Fastest Ways To Lose Weight | Weight Loss slideshows | Well Being center

After Breakfast, Make Water Your Primary Drink

There are three main reasons for this: what water does, what it is and what it doesn't do. Water will help speed up the transit of undesirable chemicals through the body, improve digestion and can even improve your skin! Water is vital to the body's functions, and even fairly mild dehydration can have serious effects on performance. Drinking water regularly throughout the day will help keep your body functioning correctly. Finally, water doesn't contain any sugar or fat - whereas many other drinks do. When you're trying to lose weight you can be dealing with quite small margins - cutting 500 calories a day out of your intake can make a big difference, but all your hard work can be undone by a couple of upmarket coffees or a few sodas without you even realizing it!

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Photo courtesy of Matthias by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/theowl84/3045227001/
www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20501331,00.html
http://www.rd.com/health/diet-weight-loss/easy-ways-to-lose-weight-50-ideas/
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/lose-weight-fast-how-to-do-it-safely

Eat Five or Six Small Meals a Day Instead of Three Large Meals

Eating several small meals used to be a staple of bodybuilders anxious to keep their blood sugar - and available protein levels - high. They want to do it in order to gain weight - but having stable blood sugar is beneficial if you want to lose weight too. When your blood sugar rises, you can feel energetic, 'hyper,' and then when it crashes, you feel hungry - even though you don't really need food. To prevent this, eat several smaller meals throughout the day, only two to four hours apart, and you'll never get hungry enough to make you want to stray from your diet.

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Walk Gently for About Forty-Five Minutes a Day

Walking isn't the kind of exercise that's going to lead to great athletic performance - well, not directly. But it is a form of 'non-exercise exercise' that allows your body to tick over slowly, getting unwanted waste products out of your muscles, stimulating your digestion and helping to stabilize blood sugar. For the best results, walk after a meal, somewhere relaxing - a pleasant outdoor environment will help give you a mental boost , and the varied terrain will give you a bit more of a workout. Walking doesn't burn a lot of calories by itself - about 200 calories an hour - but it does a great job of gently resettling your metabolism.

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Want to Eat Smaller Portions? Serve Your Food On Smaller Plates

Studies show that people eat more when they eat from larger plates, and less when they eat from smaller ones. As silly as that sounds, it's because our selection of portions is subconscious. And once you know how it works, the subconscious mind is easy to fool. We sit down to eat a plateful of food - whatever the size of the plate. If you want to eat more, get a bigger plate, and if you want to eat less, get a smaller one. Your subconscious mind won't know the difference, so you'll soon find you're eating smaller portions.

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Eat Foods That Are Rich in Water - Especially Bound Water

Foods that are rich in water will make you feel fuller longer. Their bulk fills your stomach and often takes some time to break down; in the case of many fruits and vegetables, it's the time it takes for the cell walls to be broken down by the digestive process. Additionally, the mix of dietary fiber and water makes for a fuller felling in the gut and improves digestive transit. To get the most out of this effect, eat water rich foods that are also good sources of fiber and long-chain carbohydrates - fruit or raw vegetables such as carrot sticks make an ideal, and convenient choice.

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As Odd as it Might Seem, Avoiding White Foods Can Help

Not a week goes by without a new advert in magazines for a new diet, based on some new absurd 'principle.' This isn't the 'no white foods' diet. The reason foods are white is because either they consist of grains whose outer surfaces have been milled off, or they consist of fine powders - powders so fine that their surfaces refract all light, giving a white effect. White flour and caster sugar are examples. Typically, white foods will be high in refined, short-chain carbohydrates and nutrient-absorption-blocking chemicals like phytic acid. The exception to the rule is white rice, which, if eaten as a small part of a high-protein meal, won't do you any harm. Obviously, you can suspend the 'no white food' rule when it comes to choosing a nice piece of fish!

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Eat Slowly and Calmly To Reduce Your Caloric Intake and Improve Your Digestion

If you eat slowly and calmly, you'll eat less and feel fuller. Diets based on chewing your food a certain number of times are playing on the observation that if you pay your full attention to your food, you'll have a clearer idea of when you've had enough; stuff it into your mouth while you watch TV, or with one eye on the clock, and you'll overeat or ruin your digestion. Making time and mental space for eating will enable you to concentrate on it - and then forget it and concentrate on something else.

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Eat With Friends - Make a Meal of it Literally and Metaphorically

Eating alone doesn't mean anything except that you're alone and hungry. But if you eat with other people, you'll probably eat better and eat less. If you have a weight loss buddy, eat at their house one day a week and have them eat at your house one day a week. That's two days when you can encourage each other, swap recipes and ideas - and eat together. Ask friends over instead of going out, so you know the food's quality and you can choose what you eat. Home cooking is healthier and less calorific (usually) than commercial foods.

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Exercise Regularly - Don't Try To Diet Without Exercise!

Exercising regularly will help keep your blood sugar stable on a day to day basis, meaning that you'll feel less hungry and more relaxed during the day. It will also help you get the right balance between calories in and calories out. Losing weight by solely diet or solely exercise is far more difficult and time consuming than combining both approaches, and after all they're both components of a healthy lifestyle. Try to use a mix of resistance training and cardiovascular conditioning to encourage your body to hang on to muscle tissue even as you lose fat.

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Avoid Fad Diets and '10-Day' Challenges - Crash Diets Will Always Let you Down

Fad diets are carefully designed to make sure that you'll be back in a couple of months to try something else. The best of them are common sense dressed up as a revelation, and the worst a re simply cons. In the majority of cases, after you look behind the sales pitch, a fad diet will involve consuming a lot of water, reduced calories and increased frequency of meals - exactly what we're recommending, but taken to dangerous extremes. You'll lose some 'water weight' and a couple of pounds of body weight - and then the ten day diet will be up, you'll resume your former eating habits and be in the market for another diet, brought to you by the people who sold you the last one. What you should aim for is a permanent change in your eating and exercise habits.