I eat this myself every morning):
With breakfast, drink some caffeine-free green tea without milk, and a large glass of water.
It's pleasant and interesting to eat, it's very nutritious, simple to prepare, relatively cheap, and it has a low glycaemic index (meaning that your body burns it slowly over several hours.)
Good things here are:
One of the secrets of weight loss is to keep your "gorge signal" from tripping off. By eating a number of small, but healthy snacks through the day, you keep your blood sugar from dropping and signalling to your brain that it needs to eat a big, sugary meal right now or bad things will start to happen. The problem with eating refined sugar is exactly this: because your body processes it out of your bloodstream very quickly, you'll soon want more, and the excess gets stored.
Instead, keep plenty of fruit on hand. Fruit sugars are absorbed more slowly, and fruit contains fibre, which is filling and slows down the digestive process. By starting a meal with a piece of fruit, you give the body signals which will result in lowering your appetite so you end up eating less.
Pears are very good, and also keep well. They are high in fibre, and promote healthy cardiovascular and digestive systems, and contain antioxidants (preventing cell damage). Apples have all the same benefits and more, also having anti-cancer properties.
Dried fruit like dried apricots (mentioned above) and prunes, which are dried plums, are also excellent for snacking. Prunes slow the digestion and delay the absorption of glucose, helping to prevent overeating by giving you a "full" feeling. They lower cholesterol and blood pressure, contain antioxidants, and improve iron absorption, giving you a feeling of energy and well-being.
Nuts and seeds are also good snacking foods. Some people who are losing weight avoid them because they have a lot of calories, but counting calories doesn't tell the whole story. Almonds, in particular, have been shown to promote natural, healthy changes to people's diets and are very good for heart health, as are most other nuts and seeds. Walnuts eaten in the evening may promote better sleep, which is important for weight loss.
A sandwich is fine for lunch, but replace white bread with wholemeal – it contains more fibre (and far more nutrients) and is absorbed more slowly. There are clearly demonstrated benefits for both general health and weight from switching entirely to whole grains rather than the highly processed versions. This includes pasta as well as bread.
On the wholegrain sandwich or pasta, try putting:
Most of the things recommended for lunch are also good for dinner, and vice versa.
Chicken is a good lean meat with plenty of vitamin B6 for metabolic regulation. Get free-range chicken if you can. It's more expensive, but quite apart from ethical issues, it tastes better and contains more nutrients (and fewer artificial hormones and antibiotics).
A bean salad or side dish of beans is a good source of fibre, and combined with whole-grain rice or pasta offers almost fat-free, high-quality protein. Beans are good for the digestive system and the heart and help stabilize blood sugar levels. They help the metabolic (energy-producing) process by providing iron, thiamine and manganese.
Broccoli is packed with vitamins C, K and A, has excellent properties for protecting against cancer and heart disease, and boosts the immune system.
It's important to have a varied diet that you enjoy. Check out the World's Healthiest Foods list and see what appeals to you. The keys are:
The occasional treat of chocolate or whatever is OK. If you try to stay off it entirely, you may just find that you fall off the wagon all at once and binge, so better to let yourself have a small amount now and again and not feel guilty about it. Just make sure that you don't get back into the cycle of sugar boost-sugar crash, by eating well and regularly throughout the day.
I'm a bit of a campaigner against using caffeine, whether in tea, coffee, cola or energy drinks. It switches the metabolism over from sugar to fat, and is a diuretic (makes you pee). Well, isn't that a good thing if you're trying to lose weight? Not really. You see, caffeine achieves this by messing with your metabolism at a fairly fundamental level; it also gives a false feeling of vitality, not connected to the real state of your body, followed by a crash. In large quantities, it makes you nervous and anxious. I always recommend to anxious clients that they knock off caffeine, and replace it with large amounts of water. Gradual withdrawal will reduce the unpleasant symptoms that can come with giving it up suddenly. For more information, refer to caffeinedependence.org.
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