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Winter weight gain is something that happens to many people who live in
climates with cold winters. If you track your weight you may notice that it's
harder to lose in the fall. It's not your fault and it's not a myth. Most people, even those of normal weight, gain a few pounds when the weather begins to turn cold.
But it is possible to avoid winter weight gain.
To do this, we first need to understand what causes winter weight gain. There are two main factors. The first is a biological tendency that is carried in our genes and is there to help us survive in cold climates. Our bodies are simply programmed to store more fat as winter approaches. And we're not the only ones. Most animals
do this too.
It's easy to see why when you think about it. More fat means more protection
from the cold and more stored nutrients that the body can access if food is hard to find in the winter months. Our bodies don't know that we can walk into a store and buy polar level winter clothing and any food we need, no matter what the
weather is like outside.
In primitive societies, there was always plenty of food in the fall, the time when nuts, fruits and grains are ripe. It makes sense that we would feel hungrier at this time and crave 'warming' high carbohydrate foods that can easily be converted to fat and stored ready for the late winter and spring when plant-based foods are
hard to find.
Hormonal changes caused by the shortening days are a second factor that can
cause winter weight gain. These changes affect our eating habits as winter
approaches.
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It is well known that having less natural light can cause depression and low energy (SAD or seasonally affected depression). Most people who are overweight tend to eat more when they feel low. We also turn to food (especially refined
carbohydrate foods like chips, chocolate, cake or white bread) for a fast energy boost when we feel tired. These foods cause blood sugar swings that lead to more lows and cravings.
Understanding all of this makes it much easier to avoid winter weight gain. We
have a natural tendency to eat more and to eat the wrong foods at this time of
year. We cannot expect to hold out against a biological need but we can be
careful what foods we choose.
It's fine to have high carbohydrate foods in the fall if that is what you crave (and as long as you are not on a low carb diet) but be sure to choose whole grains and starchy vegetables over sugar and refined carb foods. The fiber in brown rice,
whole grain bread, pumpkin etc helps to slow down the absorption and keep our
blood sugar stable.
At the same time, avoid winter weight gain by being careful not to take in any
unnecessary fats. Don't slaver butter thickly all over that whole grain bread or pumpkin, or smother your whole grain pasta in a cheese sauce. Choose low fat
dairy products and use them sparingly.
And of course, it's important to keep our exercise levels up. Primitive people
would have gotten a lot less exercise in the cold winters, but we don't have to rely on outdoor activities for our fitness. We can go to the gym or keep a stationary
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bike in the basement. That way, even if we eat a little more, we don't have to let it settle on our waistlines. We can avoid that pesky winter weight gain easily.
Lose weight with a meal plan
If you are truly dedicated to losing weight, you have to take everything aspect into consideration, like exercise, water consumption and diet. A meal plan is a great way to stick to your diet especially if you are someone who is always busy.
One of the main problems dieters have is that they tend to grab quick snacks on the go that are not healthy choices. You can avoid this problem by creating a meal plan.
Choose foods you like
Here is a tip that has proved helpful for many people trying to lose weight: get a pen and paper and make a list of all the foods you like to eat, and then separate the healthy options from the unhealthy ones. If you have a long list of healthy foods on your list, then you are one step closer to the body you desire. If you have a wide variety of unhealthy options, don’t worry because you can either eat them in moderation or find a healthier way to prepare these foods.
Healthy food substitutes
If you love foods and treats such as pizza, Ice cream or milkshakes, it is impossible to remove them from your diet. The following are some healthier ways to enjoy
your favorite foods:
Ice-cream. If you are an ice cream lover, save this sweet treat for special occasions. If you crave something cold or sweet as a replacement, then you
can opt for soy ice cream or you can substitute ice cream for some delicious
fat free yogurt.
Pizza. Pizza is filled with different types of cheese and has lots of calories, but you can still incorporate it into your diet. For starters, plan on a pizza
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meal about every two weeks. Second, one slice is more than enough,
especially if you combine it with a salad or if the serving is a large
restaurant portion. You can also create your own healthy pizza recipe and
pick delicious toppings that will not go straight to your hips.
Milkshake. You can make your own milkshakes at home instead of
indulging in high-calorie fast food versions. Use skim milk instead of whole
milk, fresh fruits, and little or no sugar. This will taste just as delicious and has less sugar, fat and calories.
Plan your meals
It is important for you to have a weekly meal plan so that you stay on track with your diet. Plan what you are going to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day as well as the snacks that you plan to consume between meals. Everything
you eat adds up calories so if you have everything written on paper, it will be easier for you to calculate how much calorie you consume each day. As you plan your meals, make sure that they are balanced with the required amounts of fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains and other daily options. Your diet should have a variety of different types of healthy foods to provide you with the required nutrients your body needs throughout the day. Your breakfast choice should be light but
satisfying, such as a slice of toast, banana, and a glass of skim milk. For lunch, choose something that has protein like as a chicken salad, tuna or grilled chicken breast.
If you feel hungry between meals, have a fruit snack such as an apple or some
almonds or peanuts. Dinner should be light because you are not as able to work
off the added calories as you would throughout the day. Eat something with
protein, but make the portions small like a baked chicken breast with potatoes
and a glass of water. If you feel hungry after eating your dinner, snack on
something healthy such as a fruit or a drink a glass of skim milk. When you plan your meals, you are ready to eat when you are hungry because you have all of
your snacks and main meals planned for your weight loss success.
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AN EXAMPLE OF A TYPICAL EATING PLAN IN A DAY
In order to lose fat, and build lean muscle tissue, you have to eat the right foods!
Apart from cutting unnecessary saturated fats from the diet, the main concern is to regulate blood sugar levels by reducing sugary foods to a minimum, and eating a little more protein. Well-balanced blood sugar levels, prevents the body from storing excess sugars as fat, helps maintain energy levels, and minimizes cravings for the wrong foods!
An example food plan
Breakfast or Brunch...
Chop 2 pieces of fresh fruit, top with 200g plain yogurt and a good handful
of sunflower seeds. Squeeze over some fresh lemon juice and a sprinkling
of cinnamon OR
Organic or free-range egg and tuna omelet OR
Kedgeree - flaked poached haddock (or other white fish), ready-cooked
brown rice, chopped boiled egg and chopped fresh parsley or coriander
Mid-morning snack...
A small palm full (about 6-10 nuts) of almonds, pecans, or walnuts
Lunch...
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Tuna, chickpea and green leaf salad - tin of tuna in water, 2 large spoons of chickpeas, salad leaves, tomato, cucumber, spring onion, fresh coriander, a
tablespoon of cooked brown rice, balsamic vinegar dressing OR
A small baked sweet potato, topped with 1/2 tin of organic baked beans,
green salad and cherry tomatoes OR
1/2 carton of fresh soup, with 2 small slices of soda bread toasted and
spread with hummus.
Mid-afternoon snack...
Fresh fruit and peppermint tea
Dinner
Salmon steak on a bed of quinoa grains, green beans and broccoli, and a
green salad as above OR
Organic chicken and vegetable stir-fry, sprinkled with a spoon of sesame
seeds or sunflower seeds, on a bed of wholegrain rice or barley
Other snacks/light meals
Mashed avocado on 2 thick rice cakes
Grilled sardines and a green salad
Small tub of ricotta cheese or cottage cheese with raw vegetable
Aim to drink 300ml - 500ml of filtered water every hour!
HERE ARE OUR TOP 10 TIPS FOR WEIGHT LOSS
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10 Tips for Fast Weight Loss
Check out our 10 tips for fast weight loss if you want to lose a few pounds quickly.
There's no need to starve yourself or go hungry. Simply be more aware of what
you eat, reduce your intake of fat and sugar, and fill up with vegetables and fruit.
Here's how:
1. Write down everything that you eat or drink that contains calories, even if it's just a splash of milk in your coffee. You don't need to count the calories. Simply writing everything down will help you to see when those sneaky high calorie
foods are creeping in and sabotaging your fast weight loss.
2. Make your own meals instead of relying on TV dinners and other packaged
foods. Food manufacturers add salt and sugar to almost everything to make us
want more and more.
3. Include at least two servings of vegetables in every main meal (not counting potatoes), or add a large salad with low fat dressing. Aim to eat more green, leafy vegetables. Fresh vegetables will help you to feel full and satisfy your body's need for vitamins and minerals, reducing cravings.
4. Cut your fat intake in half. Since you're not eating packaged foods any more, it's easy to do this. Measure the oil that you use for cooking and only use half as
much. Spread butter very thinly. Switch to low fat milk. Cut visible fat off meat before cooking, and don't eat the skin.
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5. Have sweet treats containing sugar no more than three times a week. If you are a sugar addict you may find this difficult at first but you will soon have much more appreciation for the sweetness in fruits and vegetables, and fast weight loss may be your reward.
6. Indulge yourself with plenty of fresh fruit. Grapes, cherries, berries, apples, mangoes and bananas are delicious replacements for the unhealthy desserts that
most of us eat. Try them chopped into low fat sugar-free yogurt.
7. Try grated carrot for a snack. Mix in a chopped apple if you want. Grated carrot takes longer to eat than a whole carrot and because of this, it’s way more
satisfying.
8. Choose food that you can chew, and eat it slowly, putting down your fork
between bites. Go for brown rice instead of white, whole fruit instead of juice, chunks of whole foods in your soup. The added fiber will fill you up and help the body to eliminate waste, and the act of chewing will make you feel more satisfied with your meal.
9. Plan your meals and your shopping. Think ahead and make a list of what you
will need, and then stick to it. To make this easier, never go to the grocery store when you are hungry. Or order your shopping online for delivery.
10. When you eat, just eat. Sit at the table, even if it's just for a snack. Don't eat while doing something else at the same time (watching TV, reading, checking
email). If you eat with others, of course you may talk, but try to avoid bringing up
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heavy or contentious subjects at meals. Arguments are not good for anybody's
digestion and won't help your fast weight loss.
Negative Calorie Foods: Eat As Much As You Want
With negative calorie foods, you really can have "all you can eat" without worrying about the effects on your waistline! If only every buffet would offer
these foods bare and whole, instead of making them swim in mayonnaise, sugar
or sauces, none of us would have a problem with eating in restaurants! So let's look at those wonderful negative calorie foods and what they can do for our
weight loss.
'Negative calorie' means that you use more calories in eating and digesting the food than it contains, keeping in mind that we burn calories all of the time by simply living, even when we sleep. In practice the term is used for a lot of low calorie foods.
One of the best known negative calorie foods is celery. It is very low in calories and takes a lot of time and energy to eat, as long as you eat it whole and chew on all of those stringy fibers. If you ate celery in this way all day you would be sure of not gaining weight, but it wouldn't be good for you. You would not be getting the nutrients that you needed and you might even starve.
Negative calorie foods are very popular with anorexics, which show us that it's not healthy to eat nothing but these foods. However, they make great snacks. To get the best effect for weight loss, be sure to chew them thoroughly and do not make them into soup or juice.
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Eat them raw when possible. This is easy with fruits like apples, berries, pineapple and grapefruit which are all low calorie, high fiber foods. Be careful with other fruits because most fruits that are not on this list are more calorie-dense.
Eating vegetables raw is more of a challenge, and not always necessary. However, many foods can be grated or chopped very small in a food processor. Take a look at this list of negative calorie vegetables and you will see that most of them could be prepared for raw eating:
- asparagus (break it into bite sized pieces and add to salad)
- beets (grated)
- broccoli (throw it in the food processor with a couple of tomatoes as dressing)
- carrot (grated or whole)
- cauliflower (like broccoli)
- cabbage (used raw in coleslaw, but don't add the mayo!)
- celery stalks
- celery root (grated)
- cucumber
- lettuce
- red onions (sliced thin)
- spinach
- tomato
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- zucchini (grate or use a spiralizer to create long pasta-like strings)
A big salad made from 5-7 of those ingredients would give you a super low calorie snack that would keep you munching and feeling full for a long time. You might
also want to consider doing a raw or negative calorie detox for a few days - in consultation with your doctor, of course.
However, you will need to use caution when eating a lot of negative calorie foods.
First, it is important to vary your diet and not eat too much of any one particular food. Many foods contain substances that can be damaging if consumed in
excess, such as the acid in pineapples and grapefruits. Other negative calorie
foods can cause allergies or diarrhea if eaten in large quantities.
What's Wrong With Crash Diets?
Many desperate people turn to crash diets hoping they will lose the most weight in the shortest time that way. Perhaps they have had past experiences of losing weight successfully with this type of plan, or they have read about a new diet that some celebrity has followed to lose weight fast. So what is wrong with crash
diets? Is there any reason why they have such a bad reputation?
The most obvious problem with crash diets is that the weight loss is almost always temporary. If you suddenly change to a restricted diet, your body will respond by storing less water. You will lose weight and be less bloated, i.e. thinner, but you will not necessarily lose any fat. When you end the diet that weight will go right back on.
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Of course, you may lose some fat too, depending on the diet and how long you
follow it. However, the body often goes into starvation mode during these diets. It thinks a famine has hit, and it should slow down the metabolism and store as
much fat as possible to guard against the hard times ahead. When you increase
your food consumption, even if you do it in a healthy way, that famine
metabolism can persist and lead your body to gain some or all of the weight back.
Added to that is the psychological effect of breaking a crash diet. Whether this happens at the end of the planned diet or in the middle out of desperation, it
tends involve overeating. For this reason alone, many people who follow crash
diets find that a month later, they are heavier than they were before the diet.
In addition, there are some significant health issues with crash diets. First, diets that focus on losing weight fast are usually very restrictive in the types of foods that you can eat. Many foods (and sometimes whole food groups) will be cut out.
This is not something you could do in the long term without suffering from
deficiencies. It is not good for the body in the short term either.
On many crash diets you will not be getting the nutrients that the body needs. It is true that you can take supplements, but many supplements rely on substances in
whole foods to make them work most effectively. Nutrient deficiencies lead to
cravings, making it harder to stick to the diet and more likely that you will break out in a binge. At the same time, you may be getting more of some nutrients than is healthy.
To summarize, crash diets can only ever be a temporary solution, for example for a situation where you need to lose a little weight for a particular event, and you do not mind if you gain it back - and more - afterward. The healthiest option for losing weight is to make changes that will allow you to lose weight slowly on a
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healthy eating plan that does not ban any foods completely, but allows you to
incorporate occasional treats. In the long term, people who follow crash diets are likely to gain weight, not lose it.
Are You Making These 3 Diet Mistakes?
If you have tried one weight loss program after another without ever being
successful for long, you are probably making some big diet mistakes. You can be given the best diet plan in the world, but it won't work if your attitude is wrong.
The following 3 major diet mistakes are responsible for hundreds or thousands of people going off plan and failing to achieve the weight loss that they deserve.
Take the time to consider what effect they may be having on you.
1. Expecting Perfection
Nobody is perfect. We have all heard that statement countless times, but many of us still find it hard to apply it to ourselves and our diets. We take an all-or-nothing approach, thinking we have to stick to our diet plan 100% of the time, perfectly, or there's no point following it at all.
This puts huge pressure on us and makes us feel terrible if we slip up. It also means that after a slip-up we are likely to think, "I've messed up yet another diet, I just can't do this," or "This diet doesn't work," and abandon it. In short, perfection-related diet mistakes mean that we will use the smallest slip-up as an excuse for a massive binge.
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This problem is worst for dieters who like to follow very restricted plans where no treats are allowed. Inevitably, life gets in the way and instead of planning how to cope with the challenge of a party or a wedding, they try to eat nothing all day and then cave in, abandoning the diet completely.
Your weight loss does not have to be a straight downward line. It's OK to have
occasional diet mistakes, slips and gains along the way, as long as the overall trend is downward. And it's much better in the long term to lose weight slowly.
It's much more likely to stay off that way.
2. The Band-Aid Attitude to Dieting
Many dieters see their weight loss plan as a temporary fix that they will use for a short time and then abandon as soon as they have reached their target weight.
We call this the Band-Aid approach to dieting, and it's the second of our major diet mistakes.
People who see a diet as a temporary measure will often pick very restricted
eating plans and then go back to their old eating habits after the diet ends. If you do that, all of the weight will go back on, in 99% of cases.
Unless you only have a few pounds to lose, it is much better to pick an eating plan that gives you flexibility. You need something that you can follow for weeks,
months or even years. In fact, you need something that will allow you to live your life.
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Instead of using a Band-Aid, you need a diet that will become like a new skin: a permanent way of eating that will enable to maintain your goal weight after you achieve it.
3. The Wrong Goals
That leads us to the third of our big diet mistakes: setting the wrong goals. In anything that we do, goals should be clear, set out in steps and achievable. In terms of weight loss, this means that as well as having an idea of your ideal
weight or clothes size, you should also set smaller goals along the way, and
reward yourself for each one achieved (but not with food!).
Be flexible about your final goal: as you approach it, you may want to change it.
That's OK. If you avoid these diet mistakes and have the right attitude toward
dieting, you will be able to achieve a weight that you are happy with - and that is much more important than numbers.
EXTRA BONUS INFORMATION:
The Power of Antioxidants for Staying Young
Everyone wants to grow old gracefully. Some go under the knife to get that
youthful look while others opt for a more natural way to maintain that healthful glow. The way to make peace with age can be found in the types of foods that we eat and the miracle ingredient they contain.
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This hidden “miracle” is called antioxidants. They have graced the pages of
magazines, medical journals and every product from hand cream to supplement
pills. But what are antioxidants and what can they do to keep you looking your best?
Antioxidants are substances that fight the aging process that goes on in your
body. They are not produced by the body so to get the benefit of these power-
packed substances you must ingest them. A variety of foods contain antioxidants.
Let’s go back to the beginning. The body continually replenishes its cells.
Through a process called cellular metabolism, the body produces energy, more
cells and repairs any damage. One by-product of cellular metabolism is unstable molecules called free radicals.
Free radicals are molecules that damage your body. They are unstable because
they are missing an electron. To get another one and become stable, free radicals will steal electrons from cells. That theft damages the cells in a variety of ways.
The results are visible and invisible changes to our bodies. The development of diseases like cancer, diabetes, arthritis and neurological deficiencies may begin to affect you as you age. Also, thinner skin wrinkles and brittle bones are a problem.
Free radicals enter our body from outside sources as well: cigarette smoke,
radiation and the sun’s UV rays. The more free radicals we encounter, the greater the damage that can be done.
Antioxidants have been shown to be of great help in the free radical p