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The 7 Best Weight Loss Tips

We scoured the self-help literature and found the cream of the crop to help you shed that flab.

If you’re reading this, you probably want to lose a few pounds yourself or help someone you love lose weight –– and this is certainly not the first article on weight loss you’ve stumbled upon. With obesity now epidemic in our country, there is no shortage of advice, programs, and products designed to help people who are overweight. This makes it difficult to weed out what’s really useful and effective. And who isn’t sick of hearing that the way to lose weight is to reduce calories and increase activity?

Good news: We dug deep to find the best tips for people who want to lose weight. Print this page, put it on your fridge, and get going!

1. Stick to measuring tape. When it comes to shedding body fat, the scale is not always your friend. Consider this: The best way to slim down is to simultaneously change your eating habits and increase physical activity. Exercising, however, builds muscle mass –– which is a good thing. Muscle tissue is more metabolically active than other body tissue, so the more you have, the more calories your body burns at rest. However, you have probably heard that muscle weighs more than fat. So, if you lose a pound of fat and gain a pound of muscle, what will you see on the scale? Your weight could actually go up! The measuring tape, on the other hand, can’t lie. As you lose body fat, you lose inches around your waist, hips, thighs and your upper arms. Eventually, you won’t even need the tape. Your skinny jeans will tell you all you need to know.

2. Choose soup. Ever notice how surprisingly full you feel after a bowl of soup? A bowl of any broth-based soup, especially one with veggies and beans — try kale, onion, and white beans — can be a great strategy for weight loss. Make soup a habit for lunch or dinner every day, adding a piece of whole-grain bread every other day. You can get in a lot of healthy ingredients and find yourself so satisfied you don’t even need that mid-afternoon or late-night nosh.

3. Learn from former smokers. Changing your eating habits to lose weight can be a lot like quitting smoking. It’s all about dodging those cravings instead of indulging them. So when you’re considering that pasta dish or some mouth-watering dessert, try these craving busters smokers use:

• Count to 30 … in a very short time, a craving will usually subside.
• Visualize … your thinner, toned body, looking great in a pair of shorts and a form-fitting tee shirt.
• Adopt a substitute habit … of course, make it a healthy or at least neutral one, such as drinking tea (use the loose-leaf kind for the ceremony of it), chewing sugarless gum, etc.
• Change your routine … fill your time differently so you’re more aware of eating. If you’re a TV-time muncher, put on exercise clothes when you get home, and do stretches, leg lifts, and crunches while you watch TV.
• Just say never … smokers have to commit to never, ever taking another drag of a cigarette. Although we can’t give up eating entirely, for some people, it is helpful to “just say no” to one unhealthy food or ingredient that is a significant contributor to their weight problem.
  

4. Address your mental state. Without realizing it, many people use food as a comfort, distraction, pleasure, or as a buffer for stress and other negative emotions. Similar to smokers and alcoholics, some people are psychologically “addicted” to food, and they use it as a way of self-medicating an underlying problem. If you think you habitually use food to make yourself feel better, talk to a mental health counselor, who can help you determine whether you’re a candidate for an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication.

5. Add to your repertoire. Instead of focusing on the things you must limit or deny yourself in order to lose body fat, celebrate new foods that you can add to shake up your meal plans. Try to adopt a new whole grain, fruit, or vegetable every week. Maybe it’s kasha (buckwheat groats), spaghetti squash, or papaya. Keep a running list of favorites that you can refer to when you find yourself drifting back to broccoli and carrots.

6. Choose foods that take time. This is a great tip for anyone trying to lose some weight, but especially for people who eat too fast (a surefire way of consuming too many calories without realizing it). While expanding your culinary repertoire to include more healthy choices, add foods that force you to slow down. Think of foods you have to peel or pick apart — artichokes, pomegranate, kiwi, crab and other shellfish, or even a hard-boiled egg.

7. Retrain your taste buds. It is a well-known fact that when people give up salt, even lightly salted foods begin to taste terribly over-salty. The same is true for people who give up sugar — things start tasting cloyingly sweet. (This makes a good case for giving up diet soda and other artificially sweetened foods and drinks. Without them, your taste buds will adjust to not needing as much sweetness.) Now, extend this concept to foods made with white flour, and you may find yourself losing your taste — or at least your cravings — for white breads, bagels, rolls, pasta, and the like.


Reviewed by Susan Weiner, R.D., M.S., C.D.E., C.D.N. 3/08