If you get a good amount of sleep each night – I’m talking 7 – 9 hours, you’ll find you will probably end up losing weight faster than if you oversleep or deprive your body of sleeping. Sleeping lets your body rest, restore and shut down a little to process the day’s happenings etc. When you’re asleep you’re not eating. When you’re asleep, your body is processing all the waste in your bloodstream, turning it into waste product that you can remove when you wake up (hence even when you didn’t drink anything late the night before, you still need to urinate when you wake up).

So make sure you get yourself a decent night’s sleep every night to help your body to lose weight and waste.

Just because you weigh less doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ‘healthy’. Remember that muscle weighs more than fat. So if you’re working out regularly, chances are you’d have more muscle than those who don’t work out regularly.

So, basically what I’m suggesting here is, set yourself either a weight goal or a clothing size goal. If you have a perfect pair of jeans you bought back ‘before you put the weight on’ or someone gave to you thinking you were that size, try aiming to fit into them rather than aiming to fit onto the scales under a certain number.

However, either way, set yourself a goal. If you don’t use scales or clothing – you can always do the “I want to be able to see my toes without bending over” aims. Or aim to get rid of a certain bump or roll you have on your body that you’re not happy with. It’s goals that help us get to where we’re happy rather than not having a goal and mindlessly trying.

You’ll feel much better when you reach that goal too!

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.

Had a delicious eye fillet steak (least amount of gristle and fat of all the steaks) with some steamed vegetables, a side salad and a jacket potato (with the sour cream at a minimal). Ok the sour cream is pretty bad, because it was at a restaurant.. but, the good thing about sour cream is that it doesn’t soak into the potato when the potato is baked, so you can choose if you want to eat it or just scrape it onto the side. It does add a different flavour though. All those carbs, but I don’t believe carbohydrates are all that bad anyway – they just need to be consumed responsibly.

Remember, if you get the choice of mashed potato, chips or jacket potato (usually baked in alfoil with its skin still on) in a restaurant, I would probably suggest trying the jacket potato and asking (as a precaution) that no butter be used in it. That way you will only get the sour cream with it.

Chips are deep fried… so I would give them a miss.

Mashed potato in restaurants is not low in fat. To get a delicious taste, chefs usually add a lot of butter and always use full cream milk. They’re all about the taste, not the healthy side of the dish. If you’re making it at home, try what I do, a splash of low fat milk, some chopped shallots (or spring onions), and a clove of garlic. The amount is relevant to how many potatoes you put into it. If you need to, add no more than a teaspoon of butter. It’s still tasty without the extra butter or sour cream etc.

Don’t be afraid to ask for your vegetables to be cooked a certain way. No matter what restaurant I’m in, I always ask for them to come without butter. I ask for this not just because of the healthier choice but also because I tend to find the vegetables all end up tasting like butter. I don’t want them to taste like butter. I want them to taste like the delicious, low fat vegetables that are on my plate! Chefs don’t usually mind making your meal the way you want it. In my opinion, if you’re paying for it, you should get it served the way you want it.

I love this time of year! For those in one hemisphere, just coming into summer months so it’s all about the diet and keeping a low fat regime happening.. it’s an awesome time to see what kind of new things are out there – or diving back into the old slimming habits if you have any that worked!
For those in the other hemisphere, no doubt things are getting a little cold for you so keep up the water intake and try not to have TOO MUCH comfort food .. I know it’s hard to have low fat and sugar hot chocolates on those cold winter nights but hey, remember to count your calories!
Actually, interestingly, the body seems to burn more energy trying to keep itself warm so if you keep your food intake to what you had in Summer etc (hard.. I know), you shouldn’t have too much extra Winter weight on there.

Yeah – this time of year… pretty much like all times of the year… it’s common for people to start drinking more, but remember – alcohol is empty calories!!!
Plus to add to the point that folic acid absorption is greatly reduced if you’re drinking a lot!! Folic acid you say? Well.. I’ll get to that in one of my future posts! For now, keep up all the good food eating guys!

Well my birthday has recently passed and it was great. My sister took me out to a Yum Cha lunch in Chinatown in my city. It was delicious. She brought her kids along with her and we had a ball. It was delicious. Yum Cha can be a very healthy meal… depending on what you choose from the menu. It literally means “drinking tea” so, in a whole you could call it ‘Dim Sum with tea’.

Green tea (the tea you drink at a Yum Cha meal) is very good for you. From sources I’ve found, green tea is suggested to helpful with rheumatoid arthritis, high cholesterol levels (it can help lower them), impaired immune functions and cardiovascular disease. Green tea has powerful anti-oxidants and is often said to be healthier than the normal black tea that many of today’s people drink. Green tea is believed to help with your digestion as well. I believe this is why it is served at a Yum Cha lunch. You can eat the small portions of tasty food and help with your digestion at the same time.

The steamed selection is the preferred if you want to lose weight. This is pretty much a given considering you have a choice of steamed or deep-fried (including spring rolls). In my opinion, the steamed selection has a wider variety of flavours anyway so that’s naturally my choice. You can ask for a menu if you’re not sure what to order. I always make sure I order steamed vegetables (I think it’s chinese spinach). It always comes out hot and with a delicious sesame and oyster sauce.
If you can, and if you don’t mind Chinese food, I strongly recommend giving it ago. There is a large variety of flavours, comes in beef, pork, chicken and seafood and steaming food is probably one of the healthier ways of cooking. If you don’t gorge on the deep-fried stuff (including going for the steamed dumplings instead of the deep fried variety) and go for the steamed healthier selections you will come out of lunch feeling full yet not uncomfortable.