The 3 Easiest Changes For Lifelong Weight Loss You’ll Ever Love Making

September 21st, 2007 | by Ginnie | (Visited 40,584 times)

Dieting is big business. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year on diet-ready foods, diet plans, workout equipment, and other products that guarantee a slender waist in XX days/weeks.

The problem is that while they may work, we don’t work like that. If you tell a computer to process a set of instructions for 5 years, it will do it. Humans however tire, we get lazy, and we lose motivation. While some diet plans like Weight Watchers or others may keep you accountable for your progress, quitting is just as easy as walking away from the program. It only works if you’re willing to make it work.

The secret to losing weight is to change the way you think, change the way you see food, and change the way you crave food. Candy doesn’t contain the addictive qualities of cigarettes, and yet we die of diabetes and crave them the same way. We can’t blame the companies for finding different ways to texturize and color our sugar, the onus is on us.

Removing Dangerous Chemicals And Foods From Your Diet

The first step is to recognize the most harmful substances we ingest on a regular basis. The first item that comes to mind is High Fructose Corn Syrup. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), which I’ll cover in more detail later (although if you’re unfamiliar with HFCS, click here to read more about it), is now used in just about everything. It allows for better preservation and inhibits microbial spoilage so that foods last longer. However, it also happens to be very dangerous.

On everything we buy, there are nutritional facts detailing the ingredients used in the product. The first step to healthy eating and losing weight for life, is to start reading these. You don’t have to eliminate HFCS from your diet completely, that’s actually very hard to do. Instead, we’re going to look at the priority of High Fructose Corn Syrup in relation to the other ingredients.

Step One: Read The Labels, Look For The Order Of The Ingredients

HFCS is also listed as “Enriched”. So if you’re shopping for bread, take note if you see the words “Enriched Wheat Flour” on a package of wheat bread. Essentially, they’re saying that this bread may look like wheat bread, but it really isn’t. HFCS may be the 7th or 8th ingredient, but if the first one or two ingredients contain the word “Enriched” - you’ve spotted a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Instead, ditch those brands, and look for one like Roman Meal Wheat Bread (I prefer the longer loaf which closer emulates the white bread I grew up on), that has “Whole Wheat Flour” or something similar. We want to stay as far away as possible from anything “Enriched”.

You don’t have to give up your favorite sandwiches, but you’ll find that simply switching the bread you use on them, will be an easy step that you can take. After a while, you may find that you prefer the better breads.

Step Two: Learn To Love Diet Soda, Treat Every Can Of Soda, As A Candy Bar

People feel as strongly about diet soda as they do about President Bush. However, you’ll find that the diet market has evolved and now at your local store you have all of your favorite flavors in diet form. Soda has over a DOZEN teaspoons of sugar in each can. In other words, for every can of soda you consume, you might as well have just eaten a candy bar. We have very funny ways of associating what’s bad for us with what really is. Many of us wouldn’t flinch at ordering a medium 16 to 20 ounce soda with our combo meal. But we’d chastise someone eating a King Size Snickers bar. The sad truth is that they both contain the same amount of sugar! Every time we supersize, we should have just replaced the soda with THREE of FOUR candy bars. That’s a disgusting picture when you really think about it.

One way I learned to stop drinking regular soda, was that I started telling myself, every can of soda I drink is a candy bar. Normally drinking 2 or 3 sodas a day, this opened my eyes pretty fast. Especially since I gave up candy bars years ago because they were “too fattening”. Oh, how I had been lying to myself.

I’ve found that Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Mountain Dew are some of my personal favorites. I also really enjoy some diet grape and orange sodas and even diet root beer. Replace your next case of soda with diet and give it a try. You may find that what you really crave is the cold fizzy drink itself, and not actually the sugar. Not that diet soda gets us out of the jungle, but at least at the moment there is no proven science stating that the chemicals in diet soda are physically harmful in the doses we take in.

Step Three: Pick A Healthy Snack

In the spirit of slowly getting rid of harmful foods and chemicals, the next step is to find a guilt free snack. I’m not a tuna guy. I just don’t find that I like the stuff very much, at least in the can forms I’ve tried. However, when I started bodybuilding, I bought a packet of StarKist Tuna Creations with the green “Herb & Garlic” label. WOW! It was very easy to eat straight from the packet so I could eat it at the office while working (and since it didn’t require refrigeration, I could keep them in my desk), it was a full meal with over 30 grams of protein, and also contained tons of omega-3 fatty acids to help the organs function well. A definite win all around. There are other flavors of this tuna, but I found the consistency of the Herb & Garlic flavor to be the easiest to eat by itself.

However it’s not really office splurging that gets me, it’s late night snacking. I found that this packet of tuna went EXCELLENT with the new Diet Sierra Mist/Diet Sprite flavor of diet soda I’d recently found I liked with some foods (like wine, I pick my soda based on what I’m eating - classy eh?). So now I could sit there at 11pm at night, eating a good portion of food (one packet is around 3 servings if I recall correctly). And if I overate, I really didn’t suffer any consequences.

Tuna is also one of the few foods you can eat before bed. The protein is casein protein and can be absorbed by your body overnight while you sleep. Tuna and low fat cottage cheese are special this way. If you have to snack late at night, these are good foods. Although tuna is still healthier. Being able to eat out of the packet (simply tear the top off), was huge for me. No plates, no messy cleanup. This means there was no prep work involved, which is what usually turns me away from cooking something and instead grabbing a bag of chips.

That’s It! Start Slow..

I could give some more tips, but like I said, the first steps to losing weight for the long term is to change the way we eat. Simply find foods with less focus on HFCS and “Enriched” items. Find a couple diet sodas you like and try to make that transition. And then find a good snack so that if you HAVE to snack at night, you can at least do it right!

Tags: losing weight, diet, workout, burn fat, diet soda, HFCS, high fructose corn syrup