How to Follow a Few Basic Principles to Lose Weight

To lose weight without dieting you need to follow a few basic principles and stick to them. No one likes to diet. We all love the foods we crave. We crave sugar and fat because these are the things that are hard wired into our brains as the foods that will have the most calories and keep us alive. Well we are not out in the wilderness anymore so we have to develop other strategies to trick our brains and ourselves into eating differently.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Don’t make eating an Olympic sport. The first one who cleans there plate does not win. Eat leisurely and eat with someone. Make it a point of having conversation during the meal. That way you won’t wolf down your food unless you can easily be intelligible with a mouthful of food. You will also fill up more quickly because it takes awhile for our brains to register that we are full.

2. Eat off of smaller plates. The French do and they are thin. It’s one of the reasons they are thin. They eat less but they do not deprive themselves of the goodies that Americans do when we diet.

3. If you go out to eat in a restaurant, share your meal with your dining partner or ask for half your meal to go into a doggie bag right up front. This will take away the temptation to eat the whole thing.

4. As Michael Pollan says eat less and mostly plants. Eating vegetable are not only good for you but you will lose weight if you eat more of them. Also, eat them first so that you are filling up on the stuff that is good for you and leaving the mash potatoes (sorry they are a vegetable, but are mostly sugar), bread, meat, and dairy products last. You’ll eat less of them if you are too full from the veggies.

5. Eat smaller portions throughout the day. Don’t starve yourself and then eat a huge meal later in the day. That will only tell your fat cells to store fat because they are being deprived.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't eat after 8pm. People who do tend to gain weight.
• Of course exercising will help change your metabolism, but eating differently is really the key.

[godfather25]

on 11/14/2009 Great tips on losing weight.