The benefits of calorie counting are that unlike other diets you can eat what you want. If you are offered a piece of cake on a low-carb diet you can't eat it. Here you just need to add the calories to your daily intake. Not making your calorie goal one day doesn't really matter that much.
Dieting Success Factor 1: Support
This time it was my husband who wanted to go on a diet, mainly to gain muscle but also to lose some weight. Ok, I thought I will support him. I wanted this to work for me, too. Well, not so much the muscle part... just the weight loss. When my teenage son joined my husband's work-out sessions and kept him motivated I turned to my best friend. I hate working out and by making dates with her to walk we motivated each other when one of us got lazy. When she showed up, I had to do it.
Dieting Success Factor 2: Motivation
Think of what it is most that you will love about losing weight. Is it that you will look stunning, feel energetic or to be healthy? You will get all that!
Dieting Success Factor 3: Measure
This was the single most important contributor to my weight-loss. I started counting calories. It's so easy! First, you need to know how many calories are in foods and how many calories you want to eat in a day. You can find calorie counts on the web. My measuring cup became my best friend. When I was guessing amounts I was not successful. You need to measure.
Google makes this easy! You can add the iGoogle Calorie-Counter to your Google home page. I used to write it down on a piece of paper but now Google will track it for you! For instance write egg, fried, mushrooms and peppers and you have a breakfast omelet or 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of oatmeal, cereal or whatever. Google will add that to your daily count. Then, at lunch do the same. I tried to stay around 1600 calories. The longer I did it the easier it was. One of my favorite snacks was 2 plain rice cakes and cinnamon applesauce. I always kept that on hand. Rice cakes come in different flavors like chocolate, cheddar cheese and so on. You will soon find what you like and can make breakfast lunch and dinner for the whole family. I would bake chicken in tomato sauce add salad but skip the noodles I made for the family. We also started buying 100 calorie products. Things like mini-bagels, English muffins or even chocolate-covered pretzels all now come in theses sizes and are easy to add to your calorie tab for the day. An apple has 65 calories and a tbsp of peanut butter for dipping has 95 or dip in low-fat yogurt, 110 per container.
My husband and my son made protein-health shakes every night and my daughter and I made low-calorie fruit shakes. For two people, 2 cups of low-fat milk or yogurt, 1 banana, berries, whatever you like, just add it up. It was great because the whole family was part of it although my daughter did not try to lose weight she loved the low-calorie fruit shakes at the end of the day. She quickly learned how to measure and made them for me!
The best thing about this diet, apart from losing the weight, was that we didn't spend any money doing it. In fact, we probably saved money not buying junk-food. By the way, husband lost 40 pounds in 10 weeks and got ripped! I fit into all those clothes I wanted to give away and the best feeling ever was giving away my "fat clothes".
No comments:
Post a Comment