If you are looking to the secrets of obtaining your fitness, health and nutritional goals, then look no further than these 20 tips, hints, suggestions, to reaching your goals. Not an end all, cure all list… but if you can follow these, you are well on your way.

 

1. Keep a water bottle with you at all times and drink from it often. Water should always be your drink of choice. To kick things up every once in a while, try adding lemon, lime, cucumber, or a few berries to liven up the flavor without adding significant calories.

 

2. Look at exercise as a pleasure and a privilege, not a burden or chore. Think positively about the changes regular exercise will produce. Rather than obsessing about your next meal, get excited about your next workout!

 

3. Eat well-balanced meals and remember that excess calories, even if they're from food that's fat free and high in protein, will turn to excess weight. No matter what the latest fad diet says, extra calories equal extra weight!

 

5. Focus on short-term fitness goals with an emphasis on completing daily exercise.

 

6. Keep a daily log of what you’re actually eating. This includes every time you grab a handful of chips here or eat the crust of your kid’s sandwich there, and ALL of your snacking.

 

7. Enjoy an occasional (once a week) “unhealthy” treat, but never an unhealthy week or unhealthy vacation.

 

8. Enjoy contributing to the health of others by having a partner or friends to exercise with, as well as recruiting others who want to feel better and have more energy. Have a neighbor who’s sitting on the porch every morning when you walk by? Ask him or her to join you on your walk!

 

9. Avoid monotony by taking up new forms of exercising, or using things that keep you motivated and inspired, like new shoes or great music.

 

10. Subscribe to fitness magazines to keep focused on health as an overall way of life.

11. Invest in the right tools - good shoes, a portable MP3 player or iPod, fitness equipment, a new series of tapes, etc.

 

12. Make it your goal to do some form of exercise 6 or 7 days a week. If some days you exercise once in the morning and once in the evening, even better! If you’re eating right, exercise will fuel your energy level!

 

13. Don’t compare your body to others’. Instead, work to be your personal best.

 

14. If your diet is unbalanced, take daily vitamin and mineral supplements for total health.

 

 

16. Create an exercise schedule the day before instead of leaving it to chance or waiting to “find” the time. If the last three Presidents of the United States can make time to work out every day, you can make time too!

17. Move beyond the boundaries of weight loss and into total fitness. Measure success by the way your clothes fit, not some number on a scale.

18. Stick with eating plans you can maintain indefinitely. Remember that no matter how hard you’re working out, if you’re consuming too many calories, you’ll never see the muscles that lie beneath layers of fatty tissue.

19. Get adequate amounts of sleep, but remember that people who exercise regularly fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly.

20. Limit alcohol intake to special occasions.

Water weight is fluid retention. It is when your body holds on to the water in your body. This can cause you to get bloated, and see a higher number on the scale.

 

This can happen for many reasons. Increased sodium intake, too many processed foods, not getting enough protein, or not drinking enough water.

 

The more water you drink the less water your body will retain. This is because when you drink a lot of water your body signals the organs that it's okay to let go of some of the water.

By drinking more water, cutting out processed and high sodium foods, sweating, and cutting carbs (↓).

 

{Cutting carbs - although cutting carbs can help you loose water weight this will not help you loose fat. This is also not healthy. Many fad diets promise large amounts of weight loss in a small amount of time by drastically cutting carbs, however this weight will be gained back very quickly because it's not actually fat loss.}

 

This is why you should not freak out if you see a higher number on the scale. Fat is burned by being active and operating at a calorie deficit. So in conclusion if you see a high number of gain or loss on the scale in a rapid amount of time it's most likely water weight.

 

Since I've gotten LOADS of questions on my instagram about this same thing - I'll thought I'd make a post about it here. What will this post be about then? Simply one thing - how do you start a healthy lifestyle?

 

You can figure out your body type here. You can find out the ideal weight for your height and body type here. You can get a suggested calorie range right here, and you can can get an estimation of how long it will take you to lose the weight right here.

 

1. Start logging your intake. You could just write it down in little food diary notebook you keep for yourself, but I suggest using a site like loseit.com, myfitnesspal.com, caloriecount.com or livestrong.com [In the beginning of my weight loss journey I used myfitnesspal] because it allows you to see your nutrient intake and gives you counts for everything; fat, carbs, protein, etc, all in one spot. Then you can see what you’re not getting enough of (or what you’re getting too much of.) Either way, write it down. This will make you accountable for what you’re eating and you can see it all, right there in front of you, which will cut out mindless eating. Everything that you’ll be putting in your body from now on will be there. Writing down that you ate five bowls of Capn’ Crunch and a three-foot-tall chocolate bunny isn’t fun for anyone, so you’ll be less likely to do it.

2. Eat fruits and vegetables. Seems obvious. But really, they’re an integral part of a healthy diet. Our bodies have been eating, extracting nutrients from, and excreting fruits and vegetables for centuries, yours will know exactly what to do with it. If you don’t like fruits and vegetables, you haven’t tried enough. Go to the grocery store and throw in everything that looks like it could be good, whether or not you’ve tried it. Try dried fruits or vegetables. Maybe you think you hate tomatoes, but discover that it’s really the texture you hate. Then give dried tomatoes a try! Before I decided that I was going to love fruits and vegetables, I didn’t know I liked spinach, aragula or grapefruits, because I honestly had never tried them. (Don’t worry, you might find a lot of stuff you don't like too, but that’ll happen. You need to find what works for you.)

3. Pay attention to food labels. Are the calories going to provide you with the nutrients you need? Low-cal is great, but if there isn’t a whole lot of other nutrients in it, it’s not going to keep you full or nourish your body in any way. Pick foods high in protein and fiber, and low in added sugar or fat, especially saturated and trans-fat.

4. YOU decide what is healthy, not the company that created it. If you’re really trying to do the above, you’ll start to realize that a lot of food that you probably thought was healthy really isn’t. I used to eat Nutri-Grain bars all the time (Nutrition? Grains? I should be all set, right?). But when I started really reading labels, only 1 gram of protein, zero fiber. It might as well be empty calories. A Kashi Go-Lean Bar has 5 grams of fiber and 8 grams of protein for the same amount of calories, something I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t read food labels before I ate anything.

5. Eat all the time. The biggest reason people binge is because they get very hungry. If you don’t eat until you get very hungry, when you finally get around food you’ll want everything in sight, and you’ll end up overeating. A very hungry tummy wants as many grams of fat, carbs and protein as it can get per bite to restore that energy it’s been missing all day, so you’ll crave junk and fast food, naturally. If you get hungry, have a little snack, have an apple, or a banana, or some carrots.

6. Never get “full”. Of course eat until you’re not hungry anymore, but don’t get so full you can’t move. This stretches your stomach so you’ll have more room for food next time (your body is constantly adapting to serve you best, so naturally, it would stretch). It also confuses your brain, because if you’re not hungry anymore but you’re still eating, you’ll get a distorted sense of what “full” is.

7. Pay attention to your body. If you’re hungry, it’s because your body isn’t getting the nutrients it needs. Give it some. If you’re not, there’s no reason to force feed yourself, your body is all set.

8. Don’t clean your plate. This is a big thing now, most of us as kids were told to “clean our plates”, there are starving kids in Africa. I’m not pro-wasting food, but I’m not pro-overeating either. Try this: eat five bites, then put your fork down and drink some water. Wait a minute, talk to your family if you’re eating with them. Then, if you’re still hungry, have five more. Fork down. Sip. Talk. Think about if you’re hungry. If you’re not, stop eating.

9. Don’t ever drink anything but water. Really, there’s no point to it (tea and coffee are fine). Fruit juice has a crazy amount of sugar, so don’t drink that either, and definitely don’t drink soda. The jury is still out on diet soda, I suppose, but I wouldn’t drink it unless soda is already an integral part of your diet and you can’t see it go.

10. Measure your food. Of course you’re counting calories like a madwoman right now, but your bowl of cereal, if just poured haphazardly, is likely at least 50% bigger than the “serving size” listed on the box. Your peanut butter toast probably isn’t just a tablespoon, like you’re assuming. To very accurately measure your calorie intake, you absolutely have to measure everything out.

11. Pay attention to absolutely everything. The few teaspoons of brown sugar you add to your oatmeal. The glob of butter you eat with your peas. Cream in your coffee. Milk in your cereal. If you’re used to adding a lot of extras to your food (like me) this can really add up, skew your intake, and lead to frustration that you’re not seeing results as quickly as you should be, even on a heavily restricted diet. This could have one of two outcomes, neither of which are ideal: You give up on losing weight and go back to your old eating habits, or you cut your intake by even more and get caught in the ED trap. Know what is going in your body.

12. Drink a glass of water before you eat a meal. It will fill up your stomach so you’re likely to eat less. Also, thirst is often mistaken as hunger, so if you think you’re hungry, you might just be dehydrated.

13. Find better versions of the food you love. Try different things all the time, if you think it might be good, it just might be. There is often a healthier replacement option for the food that you’re eating now that you can’t bear giving up. If you love peanut butter, even the reduced fat version is still super high calorie. Keep looking and I know there are versions that has  85% less fat and 40% less calories than regular peanut butter, and is actually good. The point is, try everything.

14. Remember that your body is not a calculator, or a machine, and it will not run happily on 753 calories just because you told it to. It will not stop craving cookies just because you decided you weren’t going to eat them. Low calorie diets are very hard. It’s okay to eat something unhealthy sometimes, so do not cut your calories to nothing if you eat something unhealthy. The heart wants what the heart wants, same for the mouth. If you want to eat a cookie, eat one, but give yourself the same amount of nutrients and calories as you would any other day, even if this means you eat a few extra calories that day.

15. Relax. Eating something unhealthy once in a while will not cause you to gain back all the weight you’ve lost, so there’s no reason to feel bad about it.

16. Have an exit strategy. You don’t need to count calories forever. I’d suggest staying accountable for your eating by writing it down if you’d like to, but you really only need to measure things out and count for a month max. It’s just to get a good idea of nutrition, what’s healthy and what’s not, portion sizes, etc. It’s not a necessary everyday thing that you need to continue. After that, start making steps toward making healthy choices on your own, but don’t make it your life. Your body is just a part of you, it’s not everything.