• Use Smaller Plates: I found this to be effective with many of my clients. Simply using smaller plates helps you to cut down your portion size. Smaller portions equals fewer calories and more weight loss!
• No Seconds: This goes along with smaller plates. Serve yourself a reasonable portion of food on your smaller plate, and NEVER go back for seconds. As soon as you start allowing yourself to go back for more food, you lose track of how much you’ve eaten.
• Ditch the Fast Food: We’ve all seen what happened to Morgan Spurlock when he ate McDonalds for a month. Fast food is bad for your health and a disaster for your waist line. Ditch it.
• Can the Sodas: A vital quick weight loss tip is to stop drinking sodas. Sodas are now the number one source of calories in the American diet! Sodas contain sugar and chemicals, and are not what your body wants. Stick to water – you’ll lose more weight and feel much better.
• Get Strong! One of the finest of the quick weight loss tips is to build muscle. Muscle is your friend when you are trying to lose weight. Why? Because it burns calories, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each pound of muscle burns around 20 calories per day, so adding 5 extra pounds of muscle will burn 100 extra calories per day!
In addition, weight training is one of the best ways to increase your metabolism2 – the speed at which your body burns calories – so after a weight workout, you burn more calories even when you are sitting on the couch watching TV!
• Eat Regularly: When you eat small meals and regular healthy snacks throughout the day, you keep that feeling of being full and satisfied. In addition, because you never starve your body, it knows it will get a regular supply of calories, and is thus prepared to burn its excess fat stores. Aim to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, with small snacks in between.
• Drink Water: Your body needs water to work at peak efficiency. Water not only flushes toxins from your body, it is also essential for fat burning! In addition, you’ll retain more water when you’re not giving your body enough.
• Avoid Sugar: It may sound obvious, but sugar is your enemy. Because it is so highly refined, it is processed quickly by your body, sending your blood sugar levels rocketing.
To counter this, the body releases insulin to bring the sugar levels back down – the insulin shuttles the sugar from your blood into your fat stores, dropping your blood sugar levels back down. And when your blood sugar levels are low, what do you want? More sugar! This cycle can only be broken by eliminating or dramatically reducing the sugar levels in your diet.
• Avoid Artificial Sweeteners: I know, in an effort to avoid sugar, you turn to artificial sweeteners. The problem is, not only are there serious health concerns surrounding almost all artificial sweeteners3, they can also undermine your efforts to lose weight.
Recent research shows that they can interfere with your body's natural ability to count calories, and can lead you to overindulge on other sweet foods4.
• Keep a Food Diary: It’s amazing how we can fool ourselves about our diet – but when you keep a food diary, and write down everything you eat and drink, there is no place to hide. I had one client whose food diary revealed that he was eating 15 bags of potato chips a week!
Now, a typical 7oz bag of potato chips contains around 1000 calories, so that was an extra 15,000 calories a week that he didn’t need! Writing everything down will reveal the areas that can make the biggest difference to your weight loss.
According to Britain’s Norwich Union Healthcare company, the main reasons for people failing to lose weight are: