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3 Tips to help you start Eating Salads as a Meal.

The three tips for helping you Eat Salads as a meal are:

1. Home-made Salad Dressing
2. Add Protein
3. Experiment

When I go out to eat, I never just order a salad. I usually order a salad as an appetizer then eat my entire main course. You can guess that with today’s growing portion sizes, my waist grows. You might ask:

Why do I even order a salad?
Because everywhere you look, the experts say eat more vegetables. Eating salads are easy way to add those vegetables. Eating Salads also helps cut down on eating the larger meal and reduces your total caloric intake assuming you stop eating when your body tells you to.  Yet, Salads at restaurants have always been difficult for me to order.  I think it’s always, because there are so many other good things I want to eat.

What about at home? Do I eat a salad at home for a meal?
Nope. I just never really liked salads for a meal.  It took me a long time to figure out why. Like any good computer training, hacking scientist, I began to study the situation.

First define the knowns: What is my normal home-made salad? For my typical salad, I’d put lettuce, green pepper, cucumber, carrots, and red onion. Then, I add a store-bought salad dressing usually a Paul Newman’s or Kraft’s dressing. So far, nothing really sticks out why I cannot eat that salad as a meal. So, I let the situation stew for a while and let my mind take over.

Fast forward to recent times, while visiting friends in Orlando, I had a great home-made salad. In fact, The salad was enough for my meal. Why was I satisfied with that salad as a meal? What was different with that salad than the salad I make?

• An ex-Disney Chef made the salad, and all I had to do was eat.  (Doesn’ t it always taste better when someone else makes it?)
• The salad had crisp bacon and sunflower seeds.
• The salad had homemade dressing.

PRESTO. I have my solution, and I now eat salads for meals. All I do is ask my ex-Disney Chef friend to make salads for me and ship them from Florida to Illinois.

As much as I’d like that, the feasibility, not to mention the lettuce, starts to break down around Tennessee.

Yet, I still found my solution. If you compare my salad to the Disney chef prepared salad, What’s different? The homemade dressing and the protein, and that’s what I add to make my salad a meal. Here’s my recipe:

A Simple Salad Recipe (~175 calories)

Ingredients

• 3 to 6 Green Leaves of Lettuce (~115 grams)
  Note you can substitute whatever lettuce you like.
• 0.5 Medium Green Pepper (~25 grams)
• 0.5 Medium Cucumber (~120 grams)
• 1 Medium Carrot (~35 grams)
• 1 Tablespoon good Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• 1 Tablespoon Red Wine Vinegar -or- Balsamic Vinegar -or- Lemon juice
• 1 Teaspoon Italian Seasoning
• Dash of Fresh Ground Pepper (to taste)
• Dash of Fresh Ground Sea Salt (to taste)
• (optional) 2 pieces of fresh microwaved cooked bacon
• (optional) 2 tablespoons Feta Cheese
• (optional) 2 tablespoons Almonds, Sunflower Seeds, or some other seed/nut
• (optional) 1 clove fresh minced garlic

Directions

1. Mix Vinegar, Olive Oil, and Italian Seasoning. and set aside.
2. Rinse and Wash Vegetables
3. Chop Lettuce into desired size
4. Chop Green Pepper and Cucumber into bite sizes
5. Use a Vegetable Peeler and Peel Carrots into thin slices
6. Toss Vegetables and Dressing together in a bowl
7. Add Any of your optional items (Bacon, Cheese, Almonds) and Toss Salad again
8. Add Fresh Ground Pepper and Sea Salt and Toss
9. Serve on a nice big plate
10. Enjoy

One benefit to home-made salad dressing, is I now have a healthier salad due to the lack of typical store-bought High Fructose Corn Syrup in my Salad Dressing.

What are my 3 tips to help you start Eating Salads as Meals?

1. Make your own Salad Dressing and Use the best extra virgin olive oil you can afford. It makes a ton of difference
2. Add protein to the salad. Such as: Almonds, Bacon, Chicken, Ham, Salami, and/or Cheese. The protein really helps impact the meal and accelerates your fat burn. Although, I’ll save that for a future blog post.
3. Experiment to find your own tastes.

If you’d like more tips for a good salad: Eric Gower posted 7 great tips for the immaculately Dressed Salad. After reading his article, I realized that I had been doing what he suggested for the past two months, and that’s how I started eating Salads as a meal. I make my dressing count, add protein, and experiment.

Do you have any tips to help someone start eating salads as meals?

Dalai Lama’s 7 steps to positive and healthy lifestyle change

Use these 7 steps to make positive changes towards a healthy diet, exercise, and weight.

1. Learning
2. Conviction
3. Determination
4. Action
5. Effort
6. Create Habits
7. Eliminate negativity

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Organizing Behaviors make for Successful Weight Loss.

Wow. What a powerful study. A CNN.com article titled: Weight loss is all in your head details that Inga Treitler, Ph.D studied the behavior of 10 people from the National Weight Control Registry. The people with the greatest weight loss success are:

…controlled, methodical, disciplined sticklers for structure and routine. Punctual and neat, they always have a plan, timetable and calendar with appointments penciled in….

Now, not everyone thinks this way. Some of us are emotional gut thinkers, some of us are visual thinkers, some of us are analytical and mathematical thinkers.

How does this help us with weight loss or weight gain?

First, identify your personality type to help you succeed with your weight loss . I did this by reading books by Dr. David Keirsey: Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types and Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence.

If you don’t want to read the books, there are many other ways to determine your behavior habits by searching the web for Type and Temperament surveys.

Second, Use your behavior type to your advantage. Some examples include:

• If you are a Visual Thinker, then you could take time to visualize weight gain, draw pictures of your weight management, make collages of you exercising, visualize eating properly, visualize yourself at your ideal weight, and draw mind-maps of your weight management goals.
• If you are an Emotional Thinker, then use your emotions. Ask Friends to talk about what’s best for weight loss. Teach someone about exercising. Design activities that arouse your emotions and Use Anger, Happiness, Fear, Peace, Worry, Satisfaction, etc. to support your weight gain or weight loss goals.
• If you are a Mathematical Thinker, then you could think of your weight loss as a math problem, and devise multiple solutions and proofs. Calculate the calories at each meal designing an analytical solution for your day’s meal plan
• Finally, if you are an Organized Thinker, Make To Do Lists, Organize, and Add to your Calendar when you are going to lose weight. Make a recipe plan daily of what you plan to eat.

I’ll expand on these topics in a future post.

Third, Modify your behavior and thinking to help you become a more Organized Thinker.

Now, here’s the detail, I think is important, is that your temperament and type will likely change. I can see in my past activities, there have been periods of times where I was very much an analytical thinker, visual thinker, emotional thinker, and even the structured thinker.

Even if you are not an organized thinker, we can apply the practices of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time to our weigh management life.

When you are practicing organizing behavior, you are firing neurons in the part of the brain that helps with successful weight loss.

If you have been procrastinating on cleaning out the garage. Plan to do it now while you are managing your weight.

If you need to schedule a dentist appointment, doctor’s appointment, or gambling appointment with your bookie. Do that now.

If you are notoriously late, then learn to wake up early and become punctual!

The mere action of organizing and building a structure to your life will help with your weight loss.

Finally, Use an online Weight Management Tool to help you organize your weight goals and to assist building organizing behaviors. As the CNN.com article states, perform activities that are adding to your organizing behavior. One way to do so is to track what you eat, track what you do, and track what what you weigh everyday!

Picture source: Stock Xchng: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/455452/
Picture created by: Henkster: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Henkster

Pedometer Field Test by Money Magazine

Sorry, I have not blogged in a while.  I have come to the conclusion that blogging is more difficult than it looks.  It is difficult to write consistent good content when one has other daily tasks. Consequently, I plan on blogging when I have good content. I am not going to blog just to blog. I will try to build a habit to have good content every week. It will take a while to build that habit.

I am a big pedometer user.  For a while, I wore a pedometer everywhere I went to track how many steps.  My goal was to walk 10,000 steps a day as that’s what some experts believe keep a healthy heart. 

After consistent use of a pedometer, I came to the conclusion, that the only way I could achieve 10,000 steps was to walk at least 30 to 45 minutes a day. This gives me about 6,000 steps from the walking and 4,000 steps from my day-to-day movement. 

I would not have known that had I not measured and tracked my progress. I have mentioned a few times: It is imperative to track your progress and watch trends. With your information, you can make smarter decisions with your activity. 

Here’s the abstract of Money Magazine’s Pedometer Field Test

1. Money Magazine field test winner
   Grade: A- Omron Pocket HJ-720ITC - $50
2. Grade: B  Oregon Scientific PE823 - $20
3. Grade: B- New Balance VIA Wrist Pedometer by Highgear - $60
4. Grade: C  Walk4Life WFL Elite - $29
5. Grade: C- New Lifestyles NL-2000 Activity Monitor - $60

What’s my Favorite pedometer?

Thank you for asking. my favorite pedometer is the: Omron HJ-112 Digital Pedometer. You can find it at Amazon for about $20. The pedometer is light, accurate, and easy to use. It’d say it’s the little brother of the Money Magazine’s field test winner.

An excellent way to track your exercise activity is to combine a good pedometer with Simpleweight’s exercise tracking.

SW’s Site of the week: The Faddist. Dieting by Self Experimentation

With SW’s Site of the week: We’ll describe a relevant website or blog that caught our eye.

We’ve always said, you can use whatever Fad Diet you want and use Simpleweight to track it. As Ryan mentioned in a previous post, a Diet is what we eat. You may choose to eat healthy or unhealthy, but either way it’s still a diet.

Well, I recently learned of Andy - The Faddist. To paraphrase the Faddist, Andy is using self experimentation as a way to restore his life by adhering briefly to a passing variety of unusual diets.
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What will it take to manage your weight, diet, and fitness?

Short and sweet!

Choose what you want and become committed to the process. That is what it takes to manage your weight.

In a future blog post, I’ll delve into the process of positive self change.

For now, please let us help you get started.

If there was one thing we could do to motivate you to sign up to manage your weight and fitness, what would it be?

Patent Search Diet

Did you know you could use Google Patent Search to diet?

That’s what I learned at lifehack.org. I found an article Kyle wrote describing Unconventional Diet Tips, Lose 50 lbs in 3 months. First, the tips are worth mentioning:

1. Buy a Digital Scale
2. Weigh yourself everyday
3. Drink 8 glasses of water everyday
4. Make your Diet Public
5. Don’t Diet on the weekends
6. Don’t sacrifice your life for your diet
7. Make Small Changes
8. Gain perspective by understanding the fractions
9. Rationalize your workouts
10. Have a red flag weight

Lastly, for the curious out there…I followed the Weight Watchers diet. I did not pay for the diet, nor did I go to meetings. I found out all the information about the diet on-line. The first place to look is at their patent.

All well known diets are available via Google Patent Search.

Author: Kyle Pott, Source: lifehack.org

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The Slow Weigh to Weight Loss Defined (Part 1).

The Slow Weigh to weight loss is increasing methodical minute changes to your eating and exercise habits until you achieve the results you desire.

When using The Slow Weigh to weight loss, you must follow four simple rules:

1. Measure my progress at regular intervals (suggested: every day).
2. Decrease my Food In.
3. Increase my Food Out.
4. Review and Adjust my routine at regular intervals (weekly or monthly).

Stop reading now, write the rules down on a piece of paper 5 times. Then, recite them to yourself 5 times every day.

There is no weight loss pill, there is no weight loss gimmick, there is no surgery, nor alien abduction that causes miraculous weight loss. We must follow those four rules for weight loss.

What are they again?

1. Measure my progress every day.
2. Decrease my Food In.
3. Increase my Food Out.
4. Review and Adjust my routine at regular intervals (weekly or monthly)

That’s it! The simple way to weight loss is The Slow Weigh to weight loss.

Your Next Action or Homework for the next 7 days:

1. Memorize the rules by reciting them to yourself every day.
2. Begin to visualize yourself doing these rules in vivid detail.
3. Start to decide what rule you want to attack first. I will give you a hint. Start with rule number 1.

That’s it? Yes, I told you it was going to be slow and methodical. That’s the first step. Memorize The Slow Weigh to weight loss rules.

SW’s Site of the week: Losing Weight Zone.

With SW’s Site of the week: We’ll describe a relevant website or blog that caught our eye.

This week, I ran into Losing Weight Zone.

I don’t read People magazine, watch The View, Barbara Walters, or much TV at all really. I know that many people do, and I realize that we all have our own influencers and for some of you that is Celebrities.

Now, I am not making a distinction whether that is good or bad. It is what it is. Influencers can be strong motivators. For me, watching my brother make great decisions with his eating and exercise habits has really motivated me. Finding your influencers will make an impact on your weight management success. We’ll delve into influencers in a future blog post.

If your influencers are celebrities, I recommend you read Losing Weight Zone’s Celebrity Weight Loss category.

From what I can tell, Losing Weight Zone is a new blog that is building a nice niche of weight loss articles. Don’t get me wrong, they are not just about celebrities. They’ve done some good research gathering different press releases and news articles that people losing weight might find interesting. Of course, you will often find some of the same exercise, nutrition, diet, and weight loss content on our Simpleweight Blog, but I really like the way they mix different content together. The site has a clean open wordpress theme.

The thought I leave you with is who are your influencers? Find them and use them to help your motivation, and I’ll have to watch Losing Weight Zone for a bit to see if they become a permanent member of my daily reading.

Dieting with Pareto’s Principle

Scott Young wrote a great tip on applying Pareto’s Principle to your Diet.

Food - Record your eating habits for a week. Calculate up the calories of the different items of food. I’ve done this before and I’ve found it surprising how some treats contribute a high percentage of your calorie pie for no nutritional value, when other vices consumed in smaller portions take up only a sliver but still offer a tasty treat.
Source: Scott Young, Twenty unique ways to use the 80/20 rule

Just in case, Here is Wikipedia’s definition of Pareto’s Principle:

80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

How do we apply Pareto’s Principle to our diet?

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