Get yourself a set of reliable scales and weigh yourself first thing in the morning.. preferrably after you’ve been to the toilet, before you have breakfast. Weighing yourself throughout the day just shows you how much you’ve eaten and how much water you’ve taken etc. Weighing in the morning is the best way to see how much your weight changes each day, before you start eating, drinking and going about your normal daily activities. It’s a good idea to write it down in a table. I do this and I find it gives me a good indication of how my weight loss is going. If you take it at different times of the day, you’ll get an unrealistic view of your weight loss progress so first thing in the morning is best.

I can tell you from experience that it’s not just a low fat diet that’s going to help you lose weight.

It’s also the way you live your life, the amount of exercise you do and so forth.

If you work at a desk all the time, there are still exercises you can do - although they shouldn’t replace a full-blown exercise session but they can help you out when you have a busy week trying to get that deadline in!

If you can stand up and you’re reading something etc, try doing some squats beside your desk every 20 minutes. Doing exercise helps increase your concentration as well so you’ll find it will help your work (or study) too. The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn per minute so if you can do little things you’ll find it’ll help you a lot. Try lifting your arms off the desk to type instead of resting your elbows on the table. If you’re reading something, try lifting your arms up until the lactic acid hits your arms and you can’t keep them up anymore. Try tensing your leg, stomach and butt muscles while you’re sitting at your desk. If you’re allowed to have music, try using one side of your brain to study or work and the other side to tense to the beat. I like to lift my legs up off the floor and try holding them up as long as i can, in the same position as if they were on the floor, but they’re not supported by the floor so you’re burning calories. If you concentrate for a minute or two on the exercise, you’ll find your body will do it subconsciously after a while.

Over the course of a day, you’ll find all these extra small activities will add up to more calories burned than just sitting there.

There is a theory out there about cold weather and what it does to our calorie burning. I tend to believe this one over the hot weather version.
The theory is that you burn more calories in cold weather (or just in the cold) than you do in hot. The reason is your body needs to work to maintain it’s steady 37C core temperature. When you’re out in the cold and you’re shivering because you’re cold and you get goosebumps, they are ways that your body is saying it’s cold and is trying to warm itself up. It takes a fair amount of energy to warm up water. Now, since our bodies are mostly made up of water, it takes a lot of energy to warm up the water in our bodies and to maintain that temperature. I’ve been trying the theory out of standing out in the cold doing my exercises.. I’m definitely not saying to the extent where I’m harming myself by giving myself a cold or the sniffles from being out in the snow or the rain.. No. Just on a clear, calm day when there isn’t a wind chill problem. Don’t treat unhealthy ‘cold’ weather as a good plan.. use your common sense.
The other theory, and one that I enjoy doing, is drinking cold water burns more calories than drinking room temperature. Same general theory exists here. It takes a lot of energy to warm cold water, so when you drink it, it takes your body more energy - essentially more calories, to heat up the ingested water to a suitable body temperature level so that it can be digested properly. We’re not talking like 2 times the calories by working out in the cold (or just standing in it)… but there is a slight difference. Makes sense to me… and I studied science at uni!

That’s right! I was doing some research online with low fat information searches and calorie burning and I came across about 50 sites (found in the search.. so I know it’s not just one person’s “assumption”) talking about negative calorie food. What is it you may ask? In a nutshell, the negative calorie food is low fat food (pretty much vegetables and fruit from what I’ve found) that makes you burn more calories digesting it than the amount of calories you get from eating it! So, in a whole, you burn more calories than you eat. We all know vegetables are healthy, but I’d never worked out quite why (I’m not talking about the low fat values and low carbohydrates they have). Here’s a list of some of the vegetables and fruits I found that have the ability to burn more calories digesting than ingested.

asparagus
broccoli
carrot
cauliflower
hot chili peppers
cucumber
garlic
green beans
zucchini
apple
cranberries
grapefruit (also good to increase metabolism)
orange
pineapple
raspberries
strawberries
lettuce
onion
spinach

Just looking at the list, you know that these fruits and vegetables are healthy anyway - now there’s another reason! If you eat these, it will help you to lose weight. It’s pretty much a given… provided you’re not eating all the other nasty things out there on top of it thinking it will balance out.