Taking Baby Steps

Losing weight is a slow process. It takes time to meet a certain goal. Here are a few tips than I can offer you into starting your weight loss process:

• ·         Cut out sugary drinks - WebMD says “Researchers reviewed more than 40 years of studies and found the recent increase in consumption of sugary soft drinks and other sugar-sweetened drinks, like fruit drinks, lemonade, and iced tea, is associated with weight gain and obesity.” so instead of reaching for that soda, reach for a bottle of water. slowly cut your soda consumption down each day until you are not drinking soda anymore. 
•       Get active!!! – instead of sitting at home on the computer playing games or watching tv, get up, get active, and learn a new hobby.  You could go for walks, or you could do some much needed yard work. The point is to get your body used to being active. Over time when you start to work out, it won’t take so much out of you.

• Watch your Calorie Intake – one key point to getting healthy is to keep track of what you are eating and how many calories you are consuming each day. The average American’s calorie intake is well over 3,000 calories a day.  I like to visit http://caloriecount.about.com/ every day and keep track of my daily intake. For example, for my goal, I need to consume between 1,200 to 1,800 calories a day.

• Watch what you eat – the start of your diet should be the start of you eating right. You can work out all you want, but you’re not going to see a difference if you are not eating right. Everyone is different, and everyone has different tastes. Being on a diet doesn’t mean that you have to eat rabbit food, or creepy food you never heard of. Instead of eating it every day, slowly wean yourself off and consume fast food once a week. Start by cooking at home, eating more veggies and fruits. I know there might be a few people reading this and thinking to themselves “wtf, why not just cut all fast food together?” well, my answer is because junk food is addictive. You have to treat this like an addiction. Even though most fast foods won’t admit this, they are loaded with monosodium glutamate (MSG).   (I will explain the evil MSG in another post)
• Don’t know where to start?: no problem. Learning what I can eat and what I can’t eat was pretty hard for me too.   What I did was cut out all foods that had sugar, I went gluten free, cut out red meat, ate more veggies, and more fruit. Again I will explain all of this in another post.  but the best thing to do is do a lot of research on the type of diet that you are interested in. again, the website http://caloriecount.about.com/ has a lot of interesting things that can help you out with. they also have forums where you can ask questions to other people out there that can help you with anything you need to know. it's always best to stay connected to people. don't be afraid to ask questions
• Don't weigh your self everyday, it'll drive you crazy: i am pretty sure that i have said this somewhere in this post or the last post, but losing weight is a slow process. remember you are taking baby steps to help kick start your diet. 
•  Patience is a virtue 

In my next post I will explain what I have done to lose 4o pounds. I am just your average person. I don’t claim to know everything there is about going on a diet. I am just simply posting what has been working for me. if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.