Nowhere is it written that, to lose weight, you must drink stuff that tastes like cardboard, exercise ‘til you drop, eat nothing but leafy vegetables and/or any of the other dreary tips and advice you’ll get about how to lose weight fast.
Part of the problem is our idea of fast weight loss. There are ways for you to lose weight safely and relatively quickly. But when you put weight loss on a tight schedule, you reduce your chance for long-term success and you potentially put your health at risk.
Quick weight loss usually means making fairly drastic changes to your diet and levels of activity. But it’s those sorts of changes that make weight loss seem like a difficult and daunting task. And that reduces your chances of sticking with it and reaching your goals.
Don’t Eat Less – Eat Smarter
If you change your mindset from “gotta lose weight fast” to “gotta lose weight long-term”, you begin to give yourself a better chance of weight loss success.
Start by eating smarter, not necessarily less. Set reasonable deadlines. And if you don’t reach your goals, that’s OK. Keep going. Don’t let the schedules beat you.
Below are three ways you can eat smarter while enjoying foods that are off-limits on most fast weight loss diets: fast food, snacks and sugar.
Fast Food:
There are some obvious ideas, like choosing healthier fast food outlets. But even at a place like McDonald’s, a quick look at their nutrition table shows you can beat the calories while still eating foods similar to what you had before.
- Premium McWrap Chicken Sweet Chili (Crispy): 540 calories
- Premium McWrap Chicken Sweet Chili (Grilled): 380 calories
Same dish, except one’s ‘crispy’ and one’s ‘grilled’. But the grilled variety has about 30% fewer calories.
Snacks:
Snacking is the sneaky enemy of even the best weight management programs. You can eat a healthy, balanced diet all day long and ruin it all with unhealthy snacking.
Smarter snacking means reducing snacks that offer empty calories and high levels of salt, fat and sugar. Fresh peanuts, trail mix and low-salt popcorn are healthier snack choices. If you absolutely need a fix of salt, throw some pretzels in with Cheerios and Shreddies to make your own Bits ‘n’ Bites.
- Eat the Same Foods, but with Less Sugar – The more sugar you avoid, the better. But, if you have a sweet tooth and swear off sugar cold turkey, you can set yourself up for a
binge and the disappointment that follows. Instead, look for ways to continue eating similar foods, but adjust what you eat slightly to get less sugar.
Here are just two quick examples from the grocery store:
- Danone DanActive Drinkable Yogurt – Danone offers two varieties of DanActive, regular and low-sugar. Regular DanActive varieties have 10g of sugar, or about two and a half teaspoons, in each 93ml container. That’s about 75% of the sugar that’s in a Coke. Low-sugar DanActive, which is sweetened with sucralose, has 3g of sugar, less than one teaspoon, in a container.
- Campbell’s Healthy Request Soups – You’d think that anything called ‘Heathy Request’ and carrying the Heart & Stroke Foundation’s ‘Health Check’ seal of approval would be fairly healthy all around. But not when it comes to sugar. In a great example of finding excessive quantities of sugar in places where you’d least expect it, Healthy Requests’ Tomato Garden Vegetable variety has just short of six teaspoons of sugar in one can. If you switch to Healthy Request’s New England Clam Chowder, you will only get about one teaspoon of sugar from a can. That’s over 83% less sugar.
The approach to long-lasting, healthy weight loss is almost completely opposite to fast weight loss. Eating smarter is just a start. You will need to eventually make some sacrifices that don’t seem easy. But by starting with smaller, smarter adjustments, you make it easier to accomplish the bigger goals. Your local Herbal One weight loss and nutrition expert has the answers you need to help you reach and maintain your long-term weight loss goals.
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