Diets Detox and Weight Loss Blog

The trouble with dieting is that you often want to eat when you don’t really need to. You get hungry because you are bored, hungry because you are eating the wrong foods, hungry because you are eating at the wrong time of the day, etc. So lets change all that by looking at why you are eating too much food and why you want to eat that much food.

1. You Are Eating The Wrong Foods

If you have your breakfast at eight and are hungry again by ten then there is a good chance you are not eating the right kind of foods in the morning. Same applies to lunch and dinner. So take a look at what you are eating! Would it count as junk food? Is it high in sugar? What you should eat more of are complex carbohydrates – foods that are hard for your body to break down. That means that it will take longer for your body to digest these foods and you will feel full the whole time that digestion process is occuring. Fiber is an excellent source of complex carbs. Most Americans eat way too little fiber and far too much sugary junk food.

If you find yourself feeling hungry all the time try adding a few of the following to your meal plans:

Brown Bread

Shredded Wheat and similar whole grain cereals

Lentils

Beans

Porridge

Pasta (brown preferably)

Potatoes

Spaghetti

Corn

Soy Milk

Onions

Apples, pears, plums, strawberries, prunes

Protein rich foods such as chicken and beef will also keep you full for quite a long time and won’t have too many calories (as long as they are not processed meats).

2. Your eating because your bored

We have all been there. ‘Hm I’m bored, maybe il go make a snack whilst i think about what i can do today..’

Its really not a good idea. Sometimes you don’t even notice yourself doing this. For a lot of people its routine. To stop you have to notice yourself doing this and then apply a lot of restrain. It really inst easy so the best thing to do is occupy yourself when you have free time. Food is not the only thing you can do for fun. Play a game, a musical instrument, watch tv or take up a new hobby. I really think eating due to boredom is up there in the top three weight gain reasons so give it the credit it deserves and avoid it.

3. Your portions are too big , your eating too fast- and whats that, your having seconds?!

It takes 10 – 15 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that it’s full. That means that if you are one of those people that shovels food down far too quickly, you are going to be eating more than you actually want and certainly more than you need – you just don’t realize it till its too late. The key then, is to slow down your eating. This will help with digestion and means by the time you finish you will actually feel full.

4. You are eating because you are depressed

I’m not a psychologist, (In fact I’m not even sure i can spell the word correctly) but a lot of people eat because they are sad or depressed. Food, unfortunately, does have a comforting effect on most people, but it wont solve anything in the long run. If you think you are eating because you are depressed talk to someone about your problems – leave a comment and i’l try helping – but its best to talk to friends or family about your problems. I know its not as simple as you talk to someone about your problems and your no longer depressed, then hey presto you start losing weight, but it will be very hard to lose weight if you dont get your self happy. So start now with a huge smile, and from now on start each day like that too! Smile and say hello to people you pass on the street or meet on the bus. It will make both you and them feel much better!

5. You are eating at the wrong times of the day

Breakfast lunch and dinner are the three meals of the day – try not to skip any of them. Eat a proper meal for each and make sure you eat them at the right times. Alternatively try eating four smaller meals a day spread evenely throughout – its the best way of keeping your metabolism going as long as a Duracell battery and it will keep you full all day through! If you are hungry in between meals have a piece of fruit – an apple or a banana are both good choices.

Here are some simple but very useful rules to follow then trying to lose weight. After that are 10 things you should not do and to look out for when on a diet. These are from my own experiences.

10 Things To Do

1.Eat 4 smaller meals a day

This spreads your calorie intake over more time and makes it manageable for your body. The 4 meals should add up to your usual amount of calories (for the diet you are on). Remember, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It kick starts your metabolism – try fibre loaded breakfasts to keep yourself full or eat a couple of pieces of fruit as a healthy alternative.

2.Drink water or eat fruit when you are feeling hungry

Swap all your sweets and chocolate for fruit, or even nuts (a good source of fibre – but don’t buy salted!). If you are still hungry down a half glass of water, or just half a glass. This will suppress your appetite till your next meal. And that brings us nicely onto..

3.Drink 8 glasses of water a day

Not only will this suppress your hunger but water helps rinse out your body of all the bad stuff, such as toxins that plague it. 8 glasses is recommended, but really it depends on your build.

4.Add a little exercise to your day

I’m not talking about going for massive runs or taking up American football. What I mean is park a bit further away from work, get off the bus a step early, don’t take the lift or escalators, walk around the room on your break. Anything you can, it will all make a huge difference even though it might not seem like it at the time – and once you get used to these things they will become second nature!

5.Eat your meals slowly

It is important to eat slowly for a good reason. It takes about 5 – 10 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that it is full. That means you could be shovelling food down for that period of time even though your full, you just don’t know it yet. So eat slowly! It will also help with your digestion if you chew your food well.

6.Cook your own meals

Supermarket microwave meals or oven box meals are out. You must buy your own food and cook it from scratch. So much rubbish goes into most of those quick meals and you have no control over it. At least when you buy and cook it all you know what’s in it! That’s good news for your health. Avoid too much salt, its bad for your blood pressure amongst other things. In fact look for a salt alternative – there are some good ones about. Whole grain foods are in, as are fresh meat, herbs spices, fish, and of course fruit and veg.

7. Eat your last meal of the day at least 3 hours before you go to bed.

You burn off calories buy moving, thinking, watching and using, but not by sleeping. Eat a big meal then go to sleep and you are just asking for weight to pile on.

8.Weigh yourself everyday.

This is not to see a pound fly off every day (as that wont happen), it is for motivation. See what you weigh and then think of what you want to weigh and want to look like. Invest in digital scales if you like, then you can see just the slightest change. If you did put on weight analyse what you did wrong (if anything) and adjust your diet so this doesn’t happen again in the future.

9.Keep a journal of your food eaten and exercise taken

There are some great free food journals on-line, such as fitday, where you will put down everything you have eaten, drunk and all the exercise you have done during a day. Then it will work out the calories you have eaten and the calories you have burned and generate stats and graphs for you to gaze at. Again, adjust if you see something not going according to plan. It is easy to find and eliminate what you are doing wrong this way.

10 Stick with your diet

This is the most important thing to do. A diet is a lifestyle change. You are not trying to look good or be healthy for the next 10 months. You are trying to change how you live life, you are trying to look good for ever, to live for longer. Stick with it. It will work.

10 Things Not To Do

1.Don’t put off starting your diet for another day.

We all love to make excuses. This time its your health we are concerned with. Forget tonight’s gorge, tonight ice cream or chocolate. Start right now! Go on!

2.Don’t think binge eating just this once is OK, and that you will never do it again.

Iv been there, iv eaten a lot and said I will make up for it the next day. But seriously, you cant make up for it in one day. It will probably take a whole week of increased exercise or dieting to make up for a huge pizza or Chinese takeaway, and it really is not worth it. If you have to, really limit your self, or better yet, cook it yourself from fresh.

3.Don’t give in to peer pressure

It doest matter how old you are, when you are with friends its hard to resist acting like everyone else. When going out for a meal it probably means having a big main course instead of a light dish or salad. Don’t listen to your friends, do what you think is right.

4.Don’t go on yo-yo diets

On and off diets are awful for your body. The more times you do this, the less effective diets become as your body gets used to them and will eventually just shrug them off. Remember, a diet is a life style change, not 90 days on 90 days off.

5.Don’t believe the fad diet hype

Fad diets don’t tend to work in the long term, even if they make you drop 12 pounds in a week. Which they wont. They are impossible to keep up because invariably they mean ridiculous eating habits such as cabbage soup only.

6.Don’t Drink too much alcohol

All alcohol is calorie laden, even spirits that look like water (vodka). On top of that, our bodies treat alcohol as poison and need food, make you crave food, to get rid of it or help absorb it (well it doesn’t literally absorb it but it has the same effect).

7.Don’t hide the fact that you are on a diet

This is very important. Tell everyone you know you are on a diet. They will almost all be supportive. You cannot hide the fact that you are on a diet or your diet will be a failure from the get go. It is not something to be embarrassed about. Losing weight and getting healthy is something to be seriously proud about.

8.Don’t set your targets too high

Short term targets that is. Do not tell your self you are going to lose 3-4 pounds a week because you wont do that each week. You may at the start, depending on your weight and water retention, but you wont all the time. And once you don’t hit that target you might feel like giving up. Set a realistic goal, a small goal. 1 – 2 pounds a week should be your usual aim, and if you don’t hit it, that’s OK – figure out where you went wrong and get back on the bike.

9 Don’t give up!

You will lose the weight as long as you stick with it. Things will go wrong, you will break some of these rules, you will snack and gorge and feel bad. But don’t give up, get back on track, analyse your mistakes, become stronger. You will get there if you keep going. Its not easy.

10.Don’t give up!

There are two good reasons I have repeated this step. One – it is the most important rule. Two – I ran out of rules. OK, there was one good reason. But seriously don’t give up and you will get there!

When feeling down look for inspirational stories on the net, or before and after pictures. Talk to friends and family. Leave comments on my blog. If you want to take up exercise find a sport you enjoy, it is the only way you will stick with it. It doesn’t have to be the best fat burning activity, just something you take pleasure from.

OK that’s it. Good luck everyone!

Any food that makes you lose more calories than you put on just by eating them are no good for an entire diet, (it would result in malnutrition) but as snack foods these things can be fantastic. These foods are also known as negative calorie foods. Usually it means the foods have calories, but so few of them that your body spends more than it gains eating and digesting them.

Celery – Quick example

Celery is a fantastic snack food. A single stick of celery contains around 4-6 calories. You will use about 10-12 eating it. Fresh celery tastes great, can be eaten raw with no preparation and will fill you up (eventually) as it contains lots of water – a great appetite suppressant.

List of Negative Calorie Foods

Berries (certain berries such as blue berries at least)

Cabbage

Celery

Cucumber

Garlic

Grapefruit

Grapefruit

Green beans

Hot Chilli’s

Lemon

Lettuce

Radish

Spinach

Tomato

Turnip

Water Melon

Cardboard (its edible just about, is negative in calories but really not recommended!)

These are most of the negative calorie foods. There are others people claim are negative calories, such as apples , peaches and plums but it seems unlikely considering they usually contain around 100 calories.

Try and replace sweets with sticks of celery, puddings with a slice of watermelon, your usual snacks with a slight salad made up of a few of the above, etc.  If you do this it will really be a bonus to your diet. Just remember not to replace proper meals with them!

Green tea is an excellent choice of drink for dieters. Why? Because supposedly it helps raise your metabolism, has excellent antioxidants properties, can make you feel full and can stop your body absorbing so much fat from foods. But how much of that is true and how good for weight loss can green tea actually be?

Green tea originates from China (as does all tea drinking) about 4000 years ago. It has long been associated with health and long life. More recently it has been linked to helping fight cancer and helping people lose weight. Many other countries now farm green tea, and Japan claim to have a particularly effective fat fighting green tea. Oprah recently had a Japanese tea promoted on her television program with claims that each cup would make the drinker lose 80 calories.

The most obvious way i see green tea effectively helping with weight loss is by people replacing their normal cups of coffee/tea/mochas etc with it. Starbucks coffee for example, will usually have at least 200 calories in it, compared with almost 0 in green tea. So if you had one cup of Starbucks coffee (or the equivalent) a day usually, and replaced it with green tea you will lose a pound of fat in a couple of week. Not bad! But nothing to do with green tea really. However, if the claims that green tea will make you lose 80 calories extra per cup, then the weight loss is really starting to add up.

The 80 calories that green tea burns come courtesy of two different “lines of attack”. The main reason being the caffeine like substance it contains speeds up your metabolism and helps your body burn fat faster. The second reason is because green tea prevents glucose from entering your fat cells. So if you drink green tea regularly throughout the day, you are going to absorb less weight throughout the day too. There could even be a third reason – it helps suppress your appetite, especially if drunk regularly during the day. That will mean you are going to eat less food than usual (hopefully less snacks).

Certain Japanese green teas are better than most others for weight loss and health purposes. Look for tea that contains “Epigallocatechin Gallate” as this is one of the agents that helps fight cancer.

So they are the main benefits of green tea for weight loss. It is also packed full of antioxidants to help clean out your body and make your skin look good. Not too mention it could help keep your heart healthy and fight cancer. Its not a miracle drink, it will not be solely responsible for you losing a ton of weight, but as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle it really will help you reach your goal!

Background

The grapefruit diet originates from 1930′s Hollywood where the stars of the day would (much like the stars of today) try any crazy sounding fad diet to lose a lot weight, quickly. The idea was to eat a couple of slices of grapefruit before each of the three main meals of the day. Your meals were meant to be Atkins type foods – high in protein low on fiber. You were also not allowed to eat any snacks in between your meals. Follow this and In ten days you would lose ten pounds! At least that was the claim. However recent studies could not prove that grapefruit really did help with weight loss and almost ruined this diet… but even more recent studies have shown that it really does make weight fly off. So does it really help? Will you really lose weight on the grapefruit diet?  Well i tried it for 10 days and have the results…

How do i go on the Grapefruit Diet? – A Days Diet Plan

Well your going to need quite a lot of grapefruits – half a grapefruit before each meal. I did not have access to enough grapefruits for my weeks plan so replaced them with a full, medium glass, of pure grapefruit juice which i was informed would work almost as well.

Breakfast

Half a grapefruit – Followed by:

Bacon and egg

or

Omelette

Lunch

Half a grapefruit – Followed by:

Chicken salad

or

Stir Fry

Dinner

Half a grapefruit – Followed by:

Salmon and veg

or

Steak, egg and salad

Additional Rules

Drink eight glasses of water each day (or there about depending on your body size.

Eat your meals slowly but eat until you are full.

No white vegetables, bread, pasta, potatoes etc.

Go on the diet for 10 or 12 days, then two day off, then 10 or 12 days again.

Results

I went on the grapefruit diet for 10 days and did not repeat and I lost ….. 5 and a half pounds! I was really pleased with this as i have about 30 pounds to lose. I did not choose to repeat because i really did not enjoy going on the atkins diet after three weeks and this is so similar… well it put me off staying on it. I think its the fiber i miss so much.

Atkins Comparison and Conclusion

Comparing it with the Atkins diet, if i recall, i lost six pounds in two weeks/14 days. So the grapefruit diet beats it, slightly. My exercise regime is pretty similar as to when i was on the Atkins diet (almost non existent :s ) as was my starting weight. So im going to go for a big conclusion here and say that grapefruit really does help with weight loss! Perhaps it was down to me being quite full when i started my meal thanks to drinking a full glass of juice and i just didn’t eat as much because of it. Or perhaps its because grapefruit gets your metabolism pumping away, or helps your stomach acids or is just a very magic fruit… Either way its worth trying, especially if you were already considering going on Atkins.