Another year in which thousands of us resolve to lose weight. Hands up if this isn’t the first time weight loss has been your New Year Resolution?

But what is the best way to lose weight?  If we want to succeed at weight loss we really don’t want to choose the wrong method. We don’t want to be back again this time next year making resolutions to lose weight do we?

But why is there so much conflicting advice about weight loss? If obesity is the major health risk for the Western World, as we are told that it is, then why isn’t there a standard method of curing us? After all most other major health problems tend to have fairly standard treatments. So finding a diet that works can be very confusing.

How to Lose Weight

After many false starts I have finally discovered that what we were taught about weight loss is true; it s all about calories. There are some other factors but on the whole calories in being more or less equal to calories out is the answer to staying lean. Diets may prescribe various combinations of foods or even leave out whole food groups but the ones that reduce your weight are controlling calories, even if they do not say so.   So theoretically all you need to lose weight is a calories counter.

You need to  work out how many calories you need each day and check out all the foods you eat against that number. For a woman of average height 1200 – 1500 calories per day is about right. Here is a more precise way to calculate your calorie needs which I got from Facts About Fitness, Christian Finn’s brilliant membership only website.

“If you perform less than one hour of exercise each week, multiply your target body weight (in pounds) by 8. That’s how many calories you should consume daily. However, if you work out more than that, add one to the multiplier for every additional hour you train. So if your target body weight is 170 pounds and you exercise for 3 hours a week, you’d multiply 170 by 11 — giving you a target of 1870 calories a day.”

Double Your Weight Loss

In one of the longest running and largest weight loss studies ever conducted, Dr. Jack Hollis found that simply writing down the foods you eat encourages you to consume fewer calories, and that’s the key to losing weight. You don’t need expensive gym equipment or memberships to lose weight – you just need to keep track of what you eat. Keeping a food diary can double your weight loss.

“The more food records people kept, the more weight they lost. Those who kept daily food records lose twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.” Dr. Jack Hollis – Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research

Tools For Calorie Counting

My Fitness Pal Calorie Counter

If you have an iPhone, iPod, Blackberry or Android, there is a great little app called ‘My Fitness Pal’ that holds the calories of just about any foods you can buy. It also lets you add new foods or just the calories if you know them, for foods that are missing.You can even add your own recipes.

If you haven’t got a Smart phone there is an online version of My Fitness Pal.

All you need to do is to fill in the calories you eat and the exercise you take each day. If you keep within your allowance then you will lose weight steadily.

Calorie counting isn’t cool or trendy but it is something that really works.

More about what to eat to lose weight.

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True Facts About Weight Loss Not Sales Talk Disguised as Facts

If you are sick to death of fad diets and false tips about how to lose weight then you will be thrilled by discovering Christian Finn’s site which he calls ” The Facts About Fitness”.

I have been a member off and on for many years now and it is the best value membership site on fat loss and fitness out there.

The membership gives you access to hundreds of articles, with references, that Christian has written on  fat loss loss and fitness. He takes the studies from the scientific journals and writes about the results and what they mean in a way that we can understand and use. Its invaluable information and I haven’t seen anything else like it on line or off.

The membership fee is very little and I don’t know how he manages to keep his price the same year after year but he does. Take advantage of it now in case he changes his mind and puts it up!

You can read more about the “Facts About Fitness”  here.

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If you want to know how to have fun while losing weight take a minute or two to discover dance exercise-at home Zumba by a certified Zumba teacher. Learn too:

–what key thoughts keep you over-weight and stuck in a pattern of losing and re-gaining weight, without ever reaching your desired body and beauty goals

–how pleasure is the missing ingredient essential to helping your body shed unwanted pounds

–a certain type of “exercise” that will help you instantly feel sexy, confident, and beautiful in your body, regardless of where you are with your current weight, health and beauty goals.

Read this:   How to Have Fun With Exercise for Weight loss

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Best Way To Lose Weight and Banish Middle Aged Spread

We reach 35 or 40 years old and suddenly the weight we could shed so easily a year or two ago just won’t budge! What’s going on and what is the best way to lose weight now? Well girls I am sorry to tell you that losing weight gets harder every year after 35. You have heard of middle aged spread haven’t you?

Well it’s real and there are several reasons for it.

1. You begin to lose muscle mass. It is estimated that for each year over the age of 35 a woman loses 1% of her muscle. Without that muscle her metabolism slows down because muscle burns fat.
2. You most stop moving about so much. You might be walking more slowly, taking the car more often or no longer playing any sport.
3. You carry on eating as much as you always have.  If you are a Mom this probably includes the children’s leftovers!

It isn’t hard to see why you are getting rounder is it? So you can see now that the best way to lose weight in middle age is to attack the problems. That is you must start to move more and eat less. It isn’t hard to understand is it? We don’t really need endless new diet plans to work this out.

There are a couple more things that you need to know however. First you need to do strength training exercise in order to hold onto the muscle you have and even to grow it a bit. This muscle burns fat like a furnace and means you need not eat like a sparrow.  The best way to do this is to join a gym. If you can’t do that there are plenty of DVD strength training exercises that you can do at home.

The second thing to know is that the best way to lose weight is to give up eating animal products. Sorry but it really is the truth and you need to know that. Animal products are full of fat.  Fat as its name implies is fattening. Dr. Atkins was wrong about that. Fat gives you 9 calories for every gram. It doesn’t need to do anything to just hide itself away in your fat cells.

Move it!

Carbohydrates and proteins on the other hand provide only 4 calories per gram. Some of that is used up in the digestive process and some is excreted as insoluble fiber.

It is simple common sense to work out that fat should be kept to a minimum. Dr. Esseltyn who is a heart specialist recently in the news for helping Bill Clinton to lose at least 20 lbs of fat,  says to be healthy less than 10% of your diet should be  fat. This will keep you slim and also will prevent you from having   a heart attack.

Eating a completely plant based diet is the best way to lose weight. You will still need to avid fat as much as possible. Don’t pig out on soy ice cream or nuts or chocolate for that matter. Be sensible and see the weight fall off. Do this now because when you get past 50 it becomes even harder to get rid of excess weight.

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The New Weight Loss Pill on the Market, is Contrave any Good?

The attraction of the new weight-loss pill apparently hasn’t waned at all. A new compound, one that goes by the brand name Contrave, has joined dozens of other brands and compounds already on the shelves, having just been approved by the FDA. It’s been formulated with two different medications at once. And so, here we go all over again – is it safe, and does it really do what it’s supposed to do?

It’s an interesting combination really for a weight-loss pill. Contrave contains two familiar drugs, repurposed for a new goal. It contains Bupropion, the familiar antidepressant, and naltrexone, a drug that people who have been to alcohol rehab, know about. So why would anyone want to treat weight loss with antidepressants and rehab drugs?

The antidepressant is intended to help raise the levels of dopamine that you have floating about in your brain. What that does is, it suppresses your appetite and makes you feel a lot more energetic. And the alcohol rehab chemical on the other hand, just makes your food less delicious.