How to Lose Weight

There are a few good eating habits that will help you cut calories and stick with your diet.

Eat Little and Often

This is the change that will help you most in sticking with your diet and losing weight. It is beneficial in many ways. The western tradition of three big meals a day results in the body going through peaks and troughs of energy supply. It is better to give your body a steady supply of energy by eating less but more often.

When it comes to dieting, eating three meals a day will leave you feeling tired and hungry for long periods. After you eat your breakfast, you will have to wait four or five hours before your lunch and then another four or five hours before your evening meal. You will be hungry and longing for your next meal for much of the day. You are just making it difficult to stick to your diet.

If you change your eating habits and eat five or six small meals a day you will have a steady supply of energy, feel less hungry and have less wait between meals.

We have already discussed how important it is to avoid entering starvation mode. Eating regular small meals will help. When your body has a calorie deficit and is hungry for long periods, it will be more inclined to enter starvation mode. By eating regular meals, you help to convince your body that it is still receiving plenty of nutrition.

Digesting food uses quite a lot of calories. It may be that by eating more often you increase your metabolism because your body is spending more time digesting food. However, research on this is inconclusive. It has not been clearly proved that digesting six small meals uses more calories than digesting the same amount of food eaten as three large meals.

Don't Skip Breakfast

One common myth is that you can skip breakfast. This is not a good idea. When you sleep, you are effectively fasting for eight hours or more. When you wake up, your blood sugar levels are at their lowest and you need to take in some nutrition to set yourself up for the day and kick-start your metabolism.

If you don't eat breakfast, you will feel tired and sluggish and it will be a struggle to catch up with your energy requirements. All this does is make you feel discouraged. Remember, again and again, your target is to lose weight slowly and healthily. You need to stick to your diet over the required period of time. If you do things like skipping breakfast, all you do is make it harder to stick with your diet and more likely that you will give up.

Eating before Bedtime

There is a common belief that eating before bedtime is bad because when you sleep you are not using the energy and your body is therefore more likely to turn it into fat.

There really is no evidence to backup this theory. Your body is using energy even when it is asleep. Anyway, it is your calorie surplus or deficit over a period of time that will decide whether you gain or lose weight.

Just the same, I would not dismiss the idea out of hand. Not eating before bedtime does have benefits. You are more likely to get indigestion if you eat immediately before sleeping. If you don't eat before bedtime, it can help reduce your calorie intake simply because it is a couple of hours of the day when you do not eat.

Giving yourself a two-hour period before bedtime without eating is not a bad idea.

Food Preparation

You can reduce your calorie intake with a few simple changes to how you prepare and eat your food

• Don't fry your food -- you are just adding to the fat content. Grilling, baking or boiling are much healthier cooking methods.
• Boil Pasta and Rice for longer -- Pasta and rice soak up water as they boil. As they soak up water, they become softer and bigger but this does not add any calories, as water does not contain any calories. If you boil your pasta and rice for longer then you make bigger more filling meals that contain the same number of calories.
• Don't use tomato ketchup -- Sauces such as tomato ketchup are high in sugar and salt. Do you really need sauce with your food? Cutting down on sauces is an easy way to reduce your calorie intake
• What about salad cream and mayonnaise? Both are high in fat and sugar. You will save calories if you eat your salads with a nice vinaigrette. If not then at least go for low calorie salad cream/mayonnaise.
• Do you really need butter or margarine on your bread? -- Really, on soft fresh bread with tasty fillings, why do you need butter or margarine?

Negative Calorie Foods

There has been a lot of talk in the diet industry about negative calorie foods. These are foods that supposedly use more calories to eat and digest than they provide. All food contains calories but it is claimed that some foods require more calories to digest than they actually contain.

Celery has long been considered one of these foods. The theory is that no matter how much celery you eat, you will not put on weight. In fact, you would actually be canceling out calories from other food. It is a great idea. You would never need to be hungry. You could just eat a plateful of negative calorie food and feel full while losing weight.

Unfortunately, the evidence really is not clear-cut. It is difficult to measure how much energy it takes to consume a food. The reason most of these foods are claimed to be negative calorie is they contain very few calories because they are mostly fibre. However, we do not digest fibre so it is not clear that we are using any energy to process it.

Still there is no doubt that these foods, if eaten as part of a balanced diet, are good for dieting because of their low calorie content. Here is a list of a few foods that are claimed to be negative calorie:

• Asparagus
• Broccoli
• Cabbage
• Carrot
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Chilies
• Cucumber
• Garlic
• Grapefruit
• Lettuce
• Onion
• Radish
• Spinach
• Turnip

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