You must achieve three goals to lose weight and remain slimmer afterward: consume fewer calories, exercise more often and alter your behavior for the long-term. When people lose weight without making such permanent lifestyle changes, they increase their likelihood of gaining the weight back. Dropping pounds and maintaining your new healthier weight can be easier to accomplish if you make small but effective adjustments to your habits that add up continually.
Make Your Calories Count
Controlling your appetite and knowing when you are really hungry is difficult for many people who are overweight. Eating certain types of food can make you feel full for longer with fewer calories, however, which can help you better control your eating habits and weight. For instance, most fruits and vegetables contain a lot of water and fiber, yet not many calories. Water and fiber help fill you up. Eating fruits and vegetables not only makes you feel fuller, but you can eat more of such foods without adding a high amount of calories, cholesterol and fat to your diet.
Grains are another type of food that contains large amounts of filling fiber, along with a moderate number of calories and low amounts of fat. If you choose whole grains instead of refined versions, you will increase your intake of healthy carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins, as well. At the same time, you should avoid consuming excess fat, particularly saturated and trans fats, and whole dairy products because the fat they contain contributes to weight gain and health problems such as high cholesterol.
Increase Your Serving Savvy
An inability to recognize a single serving of a food is a common issue among people of all weights. Many individuals overestimate the amount of food in one serving, which leads them to consume more calories and fat at one time than they think they are. Correctly measuring exactly how much you are eating is possible if you use widely available tools. The first is the Nutrition Facts Label located on the back or side of packaged foods in retail establishments. These labels include a great deal of important nutrition information, including the size of a single serving and the amount of calories, fat and nutrients in each serving. Other useful tools for accurately measuring serving sizes include food scales and measuring cups.
Be Realistic
Weight loss is more likely to be healthy and permanent if your approach is realistic and gradual. Setting extreme or otherwise unrealistic goals for losing weight typically increases your risk of future disappointment and gaining any lost weight back later. This is because the main ways to lose weight quickly usually rely on unhealthy and possibly dangerous practices, such as cutting calories drastically or exercising too vigorously or for an extreme amount of time. When you first begin your weight loss efforts, you should focus on losing approximately 5 to 10 percent of your present weight, advises the Harvard School of Public Health. Such a moderate goal will help you to shed pounds at a safe level and rate, while also improving your overall health.
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