Losing Weight Successfully – My Top 10 Tips
On January 1st of 2014 my husband and I made the commitment to eat healthy and to lose some weight. While many of you may think we did this as a New Year’s resolution, that is only partly true.
The real reason we made this commitment is because we are older now & health problems are creeping in. On top of that, Jenelle is getting married on September 6th and we wanted to slim down & look good for the wedding.
Today I wanted to share some tips with all of you on how we are successfully losing the weight. Perhaps some of these tips will help those who are looking to do the same.
1. We now drink water or flavored water (we flavor it ourselves) as most of our beverages. We dumped the high calorie soft drinks, diet soft drinks, high calorie juices, etc. If we drink juice, we make it ourselves with our juicer.
2. Snack Food Weekends! We keep all of our junk food (snack foods) locked up until the weekend. When we do get it out on the weekend, we only have small portions in moderation.
3. Five days during the week we enjoy healthy snack foods such as granola, low-fat yogurt, low-fat polish ice, sunflower seeds, nuts, veggie sticks, 30 calorie whole fruit popsicles and fresh fruit. It took us awhile to get used to this…but now when we snack, we are going for the healthier choices.
4. Desserts! Oh my…we had dessert every day after our dinner for years. Just the way I used to cook & feed my man. For the past 6 months…we still enjoy desserts but ONLY twice a week and ONLY low-cal dessert options. One of hubby’s favorites is low-cal, sugar-free gelatin molds with fresh fruit and 5 calorie whipped cream topping.
5. Increased physical activity! This doesn’t have to mean working out & hitting a gym! We burn calories by staying busy with cleaning the house, working on home remodeling projects, gardening, yard work, taking walks through the neighborhood and so forth. If you are on the couch…you are not burning calories but storing fat. You would be amazed at how many calories you can burn by just walking around your home running the vacuum, dusting, doing the laundry, loading the dishwasher, cleaning the bathrooms, etc. Plus, our house has never been cleaner!!!
6. This next tip mostly applies to me since I work at home and on the computer. Every hour that I work online…I have to take a 15-20 minute break & get up and move around. During these break sessions I get up and do some cleaning, go outside & water the garden, whatever. Just as long as I am moving around. If you don’t take frequent breaks from the computer you are doing your body damage plus you are NOT burning calories. You are messing up your metabolism, so take frequent breaks!
7. When hungry and it is NOT meal time yet…we will chew on ice or drink ice cold water. A lot of time that is enough to hold us over until meal time. Hubby will also from time to time enjoy bubble gum…just so he is chewing something which curbs his hunger pangs until mealtime.
8. Just don’t buy it at the grocery store! If you don’t buy bags of potato chips, cookies, cakes, pies, doughnuts, boxes of ice cream, etc. It won’t be in your home to eat! When hungry, you will be forced to eat what is there!
9. Limit buying food out! In other words, we really cut down buying takeout and eating out in restaurants. When we do it now, we look for low-cal healthier options. The ONLY time we deviated from this was during our 2-week vacation.
10. Limit buying convenience foods! Frozen pizzas, lasagna dinners and other prepared frozen foods like Swanson’s Hungry Man dinners are loaded with calories & preservatives that your body doesn’t need! Heck, we saw a frozen burrito in the frozen section a few months ago that was 545 calories for one burrito! Are you kidding me?
Since adopting these tips and using them for the past 6 months, I have lost 17.4 lbs. and my husband has lost 38.6 lbs. Not too shabby for making the easy changes above!