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Much like your approach to any big problem, making lifestyle changes (including weight loss and healthy eating habits) requires “baby steps.” Making small healthy changes and eliminating bad (unhealthy) food habits will help you make permanent positive changes in your approach to diet and health. Once you discover the right combination of a healthy balanced diet and calorie burning moderate exercise, you’ll be on the right path to reach your weight loss goals.
Here are six of the best steps you should take to improve your health and start losing weight:
Step #1: Clean Up Your Diet - Start by eliminating the garbage in your diet. Gradually get rid of those fatty, high-calorie fast foods like burgers, fries, and pizzas. Replace these calorie-dense foods with natural “nutrient-dense” single ingredient foods including lean proteins, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fatty acids.
Step #2: Eat Smaller Meals More Often - Smaller, healthier meals with healthy snacks between (about every 2-3 hours) will help stabilize your blood sugar. Eating large meals far apart causes wild blood sugar swings that cause the overproduction and release of insulin and fat-storing hormones.
Step #3: Ditch The Sodas And Colas - Your daily colas, sodas, sugar-filled bottled juices, and fancy frappuccinos are adding at least 300-500+ empty calories to your diet EVERY DAY. DRINK MORE WATER! Water is healthier, re-hydrates your body, and contains NO calories. Drink your first 8-ounce glass of water as soon as you wake up and have another full glass with each meal or snack and your final glass two hours before bedtime.
Step #4: Keep A Food Journal - Write everything down, keep a detailed record of your meals, drinks, calories in, activities, and workouts. Did anything affect your diet or exercise today? Did anything unusual happen in your life that triggered food cravings or emotional eating? Stress, conflict, family, special events, or simply traffic, work, and school) can adversely affect your life. Write it all down and review your journal to establish patterns and identify causes and effects.
Also, start cooking your own meals, come up with new recipes for healthy living.
Step #5: Begin Resistance Training - While cardio training (jogging, biking, etc.) is effective in burning calories, resistance training also burns calories as you exercise, but also builds lean muscle. And lean muscle requires more calories to maintain than the body fat it displaces. Your new, lean muscular body will burn 30% more calories than your current body from metabolism alone. You can take up weight training, practice body-weight training (calisthenics), or use resistance bands. Combining resistance training with cardio training will maximize your calorie burning and boost your metabolism to burn calories for hours AFTER your workout.
Step #6: Get Some Support - Your friends, family, partner, and coworkers should become your support network. Your world, both real and virtual, is filled with people just like you that need to lose weight, exercise more, and learn to lead a healthier lifestyle. Find those like-minded people and join together against your common enemy - high-calorie junk food and a sedentary lifestyle!
When I started to make these small changes in my own personal life the weight began to drop off, You can do the same as well.