1 EAT BREAKFAST EARLY
• Eating breakfast early kick starts your metabolism, boosts energy levels and helps control your appetite for the rest of your day.
• During sleep, your body processes the last meal you ate the evening before. Waking up with an empty stomach and continuing your daily activities may be a struggle without replenishing your energy. A healthy breakfast refuels the glycogen stores in the body that supply blood sugar.
• Starting with breakfast can also encourage your metabolism to work, thus expending calories. The key to any weight-loss goal is consuming fewer calories than your body can burn in a day.
• Eating breakfast first thing in the morning will reduce the likelihood that you will find yourself making poor choices at the vending machine at work. Moments of weakness occur when hunger is unbearable.
2 SWOP THE BAGEL FOR EGGS
According to the International Journal of Obesity, individuals who ate eggs for breakfast instead of bagels had a significantly greater reduction in body fat. The egg-eating group in this study also had a greater success rate in losing weight when the healthy breakfast was combined with a reduced-calorie diet throughout the day.
3 DON’T STARVE
Many people try starving themselves in order to cut calories and hopefully lose weight. Starving, however, results in the opposite happening. If you reduce your calories too much, or don’t eat for long periods of time, your body decreases its metabolism and stores fat, and this can lead to cravings.
4 BEWARE OF LIQUID CALORIES – THEY ADD UP
Liquids like fruit juice, sweetened fizzy cold drinks, and milky drinks (including coffee) can add significant amounts of calories to your daily intake. One can of a soft drink equates to about eight teaspoons of sugar. One mega cappuccino contains 12 grams fat, while one cup of fruit juice contains six teaspoons of sugar!
5 REPLACE FATTY RED MEAT WITH FAT-FREE PROTEIN-LIKE LEGUMES
Enjoy more meals made with beans, peas and lentils, such as baked beans in tomato sauce, vegetarian chili, bean burritos, three-bean salad or falafel. Add beans, peas or lentils to soups and salads.
6 CHECK THE FAT CONTENT
Read package labels and choose lower fat versions of salad dressings, frozen foods, cream soups, etc. To be called “low fat”, a food must contain less than three grams of fat per 100g/ml.
7 SPICE IT UP MINUS THE FAT
Flavour foods without adding fat by using lemon, salsa, mustard, ketchup, herbs and spice.
8 SWAP BREAD FOR TORTILLAS
One tortilla equates to the same amount of carbohydrate as a third of a slice of bread.
9 WATCH PORTION DISTORTION
A simple practical guideline to use for your dinner plate is:
• 1 fist or ? plate whole grain, unrefined carbohydrate.
• 1 fist or ? plate lean protein.
• 2 fists or half plate vegetables.
(Remember to count starchy vegetables as carbs rather than vegetables).
10 TRACK YOURSELF
Use handy tools like downloading applications on your cell phone to track your eating, exercise and progress. Check out Mynetdiary.com or Fatsecret.com.