Top Tip: Scales May Lie, but Inches Don’t…

Scales May Lie, but Inches Don’t…

I have posted about tracking your weight, recording your food intake in a diary and making as many notes about your requirements and activities as possible.

Waist Measurement Tape

However there is another factor to consider, this is simply that Scales can lie to you. I say lie but its more a case of them being misleading. We all know that muscle is denser and thus weighs more than fat, so if your losing body fat but your exercising and gaining muscle the scales won’t really show this.

This means you could be losing body fat but gaining muscle for example, this would show your weight not moving at all or moving very slowly, which may dishearten you.

Now the question is how do you combat this ?

Scales are a a very useful monitoring and motivational tool to have in your arsenal but they cannot be your only monitoring method.

Additionally you should measure and track in your food diary, the measurements from:

1,  The Top of Your Arms.
2, Fullest Part of Your Thighs.
3, Your Waist.
4, Your Hips.
5, Your Chest.

All of these should be checked and monitored for the inches you lose, there is another measurement method using a  Body Fat Measure tool, but I’ll talk about them another time because its quite a complex tool.

Unlike the bathroom scales, Inches never lie or mislead you.

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Top Tip: Herbal Tea’s Make It Easier

Herbal Tea’s Make It Easier

Herbal Tea‘s especially flavoured Green Tea Bags, which help your metabolism and surpress your appetite, but in general herbal teas help with your urges and desire to eat. The few minutes it takes for the kettle to boil, making the tea etc, will keep your mind off eating. Once you drink your tea the warmth will fill you up and aroma satisfy your urge.

Iced Green Tea

I would suggest looking at apple cinnamon tea, almond tea, or orange tea, in addition to the green tea with fruit, which the Green Tea with Lemon is awesome.

Some tea’s also have health benefits such as:

Peppermint Tea is a digestive aid that helps to relieve bloating and indigestion after meals. Peppermint is also used to treat irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and gallstones.

Echinacea Tea will help you protect your immune system, keeping you fighting fit, and alledgely helps to clear up cold and flu quicker as well as protect you from them in the first place.

Detox Tea  is a blend of detoxifying herbs including Milk Thistle, Sarsparilla Root, Dandelion Root, Echinacea, and Red Clover that stimulate the liver, gallbladder, and immune system.

Lemongrass Tea – Lemongrass is a very popular herbal tea with a refreshing Lemon taste and aroma. Although Lemongrass Tea is caffeine free is still provides an uplifting feeling due to its light and refreshing taste.

You can also make cool Iced Tea’s in the summer for all the benefits as well.

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Top Tip: Track Your Weight On The Scales

Track You Weight On The Scales

Some people avoid the scales but this will not help you to lose weight, you should regularly check your weight. The trick is to not obsess over your scales, weighing yourself daily will lead to disappointment as your weight will flucuate up or down several points from day to day.

Weight Loss Tracker

Some people who want to chart their loss and gains by the day just so they can see what’s going on, should really be doing this along with a weight loss tracker plan, which is like an extension of the food diary and what makes you eat. Using a Weight Loss Tracker can offer you what is called insights.

Insights are where you can compare your recorded weight with your in-take, exercise and everything else you do and you look for patterns that have resulted. This can be noticing that every time you go to the the gym for swimming your lose more inches off your body than weight, or that certain things result  in multiple days of weight increase, or decrease meaning you can hone your dieting in.

By looking for insights you can clean your diet and plans up to make them more effective for you.

Realistically if you do decide to record daily, you should weigh in at the same time each day, for me this is after my morning teeth brushing and toilet visit. You should also only track a weekly number, say Mondays for your weight loss goals.

Daily Tracking is only for monitoring your lifestyle, not for tracking your weight loss.

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Tip Top: Exercise On, Zone Out, Lose Weight Now

Exercise On, Zone Out, Lose Weight Now

This theory works for ANY thing, so now thats out the way lets get down to the top tip. Have you ever wondered why music is so important to your work out and why Gym’s all play very similar music  ?

101 Running Songs

Well people, music fires up the pleasure centres in your brain and allows your mind to wonder and focus or rather zone out to the music, so you kind of slip into ‘auto-pilot’ mode almost like the DVD Click, where Adam Sandler fast forwards his life.

This makes you glide and power through whatever task your doing, be it working in the office, working out, or walking a long distance.

This is the big secret to making your work outs fun, and making the time fly. Take a little time to work out, plan mellow easy going music, aggressive hard music and up-beat poppy happy music get a mix of fast, slow, bouncy and sad.

If you play the same music all along your pace will not change, and you’ll get bored you mind will lose interest. You want to play some pop, dance, rock, metal, soul, hip-hop a little of everything to keep your brain engaged.

I suggest this CD with 101 Songs which include hits from Queen, Outkast, The Fray, NickelBack, Super Grass, Wham, Lily Allen, Pink, Katy Perry] and loads more to keep your mind rocking and ensure you totally forget your working out and burning calories.

You should also buy a small MP3 Player Card Reader to Load your music onto, I personally have one of these MP3 Card Readers.  Its not much bigger than my thumb, and has a 8gb Micro SD Card in it, and I have about 500 songs on there and not even half full.  I’ll talk more about getting enough music and MP3 Players another time.

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Top Tip: Low Calorie Alternatives Help

Low Calorie Alternatives Help

This should be a Homer Simpson style D’oh moment.

Changing as many small things in your current diet to healthier low calorie options is half the battle and adds up to some pretty impressive changes overall. Many people say they can taste the difference but this is only temporary, once you have changed your tastes will change and adjust to less sugar/fat and you will find the old full sugar one too sweet, the full fat too greasy it really does happen.

My top suggestions for changes are:

Pepsi to Pepsi Max.
Bottles to Cans.
Coke to Diet Coke with Lemon.
Full Butter to Vitalite or Low Fat Spread.
Full Sugar Drinks to Lo-Cal Flavoured Water.
Full Fat Milk to Semi Skimmed.
Fried Egg to Boiled or Poached Egg.
High Fiber Breakfast Cereals.
Wholegrain Bread.

If you cut down and try to save as many calories as you can, you will soon realise you are saving 1000s of calories per week and the weight will drop off. For example changing Warburtons White Toastie bread to a wholegrain harvest grain bread, saves you around 60 kcal per slice, so if you ate 6 slices per day would be saving 360kcal which is almost 1lb of weight loss per week.

Think what you have, that you can change slightly, don’t think you have to go whole-hog all at once either. I personally for example went from full-milk to semi-skimmed and now I have semiskimmed on Shreaddies Cereal and Skimmed in my drinks. I’ll move to fully skimmed in time, so I’ll save around 600 kcal per week compared to full-milk.

Everytime you cut something down, work out how many times a month you would have it, now add those calories up for the month. Saving 50 kcal on not having cream in your coffee, if you drink 10 cups a day, will save you almost 3lb a month weight loss. Add them up in weekly and monthly total, and then work to 3500 kcal = 1lb of fat.

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Top Tip: Treats Are Good for You

Treats Are Good For You

Yeah you heard me right, treats are good for you. If you cut all your treats out you are going to start craving them and will be more likely to have a slip and feel guilty so don’t do it. Allow yourself a number of treats, obviously low calorie and fat treats are best but not essential.

AK-47 Bullet Ice Cubes

If you are going to crave chocolate for example, buy funsize or smallest bars you can find, if you have a 500g bar, you will want 500g and eat more than you planned.

Buy It Small, and Keep It Small.

If you are going to crave anything, you should build these treats into your diet, and control the craving, I usually crazy Pepsi Max, Frozen Fruit Juice or Smoothies.

Smoothies I can work into my diet for my fruit in-take so no big deal there, but I’ll talk about smoothies as part of your 5-a-day and fiber in-take another day. I bought this Kenwood Smoothie Maker, or maybe the model below, I paid £52.99 from Comet about 18 months ago for mine, but I liked it because I destroys Ice Cubes and Fruit like its nothing.

I used to buy the Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF)  of Pepsi Max 2ltr bottles, I’d fill a glass, put some ice cubes in and take the bottle to my computer and end up drinking loads until the ice melted and I didn’t like it warm.

Ice Lolly Push Pop Maker

I solved this problem by buying 6 cans of Pepsi Max and keep them in the fridge and I bought novelty ice cube makers like Skull and Cross Bones and AK-47 Bullets (Upper Right) and use them instead.

If I have any Pepsi Max left over, I make the ice-cubes out of the Pepsi or out of Fruit Juice, Orange Juice bullets and blackcurrent skulls with apple cross bones awesome.

I also bought a frozen push pop or twist pop depending on what they was as a kid. So I pour my fruit juice into the Push Pop Maker (left) and throw them into the freezer.

So now I have a healthy treat thats fun to have, you and freeze smoothies, fruit juice, flat fizzy drinks, almost anything to make ice-cubes, push pops, or almost anything.

I also sometimes buy the small kids size fruit juices and just freeze the small carton to make a little treat to drink/suck or eat with a knife.

With a little imagination you can turn the most mundane things into something quite fun to aid you in your healthier self goals.

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