5 Summer Weight Loss Strategies

Summer is the easiest time of year to lose weight, especially for those of us who endure long, cold winters. With summer’s abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, not to mention, warmer weather, there’s no excuse for us not to be eating healthy and exercising. Adopting these simple weight-loss strategies into your summer plans may leave you more than a few pounds lighter come October.

Here are 5 Summer Weight-Loss Strategies to try this summer:

1) Get moving - self explanatory, but for those of you who see exercise as a big scary monster and run screaming when faced with it, think of exercise as a time to reenergize yourself. Exercise does not have to result in a pool of sweat (you know who you are). It can be as simple as a brisk walk with your spouse, playing tag with your kids, or biking to/from work a few times a week. Anything that gets you moving for at least 20 to 30 minutes a day is worthwhile.

2) Eat au natural - I’m not suggesting you eat naked, although some people may like to try this, but rather try to eat foods with the fewest ingredients and limit the amount of processed foods you eat. Processed foods can pack on the pounds, because they tend to offer less fiber and won’t fill you up as much as natural foods. One rule is to eat food with ingredients you actually know and can pronounce.

3) MUFA Me, MUFA You – Monounsaturated fat, or MUFA, is known as the “healthy” fat. MUFA keeps you feeling fuller for longer and studies show that MUFA may also help us stave off chronic diseases, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and depression. There are five main MUFA food groups:

* Oils that include canola, flaxseed, and olive oil
* Nuts and seeds that include walnuts, macadamia nuts, and sunflower seeds
* Avocados
* Olives, particularly the green variety
* Dark chocolate

Check out these great ideas to add a little MUFA to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Also, make it a habit to eat MUFA snacks whenever possible. Keep in mind, MUFA is still high in calories, but a little goes a long way.

4) Divide and Conquer - Think of your plate as a clock - fill the space between 12 and 6 with fresh or steamed veggies; the space between 6 and 9 with whole grains and 9 and 12 with protein/fish. Throw in a little low-fat dairy and you’ll be good to go. By adopting this strategy, it should be easy to eat meals that are low-calorie, high nutrient foods, and to keep portions in control – just make sure you are using normal size plates!

5) Limit simple sugars – Simple sugars or simple carbohydrates refer to foods made with refined sugars or table sugar. Most foods made with simple sugars are essentially “empty calories”, providing very few vitamins, minerals, or fiber but remaining high in calories. They tend to leave us feeling unsatisfied and/or less full, prompting us to eat more. Simple sugars can also lead to a spike in blood sugar levels, giving us a short boost of energy, but leaving us sluggish and energy-zapped for hours on end. Simple sugars can be seen in foods under the names of corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, and glucose, among others. Foods high in simple sugars include sweets like cookies, cakes, and candy. Simple sugars also are found naturally in fruit and milk, but, unlike other simple sugar foods, these provide essential nutrients.

Have another great summer weight loss tip? Let’s hear it….

Eating Healthy, 30 minutes Walking, and 60 minutes Quiet Thinking fixes Health Problems

Just another reason to eat healthy and exercise.

As reported by Will Dunham from Reuters, Dean Ornish conducted some studies on men with prostate cancer who elected against surgery for remediation.  To try to combat the low grade cancer: the men in the study:

• Ate Healthy,
• Exercised 30 minutes a day, and
• Meditated | Prayed | Thought for 60 minutes a day.

Guess what happened?  In three months time, they lost weight as expected, but even more encouraging is they actually changed Genes.  The healthy lifestyle activated some disease fighting genes and deactivated some unhealthy genes.  WOW!

Read the Original News source: Healthy lifestyle triggers genetic changes: study

I know many a people who say they can’t lose weight or can’t get healthy, because they have bad genes or they are big boned, or you name the excuse.  Well, here is a study that says even if you have bad genes, you can get healthy with lifestyle changes.  To steal a phrase from someone before me:  Yes we can!

What’s stopping you from committing to a healthy lifestyle?

I want you around.  I want you to live life! Enjoy what Earth, God, Metaphysics provide for you.  Happiness is health and family.  Frolic with grand children at the park, Watch your dog chase his tail, or just watching the trees blow in the wind.

Where do I start?

Well, Let’s Think about it.

What do kids get on their children’s menu at restaurants?  They get connect the dot pictures.  It allows the child to create a dog, lion, car, or any number of pictures by following the dots one at a time slowly and incrementally.  It’s much easier to connect the dots to draw a picture than to draw on a blank slate.

So, connect the dots!  Start Slow, be methodical and incremental.  Work up a ladder.  I’ll expand on this method later, but here’s the abridged version:

Dots:

• 0 days - 14 days: Commit to weighing yourself everyday for the first 2 weeks.

Don’t worry about the details. The fact that you are weighing yourself everyday is the accomplishment!

• 14 days - 42 days:  Continue weighing yourself everyday, in fact, don’t stop weighing yourself for the rest of your life.  Add to that small amounts of exercise everyday.  I recommend the 8 minute weight workout, but you could also do 10 minutes of walking everyday, gradually build up.

You’ve got some great new habits now.  you weigh yourself everyday and you commit to your 10 minutes of exercise a day!

Lets add another dot.

• 42 days - 56 days:  Continue your current weighing and exercise habits.  Now add tracking your diet everyday.  Keep a pen and paper handy.  Write down everything you eat, and just keep track, don’t worry about how much you eat.  Just log it.

We’re finding out internally what we do.  when we eat.  It will guide us in our nutrition plan.  Do I really eat 3 starbucks a day?  Do I have that many potato chips?  you can be amazed at what you eat without knowing it.  Again, remember the goal is to Identify and Track.  That’s the accomplishment for this dot.

• 56 days - 84 days:  Pick one dietary change each week, and focus on that change.

Examples:  I recommend lowering your diet each week by 200 calories.  Or, Pick a food item that really causes you trouble.  For me it is french Fries.  If I cut out french fries, I cut out a ton of places I’d go to eat which means I make different diet changes.  I also have the challenge of large portions.  So, that can be my change.  Whatever it is, Pick one and focus while keeping up your habits.

• 84 days - forever:  Rinse, Recycle, and Repeat.  What I mean, is this is lifestyle change.  we have to be willing to commit to the change and keep it at that.  it’s a change.  No going back.  Learn to love new foods and new ways of eating, Learn to love exercising, make it fun for you.  By creating these new habits, we can replace our old diet habits.

How do you connect the dots?  What’s your incremental lifestyle change you can make?  Can you commit?

Of course, I recommend simpleweight for managing this healthy diet and exercise planning.

My Top Three 5 minute MUFA Snacks for weight loss

My favorite MUFA Snacks.

I know I blogged a while back about adding mufa to your diet for weight loss.  Of course, I feel bad if I don’t eat my own dogfood.  What I mean by that, if I write or talk about something as a positive, I try my best to live what I say.  This brings integrity to my life.  As a by-product, my actions can then speak louder than my words.

Since Jan 1, I’ve been trying to eat more MUFA and lower my calories.   From January to March, I was doing great. I lost about 10 pounds, and all was smooth sailing.

What did I do:  I try to eat MUFA at every meal.  I try to eat sensible portions, and I try to eat often.  Notice the word try.  I’m not perfect, but overall, I’ve had a good experience with MUFA.  There was a keyword you may have missed:  “was”.  From March until recently, I stopped eating MUFA at every meal, and I stopped eating sensible portions.  So, I gained about 7 lbs back from early in the year weight loss. When eating MUFA, Portions are the number key.

One of my personal nutrition challenges has been:  Finding:

• Quick,
• Portable,
• Highly Nutritious

MUFA Snacks that I can eat on the run.

After some searching:  here are my top 3 MUFA snacks that can be had in under 5 minutes.

1. My number one snack favorite is naked Almonds. Trader Joe’s has the perfect 200 calorie snack-sized packages of  naked almonds.  If I can’t do that, or I’m more economical, I’ll buy a bulk bag of naked almonds and make my own snack-size using my handy scale.  However, that takes a little more time.
2. My second favorite snack is Dove 63% Dark Chocolate or Ghiradeli Square Dark Chocolate. Again, these are very easy to take and eat. However, Dark Chocolate is addicting for me. It can be very difficult to stop at just one chocolate square.  My MUFA Chocolate hack is only bring one square to work with me. Obviously, I have to stop at only one since I don’t have any more.  Additionally, I’ll try to break that square into 4 pieces so it feels like more than it really is.   When the whole bag is so close to me, I end up eating more than one.
3. My third favorite MUFA snack is well, this is hard.  I like walnuts on my cereal, I like sunflower seeds on my salad.  I cook my egg whites in olive oil, and I’ll eat Peanut Butter and Jelly, but all of those items are lunch/breakfast/dinner items.  They’re not really snacks.I guess my third favorite would be adding two tablespoons of Peanut Butter to Fruit Smoothies.  It takes a while to get used to, but you get the punch of Protein from the PB combined with the MUFA, and after a few times, you get used to eating the Smoothie that way.  My favorite recipe is add a banana, to some frozen strawberries, add some 1/4 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of orange juice and the two tablespoons of Peanut butter and blend until smooth.  This makes a great snack or a great breakfast.

Of course, I’m interested to hear.  What are your favorite 5 minute MUFA snacks?

If you liked this post, you’d may want to read: Flat Belly Diet: A Skim Review

How do you share your fitness log with your mentor?

We released the “health club” edition of Simpleweight this past Friday. Someone asked me, what’s the big deal?  Why is this feature useful?

So, here’s the point:

When you share your weight loss and make it public you hold yourself more accountable. For many people, its easy to let yourself down, but they wouldn’t dare let someone else down.  Think about it, when you want to get somewhere that involves other people, most people try to arrive on time.  When you want to get somewhere by yourself, you meander and take your time.  Why?  It’s that peer pressure.

So, With the latest release,  We created a public page for every user.

When you log into simpleweight, your home page has a link that you can send to your friends and family to help you reach your goals.

How a URL might look:
http://www.simpleweight.com/health-club/{insert - your - simple weight user name here}.

—  Now, I recently read an article that stated:

But then we looked at the response to this question:

“Have you ever had regular mentorship from someone who was in the exact shape you wanted to be in?”

Note: In this context, regular mentorship is defined as constructive and impartial feedback and direction, on a near-daily basis, for a continuous period of at least 3 months.

And check this out: 77% of the 5’s said “Yes” (37 out of 48)
Only 17% of the 3’s and 4’s said “Yes”

And less than 5% of the 1’s and 2’s said “Yes”

source: Mentorship, Support, Accountability - Part 1 Who’s Your Nutritional Mentor?

What does this mean?
First: The article surveyed a group of individuals. In that survey, Users were asked to identify their happiness as related to their physique and fitness. The survey used a scale where 5’s are people who are Extremely Happy with their physique. 1’s were Extremely Unhappy.

So, of the people where were extremely happy 77% of them used a coach, mentor, friend to give them constructive and impartial feedback and direction, on a near-daily basis

This unscientific research study demonstrates the impact of making your weight loss social. Some keys:

• Find a mentor or coach who is positive
• Find a mentor or coach who are successful at body weight management
• Try to hang around healthy people
• Receive consistent scheduled daily feedback
• Be receptive to constructive criticism. You may not always like what you hear.

With simpleweight, you can email your coach, mentor, family, friends, co-workers, everyone, about your weight loss. Send them to your health-club page. Ask them to keep tabs and give you fair and balanced (positive and constructive) comments.

Who is your mentor? Join Simpleweight now so you can share your Health Club Page with your social network and increase the likelihood of your weight loss success.

Simpleweight Health-Club Has Started.

How did you spend your Friday evening?

Well, my brother and I had a fun evening deploying simpleweight health-club edition.

It’s late, and I’m tired.  So, I’ll save a full report over the next few days.  Here’s the abridged update:

All Customers have a new simple weight home page which we call the simple weight health club.  You can now easily share your Simpleweight information with Friends and Family.

By the request of some of our users, we’ve made a couple of new reports.

Also, if you hadn’t noticed, we’ve integrated a new wordpress theme into simpleweight.

More Details to come.

What’s the one thing that if we added to simpleweight will help you become more fit and healthy?