Lose Weight While You Eat!

Nobody likes to diet. But what if you could make tasty meals yourself that would speed up the process of losing weight? By combining ‘negative calorie’ fruits and vegetables into salads and other dishes at mealtime, you can accelerate your weight loss in a delicious way.

Negative calorie foods are not new and have been discussed in weight loss circles for years. They are essentially fruits and vegetables that make your body use more calories (units of heat) to digest than they contain themselves. When you eat them as part of your diet, the net result is a negative calorie balance. This will help you lose weight faster.

Here is a short list of popular negative calorie fat burning foods:

• Asparagus
• Apples
• Beets
• Broccoli
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Cucumbers
• Garlic
• Grapefruit
• Lettuce
• Oranges
• Papaya
• Pineapples
• Raspberries
• Spinach
• Strawberries
• Turnips
• Zucchini

As you can see there are many fat burning foods to choose from. The way to achieve faster weight loss with these foods is to eat more of them more often. Let’s explore your options for the many ways to include them in your diet. First pick out the vegetables from the list that you like to eat. Write them down on a piece of paper. Then list your favorite fruits below them on the same piece of paper.

Your objective is to use as many of your favorite fat burning foods incorporated with the other foods you prepare. For example, when you eat your daily salad incorporate as many fat burning foods as you can to make a tasty salad for yourself. You can start with lettuce, add shredded carrots, a few cucumber slices, sliced or diced apples and maybe a little pineapple. On the side you might add a few strawberries and a couple pieces of celery.

For a snack you can make sugarless Jell-O with shredded carrots included. Another good snack is your own special fruit salad prepared ahead of time. You can top it with a sugarless whipped cream. Be creative. Find ways to use garlic in your cooking instead of salt. Use fat burning vegetables as the complementary ingredients when you cook your meals. You will soon become accustomed to using these foods first in your meals.

By their very nature, you can eat as many of them in your diet as you wish. The more of these foods you eat on a daily basis, the more weight you can lose and keep off. Remember to also eat other sensible low fat foods and protein to stay healthy. Never go on a crash negative food diet only. The idea is to increase your use of these foods, not to replace your total diet with them.

A well-rounded lifestyle that includes the right foods and exercise will result in you reaching your goal weight faster. Fat burning foods can be your secret weapon in the battle of the bulge. It’s a tasty way to lose those unwanted pounds.

Six Steps To Turbo-Charging Your Weight Loss!

Step One: Organizing Your Eating
A lot of people who have trouble maintaining a healthy weight fall into one big trap—eating too many of their daily calories toward the end of the day. These calories go unused (while you sleep) and are much more likely to be stored as fat. Eating a large dinner and then a late night snack is the perfect prescription for gaining weight. Calories eaten earlier in the day can raise your metabolism and energy level. Organizing your meals will help you identify and conquer emotional eating! Stick to these rules, and remember that these are the only times you should eat:

• Eat a healthy breakfast.
• Eat a moderate lunch.
• Have a snack in between lunch and dinner.
• Eat a moderate dinner.
• Eat a second snack only if you’re physically hungry.
• Stop eating completely at least two hours before bedtime.

Step Two: Make Eating a Conscious Activity
Eating should be enjoyed—it must also become a conscious act. Eating in front of the television or eating on the run denies us the pleasure of the actual eating experience! Think of all the times that you’ve unconsciously eaten throughout the day. Whether you’re at a social gathering or watching television, this is inhibiting your weight loss. That’s why organizing your meals will help you. Keys to enjoying your eating and making it part of your daily plan:
Instead of the amount of food consumed, your focus should be the “event” of eating and the quality. Your meals are mini-celebrations!
Formally sit down for all of your meals.
Create a nice environment to enjoy your healthy meals; play soothing music, candlelight, invite guests.
Unconscious eating can become a way of life if you let it. Instead, become a planner with some creativity and make eating fun!

Step Three: Physical Hunger vs. Emotional Eating
Learning to distinguish when physical hunger ends and emotional eating begins is essential to identifying your emotional eating issues and patterns. Just by being more active, as you have been doing in Phases One and Two, you have enhanced your ability to become physically hungry.

Feeling Physical Hunger. If you deal with your emotions by using food, you may have actually lost the ability to feel physical hunger. You must allow yourself to become hungry. To do this, delay your eating past your normal meal times to experience the actual sensation of physical hunger. You may feel anxiety and stress at first, but these emotions need to be experienced in order to make a permanent change. The goal is to get to know your body so you eat only when you are physically hungry. Note: if you have a medical condition such as diabetes, you should consult your physician. Why are you eating? In order to re-learn how to eat according to the demands of your physical hunger, you need to get into the habit of knowing exactly why you’re eating whenever you eat.

Step Four: Five Reasons for Emotional Eating
It’s time to identify the reasons behind emotional eating. These are the five most common reasons:

Boredom
Boredom is the easiest reason for emotional eating to remedy. If this is the reason you eat, try doing something else when you reach for a snack, like playing the piano, cleaning your closet or starting a craft project. One of the best things you can do in lieu of snacking is exercise! Make a list in your online journal of everything you want to do or accomplish and then hang it on your refrigerator. When you reach for a snack, do one of these things. You’ll not only feel better from cutting down on your eating, but you’ll be fulfilling yourself in other ways.

Stress
Our lives are more stressful than ever before, and food is one of the most common ways we deal with stress. Eating out of stress is another easy thing to overcome. Here’s how. Identify the sources of stress. Record them in your journal.
Try to minimize or eliminate some of the things on your list. Remember, exercise is a healthy outlet to eliminate stress.
List other relaxing activities you love—taking a bath, watching a movie, getting a manicure…and treat yourself once in a while.

Loneliness
Using food as a replacement for human interaction is a very easy habit to slip into. It’s no surprise that “comfort food” has become one of our culture’s most popular catch phrases. Food has an almost mystical quality of disguising itself as your “friend.” If you eat out of loneliness, these steps may help you. When the urge strikes you to eat when you are alone, write down your feelings in your journal. Study your journal entries and use your newfound personal awareness to expand your social horizons. Keep a list of friends and family members to call on a moment’s notice to keep you from eating when you’re alone.  Join a gym or take a class—you will increase your odds of meeting new people

Emotional Issues
Depression is often the result of deep-seated sadness, fear and anger. It is one of the most insidious of all the causes for emotional overeating, and it often has its roots in some form of childhood trauma. In our society, we are raised to hide our feelings and to put on a happy face. Often times we use eating as a temporary fix for our unhappiness. Many people can trace their emotional eating binges back to a specific traumatic event in their past, such as abandonment, abuse or lack of proper parenting. Try and get to the root of your problem. When the urge strikes you to eat when you are depressed, write down your feelings in your journal. You may be surprised to discover where your issues began. Ask yourself why you use food to make you feel happy. Find support through friends, family or counseling.  Note: If you feel that you are depressed, you may want to seek professional help.

Step Five: Use the moment of temptation to learn what needs to change in your life.
Emotional eating usually follows a pattern. Are you prone to late-night snacking or overdoing it at social functions? Become conscious of when and where you eat. Record your patterns of eating in your online journal. The best time to write is when you’re tempted to eat. If you miss this opportunity, it’s still helpful to write about it later. This will help you become aware of why you’re emotionally eating in the first place. Make Sensible Snack Choices; if the urge to emotionally eat is overwhelming, at least eat wisely. Make some changes to your snacking habits.

• Yogurt instead of ice cream
• Popcorn instead of potato chips
• Graham crackers instead of cookies
• Freshly-cut veggies instead of candy

Step Six: Change your unwanted behavior, one step at a time.
The real hard work of improving your health is taking a clear-eyed and objective look at your life and finding the courage to make permanent changes to behaviors that you’ve probably defended most of your life. At the moment that you’re the most tempted to eat, your true self is crying out for you to change your life! New Words to Live By:
Stop comforting yourself by stuffing down your feelings of sadness, regret, fear and frustration with cheeseburgers, pizza, pie and potato chips.
Stop comforting yourself by numbing yourself from the everyday stresses of work and family life by falling prey to obsessive-compulsive snacking.
Stop comforting yourself by fooling yourself that you can fill a void in your personal or professional life simply with food.