Portion Control

“HUGE” – That’s the word to describe the confusion about portion sizes (as well as the portions themselves). One example: A sports arena in the Midwest sells an 8-inch bun piled high with five 1/3-pound beef patties, chili, chips, and cheese that weighs in at 4,800 calories.

 

As restaurants pump up their serving sizes, we reflexively reset our default for what is normal, according to Brian Wansink, PhD, Cooking Light Nutrition Essentials advisory panelist and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. Bigger portion sizes (with more calories and possible saturated ft or sodium) likely entice you to eat more, says Wansink. Yet for maintaining your weight, eating proper portions is key.

TIPS to help with portion control.

• The easiest way to control what you eat is to cook at home, where you can plate a sensible amount.

Choose right-size plates. On overscaled china, your healthful portion may seem skimpy.

As you serve meals, measure individual portions of difficult-to-judge foods like pasta.

When you eat out, finish half your entrée, then bring home the rest to enjoy later.

-Kathy Kitchens Downie, RD

Protein Bars

 

 

5 scoops  Vanilla Protein Powder
1 cup Oatmeal
1/2 cup Honey
½ cup Peanut Butter
½ cup Applesauce
6 oz pack  Dried Cranberries
Calories   Fat     Carbs    Fiber     Protein

260                6           36              3               17           

10 Bars (each)

Optional
8 Tsp        Fibersure
1 cup         Flax Seed (milled)

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix.  Using your hand to mix will be easier than a spoon.  Fold the dry ingredients over the sticky ones.  Make sure the mixture has a stiff consistency, like cookie dough.  If you choose to add the optional ingredients you will need to add more applesauce to offset the dryness.  Cover the bottom of a 9 x 12 baking dish with plastic wrap and spread mixture in evenly.  Refrigerate for 30 minutes then cut into 10 equal pieces.  Wrap individually and store in the refrigerator.

**To make chocolate bars, substitute chocolate protein powder for vanilla and 1 cup of mini chocolate chips for dried fruit.    You can also substitute milk for the applesauce to change the nutritional value.

Think Before You Eat for Concord Weight Loss

If you learn to think before you eat, you will achieve Concord weight loss by making the right choices. When you eat foods simply because you like them without regard for their nutritional content, it is easy to choose foods that are not good for your body. Losing weight doesn’t have to be a traumatic experience when you learn how to choose healthy and tasty foods with high nutritional content.

Thinking It Through to the End

There was once an old expression that went something like “a moment on the lips and a lifetime on the hips”. You don’t hear this expression often anymore, but it really sums up the need to be fully aware of what you put into your mouth. When you thoughtlessly prepare and/or eat meals that are unhealthy, the food tastes great in your mouth but quickly turns to fat in the body.

Even worse is the fact the wrong food choices can lead to disease and shorten your life span. Almost everyone knows that high cholesterol foods can cause cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, or even cancer. Foods that are high in sugar can cause type-2 diabetes and heart disease.

All too often, people decide to go on a diet and make a big production of the decision. They announce their decision to family and friends, make a date to start the diet, and begin weighing religiously. Most diets start out well, but it’s not long before the cravings for certain foods begin and the constant effort becomes tedious.

Instead of deciding to go on a diet, you should decide to start living a healthy lifestyle. Going on a diet for Concord weight loss is a short term solution. Living a healthy lifestyle is a choice you are making that will endure the rest of your life. You can begin by simply thinking about what you eat and when you eat it in order to achieve Concord weight loss.

Lose Weight By Living the Healthy Life

When you embark on a healthy lifestyle, it is important to begin thinking about your decision related to food and physical activity. When it comes to food, you want to mentally evaluate your choices. For example, when you reach into the refrigerator for an evening snack, you can choose ice cream or a piece of fruit. When it’s time for breakfast, you can choose a bowl of oatmeal or bacon and eggs. Do you really need that in-between meal snack? Are you that hungry, and if so, why?

You can begin to substitute foods with high nutritional value for foods that are not good for your body on a meal by meal basis. Instead of being obsessed with Concord weight loss, you can focus on your energy level and how well you are aging. When you make the right food choices and manage the quantity of food you eat, you will lose weight.

Your diet management should be combined with regular exercise too. If you just think about each food item you put into your mouth, you are bound to maintain Concord weight loss as you learn to make better choices.

Keeping Off the Pounds You Lost with Concord Weight Loss

Everyone who cares about Concord weight loss has heard of yo-yo dieting where you lose weight and then slowly (or quickly) put the weight back on and then lose it again and so on. It is unhealthy to treat your body in that fashion, and it puts a lot of stress on your organs and cardiovascular system. In fact, you can do permanent damage to your body’s ability to maintain equilibrium.

Maintaining the Right Weight and a Lifestyle

When you lose weight by following a calorie restricted fad diet, you are not making a lifestyle change. You are simply dieting. This makes it very difficult to keep lost weight off, because as soon as you start eating again the weight will return.

The ideal healthy diet is really not a diet but more of a fitness plan. You learn to eat right and get regular exercise. The fitness plan is not something you follow for a few weeks until the weight is lost, but it is a plan for living a healthy life. There is a big difference between dieting to lose weight and getting fit while losing weight.

Maintaining Concord weight loss is a lot easier when you adhere to a healthy lifestyle. The key is to make your fitness program interesting by eating a variety of healthy foods and choosing physical activities you enjoy.

If you are uncomfortable working out at the gym then you can hire an in-home trainer who can develop a varied exercise program. If you like exercising outdoors, there are many different athletic and recreational activities which you can do to burn calories. You can play tennis or start a walking program.

Paying Attention to the Details

The key to Concord weight loss is to continue your weight maintenance program in your daily living while paying attention to habits which could lead to weight gain.

• Stay focused on your daily Concord weight loss maintenance program by becoming aware of physical symptoms indicating the body is distressed (i.e. eating high fat food that causes indigestion)
• Weigh yourself regularly without being obsessive
• Learn how to choose a variety of healthy foods
• Learn how to cook foods in a healthy manner
• Exercise 5 to 7 days a week
• Change your exercise program regularly so you don’t lose interest
• Don’t let your body feel starved which lowers your resistance to eating junk food or extra calories you don’t need
• Only eat when you are hungry and not because it is “meal time”
• Eat smaller meals more frequently
• Make sure your exercise program includes aerobic and strength training exercises
• Look for ways to burn more calories as you go through the day (i.e. stand instead of sitting, parking far from the store door and so on)

Keeping the pounds off for Concord weight loss is not difficult as long as you pay attention to your diet and continue to exercise regularly. Even as you age and the metabolism naturally slows down, low fat diets coupled with increased exercise can help you stay at the right weight.

Prevent Obesity with Concord Weight Loss!

Concord weight loss experts have written articles about how many people are overweight or obese. Obesity is normally defined as being 20% over what would be considered the ideal weight for your height and physical build. Of course, most people are uncomfortable carrying too much weight long before they reach the obesity stage, and they also are probably experiencing one or more of the health issues related to excess weight.

Stop Blaming Fast Food!

The interesting fact about weight gain, as any personal trainer will confirm, is that fast food itself is not necessarily to blame for being overweight or obese. Since you are reading about weight gain, you are probably ready to hear the truth. The truth is that poor dietary choices are top of the list of major causes of weight gain in developed societies. Concord weight loss involves more than the mere existence of fast food.

In other words, you are not forced to choose a 1,600 calorie fast food meal of french fries and a half pound hamburger. There is no giant fast food hand that grabs you by the collar and forces a milkshake down your throat. You are not held captive by renegade fast food workers who like to watch people’s bodies grow heavier before their very eyes.

The truth is that you have no one but yourself to point a finger at when it comes to laying blame for food choices leading to obesity. Odds are that if you choose the wrong food items on the restaurant menu, fast or not, you are also choosing the wrong grocery items and cooking the wrong kind of meals for maintaining a normal weight.

Learning to make better dietary choices can be difficult at first, but it is necessary for Concord weight loss. That is why many people choose to get assistance from a personal trainer. A personal trainer can help you interpret your diet and show you how to substitute healthy foods for the ones that are causing significant weight gain.

Slowing Down the Fast Choices

Did you know you can eat at a fast food restaurant and still eat healthy? If you look closely at the menu, you will notice that next to the brutus hamburger is a normal sized hamburger. And next to the french fries menu item are the salad choices. And, for Concord weight loss to happen it is possible for people to eat fast food occasionally while also making good choices for other meals and exercising regularly.

People can eat a low calorie and low fat meal at a fast food restaurant if they choose wisely. A personal trainer can show you how to read fast food and other restaurant menus so you know how to pick the foods that will not hurt your health and will help you achieve Concord weight loss.

In fact, a personal trainer can help you develop a good understanding of a healthy diet and how to maintain it as part of your normal lifestyle. You can learn how to choose the foods at the grocery store which will supply good nutrition and a balance of essential daily nutrients. You will also learn which cooking methods keep foods low in fats and calories and how to prepare interesting meals so you don’t get bored.

Fast food restaurants are not to be blamed if you are overweight or obese. Each person desiring Concord weight loss must take responsibility for their own health which means you have to make healthy dietary choices and get regular exercise. A personal trainer cannot make the decisions for you as you go through each day, but he or she can certainly give you the tools you need to follow an interesting diet that will not cause you harm.

Dieting for Weight Loss in Concord Does Not Mean Not Eating

Dieting for weight loss in Concord does not mean not eating, because not eating can actually derail your efforts to lose weight. The body needs certain nutrients every day and in sufficient quantities in order to function properly. When you don’t eat, all you are doing is forcing your body to react to an “emergency” situation by taking drastic measures.

Starvation is Never a Good Option

How many times have you told yourself you will not eat except for a snack here and there in order to achieve weight loss in Concord? How many fad diets have you tried that deprive your body of honest food and use supplement products to replace a balanced diet? Though they continue to be popular, fad diets simply do not work because they disrupt the body’s natural processes.

Starving your body by not eating or eliminating essential nutrients throws your body into chaos. The human body is built with a protection system that tries to defend it against dangerous threats. When you don’t eat enough calories to sustain a healthy body, this protection system will result in the body storing calories just in case they are needed for energy.

So on a starvation diet, you can actually put on weight instead of losing it. Dieting for weight loss in Concord does not mean not eating. In fact, you should eliminate the word “dieting” from your vocabulary and replace it with “balanced nutrition”. To lose weight or to maintain a healthy weight, you need to incorporate healthy food choices in your meal planning and make sure you eat regularly.

Keeping the Pounds Off

When you decide to go for weight loss in Concord, the first place to begin is by setting reasonable goals. You should not lose more than 2 pounds a week if you want to keep the weight off. You can do this by exchanging unhealthy foods you are currently eating with nutrient packed alternatives. Your meals should be low in fat and high in nutrition that supports your body’s needs.

• Eat 6 small meals spread out throughout the day
• Eat foods which are low fat and have no processed sugar
• Avoid processed foods which contain chemical additives and are usually have a high sodium content
• Eat foods with lots of fiber which lowers cholesterol and improves the digestive process
• Eat foods loaded with antioxidants to slow down the aging process
• Eat calories containing the right mix of protein, fats and carbohydrates and don’t eliminate whole food groups
• Eat lots of vegetables and fruits for snacks

In other words, dieting does not mean you should stop eating for weight loss in Concord. Dieting means choosing the right foods and in the right quantities so that you are consuming fewer calories than you burn. You don’t have to rely just on your diet either to lose weight. By increasing the amount of exercise you get each week, you can burn calories quicker and more efficiently.

Which Factors Really Affect Weight Loss in Concord For You

Experts on Weight loss in Concord experts advise you to think positively about health and fitness. Watching those skinny models on television can make you look at your own body differently, but it will not necessarily have a good impact on your health. Seeing those models on TV or in magazines may make you want to be thinner, but many times those models are unnaturally thin.

On the other hand, being overweight is not healthy either. Looking “healthy” is different for everyone, and the best way to look healthy is to feel healthy by finding a happy medium. Healthy weight loss is attainable and should be treated as a plan for life. Fortunately, there are many options for motivation and support whether you are talking weight loss in Concord or elsewhere.

Food Magnet

Food serves a lot of purposes besides nutrition. We serve food at all major events in our life – weddings, birthday parties, even funerals. It doesn’t matter whether you are hungry; you are going to eat at these occasions. Certain foods are can be addictive, and healthy eating requires you to acknowledge these foods and steer clear of the unhealthy ones. All of this pressure makes weight loss in Concord a very difficult task, requiring a lot of commitment.

When you eat too many carbohydrates, you begin to crave bread and pasta. This becomes an unending cycle of satisfying cravings which often manifest themselves in your daily routines. In the end, you find yourself overweight and unhappy. Being overweight can have a lot of consequences:

• Can create poor self-image
• Cause depression
• Affect relationships
• Increase stress levels
• Cause anxiety
• Decrease energy levels
• Cause disease

This is just a partial list. A lot of people try various diets over time looking for the one that will keep the weight off. That is the hardest goal to reach – weight maintenance. Your weight is controlled by a variety of things in your body:

• Glands
• Genetics
• Digestive system
• Immune system
• Genes
• Hormones

With all these systems contributing to your weight, no wonder it is difficult to keep weight off. But fortunately, weight loss assistance is available. Many just need a weight loss coach or nutrition advisor, someone who will provide the initial impetus and planning.

A diet coach can be a nutritionist or a naturopath or even a personal trainer. When you look for weight loss in Concord, you will find all three. A weight loss program is more than watching what you eat. It is determining what foods will operate most efficiently in you individual bodily systems.

Weight loss involves changing your behaviors and becoming attuned to when you choose food you don’t need or want. It means tracking your eating patterns and changing your meals as your body adjusts. In other words, it is a complete program that requires vigilance. That is a lot different than just not eating much food for a couple of weeks like most fad diets suggest!

Sticking Together

Diet plans, personal chef tips, nutrition evaluation, online journals, event calendars and meal tracking are just a few of the weight loss in Concord tools available.

Weight Loss in Concord: Why Crash Dieting Does More Harm Than Good

When trying for weight loss in Concord, sometimes the thing that prompts us to try and lose weight is an upcoming event, such as wanting to get into a bathing suit for summer or looking good for a wedding or reunion. The temptation is high to follow a diet that promises rapid weight loss in Concord in a short amount of time, but often these crash diets do more harm than good and can even result in long lasting consequences. In this article, we’ll discuss why crash dieting is bad for you, the long term consequences of a cycle of long term crash dieting, and what you can do for effective weight loss in Concord!

What is a Crash Diet and Why is it Bad?

Crash diets are famous for promising unbelievable results with minimum effort in a short period of time, but what do they entail exactly? Most crash diets have a poor diet and questionable supplements in common. They usually involve drastically cutting back on the number of calories you consume during the day, and sometimes have complementary supplements which are nothing but diuretics. While practitioners may notice rapid weight loss at the beginning of such a diet, often the weight lost is nothing but water weight and, if continued, will result in muscle loss as well.

When you follow an extremely low calorie diet, the first thing that happens is that your body uses up its stores of carbohydrate, also known as glycogen, as well as the water that is stored with it, in the liver and muscles. This is what prompts the weight loss in the beginning. Once these carbohydrates are used up, the body starts using proteins in the muscles for energy, which can leave you feeling tired and irritable.

Soon, the metabolism slows down, putting your body into a kind of starvation mode, because it doesn’t know when it will start receiving healthy nutrients again. Then, when you go back to your previous eating habits, you’re likely to not only put back on the weight you’ve lost, but add more pounds as well, because the metabolism is still too slow to keep up with the new intake of food.

Worst Case Scenarios

Those that put themselves of a constant cycle of crash dieting and eating poorly are doing a lot of damage to their bodies which could result in potentially life threatening illnesses. Due to their restrictive natures, crash diets could prevent you from eating healthy foods with nutrients that your body needs to function properly, such as iron, B12, potassium or sodium. These could lead to deficiencies that can cause other problems, like nerve and muscle functions and heart attacks. They also cause a great deal of problems for organs like the liver and kidneys, because without the proper nutrients, the organs can’t function properly. Finally, not getting enough calcium in the diet can lead to the development of osteoporosis, which makes bones brittle and more prone to fractures.

Eat a Balanced Diet for Better Results

If you’re trying for weight loss in Concord, resist the temptation to follow a crash diet and look for healthier alternatives instead. Gradually change your eating habits and your proportion sizes so your metabolism won’t drop too quickly, and pair your new eating habits with a fitness routine, and you’ll be losing weight in no time. Think of your new good habits as a lifestyle change instead of a temporary diet.

You may not lose weight as quickly as a crash diet can promise, but you’ll be doing it in a much safer way and the weight is more likely to stay off. For safe and effective weight loss in Concord consider hiring a personal trainer. Personal trainers ensure that you will achieve your long term goals by changing up your routines and keeping you motivated!