Dieting does not have to be frustrating, confusing or hard. When it comes to weight loss, a well-rounded healthy diet with an awareness of calories will lead to results. Add exercise to the equation, and you have a fool proof guide to losing 10 lbs.
Nutrition
Contrary to popular belief, dieting can be tasty, not bland or boring. The key is eating a wide variety of natural foods. Avoid processed foods; these simple, easily digested carbohydrates interfere with weight loss and promote weight gain. Instead, eat fruits and vegetables. Try seasonal and locally grown fruits for a fresher taste, which will also help to break up the redundancy when dieting. Eat healthy monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats from nuts, seeds, avocados and olive oil. Daily intake of these healthy fats promotes healthy and sustained weight loss. When losing weight, protein intake becomes even more important, since protein is responsible for building and preserving lean muscle mass. You want to make sure that the 10 lbs you lose is fat, not muscle.
Caloric Intake
Even though your diet is made up of foods to promote weight loss, you still need to monitor the amount of calories you consume daily. Eating more calories than your body needs will lead to weight gain, regardless of the source of the calories, the Harvard School of Public Health warns.
Resources
Before you begin cutting calories out of your diet to lose weight, you first need to know how many calories your body needs to maintain your current weight. Online resources are available to help you determine how many calories you should consume each day. The American Heart Association provides a general chart based on age, gender and activity level. The calorie calculator provided by Ask the Dietitian also takes into consideration current weight, height and more specific choices for activity levels. You also have the option to include your body fat and hip-to-waist ratio when calculating your needed calories.
Time Frame
Healthy weight loss is no more than 2 lbs. per week. For this kind of weight loss, you need to create a 1,000 calorie deficit in your diet daily. If you find that cutting 1,000 calories out of your diet is too demanding, decrease your weight loss goals to 1 lb. per week, or add exercise. Eating 500 calories less and exercising to burn 500 calories will have the same effect on weight loss.
Misconceptions
Do not fall victim to the claims of extreme and fad diets. These diets often promote unhealthy caloric intakes and fast, extreme results. These types of diets can only be sustained for a very short period since the demands of the diet are so strict, limiting and void of healthy nutrition. Though weight is initially lost, once a normal diet resumes the weight returns. This begins a vicious circle of what is called yo-yo dieting.
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