Good Healthcare Requires Treatment of Your Mind, Body, and Soul

Gaining Habits To Lose Weight

4 January 2017 by Hugh Larson

Although most of life's goals involve winning, one of America's most common goals is about losing weight. However, if your goal is to lose weight this year, you will need to gain habits to help you shed and keep off these unwanted pounds.

Here's a quick guide to help you develop better habits to help you win your battle to lose:

Nutrition

Your eating and drinking habits play a large role in maintaining a healthy weight. This doesn't mean, however, that you can simply restrict your caloric intake and expect to lose (and keep) off extra weight. You must adopt healthy nutritional habits to ensure that you're addressing the nutritional aspect of your weight loss goals.

Hydration: according to a recent study, nearly 22% of your calories come from what you drink. Beverages like soda, sports drinks, energy drinks, and alcoholic beverages among the most calorically dense and nutritionally empty commonly consumed liquids. This means that they add calories without always hydrating you or satiating your hunger.

New Habit: choose water or other unsweetened beverages like tea or sparkling water, which will provide hydration without adding unwanted calories.*

Snacking: nearly 25% of your calories are likely to come from "snacking." These impromptu mini-meals often come in the form of calorically-dense fatty, sugary, and salty processed foods like chips and cookies. Not only are these snacks calorie bombs, but they are also unlikely to provide substantial nutritional value.

New Habit: choose fresh fruits or vegetables instead of processed snack food. Because most fruits and vegetables have a low caloric footprint and a high nutritional value, you will feel full with far fewer calories.

*Research suggests that "zero calorie" products, sweetened with artificial sweeteners, are not always beneficial for individuals looking to shed excess weight.

Exercise

Your body was designed to be active. This intrinsic design helps you burn calories and promotes a host of desirable health benefits. When it comes to exercise, it's important to remember that exercising must become a lifestyle to truly deliver lasting results.

Holistic: one of the biggest mistakes people make when adopting a new exercising plan is focusing on a single metric, weight, to evaluate its success. Unfortunately, this figure can be misleading as it takes your body time to adjust any exercise plan; this adaptation pattern can be closely correlated to weight loss.

New Habit: refrain from weighing yourself for a few weeks. Additionally, find additional ways to measure your exercise success. Minutes, miles, calories, distance from one location to another (one city to the next), mountains climbed, and other metrics can help you see that exercise success doesn't need to always be tied to weight.

Social: research suggests that exercise plans that incorporate a social element are far more likely to succeed than those completed alone. Although working out with a group (or around a group) can involve some element of vulnerability and can require more planning, exercising with a group can help motivate you even when your resolve might waver.

New Habit: commit to completing some form of exercising event connected to your new exercising goal. For instance, if you're looking to take up running or jogging, committing to running a local road race will ensure that you'll be able to exercise with a crowd and might help you find a new social group to exercise with.

Although losing weight can be difficult, evolving new, healthier, habits can help you lose weight. These habits often involve a little extra planning and mindfulness, but they can help you lose weight successfully.  Whether you're making a New Year's resolution or simply making a new resolution, you can always working on ditching bad habits for better habits. For more information, contact a weight loss clinic like Figure Weight Loss.

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