With summer in full swing a common them among peers is loosing and maintaining a comfortable weight. Throughout the years I have found seven simple steps to ensure a healthy body weight that is easy to follow and sure to work.
- When beginning any new healthy regime, it is always beneficial to start with an honest self evaluation to determine practical goals. I recommend starting with a food diary so you can assess eating habits that need to be changed as well as observe where the bulk of your calories are coming from.
- One of the villains of weight management is sweetened beverages. Most of these thirst quenchers are filled with empty calories and carbohydrates.
- Just like sweetened beverages, limiting sweet desserts, cookies, and candy will aid in better controlling your weight. If you have a sweet tooth like me, then cutting sweets out of your diet can seem nearly impossible. I advise patients to practice sharing desserts or cutting servings in half or thirds to save for another day.
- Moderation is a key step in managing your weight. Knowing proper portions for starches, meat, diary products, and fats will be invaluable in weight control. When getting used to appropriate portion sizes want to use measuring cups.
- Choose foods that are lower in fat. You can decrease your fat intake by limiting fried foods, trimming visible fat from meats, consuming diary products that are lower in fat, seasoning veggies with herbs, spices, and lean meats, and adhering to proper portions of salad dressing, butter, and other condiments that are high in fat.
- Getting into a routine of eating regularly allows proper metabolism of foods and helps avoid times of hunger when we are most prone to making poor food choices. Instead of eating one to two meals a day, I recommend eating three small meals and incorporating snacks that are high in nutrients and contain few empty calories.
- Increasing activity has many health benefits that increase overall health and promote a healthy lifestyle. It is important to exercise your body to burn unwanted calories but it will also aid in reducing the risk of illness both acute and chronic. Exercise also relieves stress and improves your quality of sleep.
I recommend these seven steps because they are easy to incorporate into any lifestyle and do not have to be followed in order to be effective. If you work on one step at a time, you are guaranteed to achieve and maintain a healthy weight you can be proud of.