Sadly there is no miracle pill that will allow you to eat anything you want and still lose weight. If you want to burn calories you have to increase your metabolism and the trick to that, is eating the right things frequently.

Understanding What You Need To Do

The concept behind eating to lose weight is really quite simple. Your digestive system and your metabolism need to be kept working. To achieve this you have to eat regular small meals with only a short time between them.

When you miss meals or try to “starve” yourself to lose weight, what actually happens is your body goes into energy conservation mode. You will experience an initial weight loss, but your metabolism will slow down, and you will burn fewer calories. So, in effect, crash dieting and skipping meals hiders rather than helps you experience weight loss.

The general recommendation is that you have a small meal or snack roughly every four hours during waking hours. This helps to keep your body operating at its peak efficiency. Although this sounds great, sadly you just cannot eat anything and still lose weight. It is important that you select the correct meals and when combined with some sensible exercise the increase in your metabolism can be pretty impressive.

What Should You Eat?

Boosting your metabolism requires you to eat the right food. Most of the normal healthy choices will work well, but you must avoid the following:

1. Too Large a Portion. When preparing small meals for weight loss, have a look at the recommended portion size and reduce it. If for example you have a half bowl of breakfast cereal, it will help, but one and a half will not.

2. High Sugar Content. Sugary foods can actually send the body into conservation mode. It is important that you steer clear of sugary food. Watch out for hidden sugars, if it contains syrup, glucose, fructose or almost anything ending in”ose” it is sure to have added sugars. Avoid, white bread, cakes, muffins and pastries.

3. High Cholesterol Food. If it is fried, or heavy you will feel sluggish and unwilling to do any exercise.
   

If you follow these rules. It is possible to eat several times each day, boost your metabolism, achieve a healthy weight loss

You don’t have to radically change your lifestyle or your eating habits to lose weight. Small changes in your daily routine can add up to major changes on the scale.

We all know that drinking water is good for you, but can it also help you take off the pounds? Yes if it’s ice water. If you drink an 8 ounce glass of ice cold water, your body burns up 25 calories to get its temperature back to normal. If you drink only 4 glasses of ice water a day, you’ll lose 12 pounds in a year.

Exercise in the morning, not at night. There is evidence that exercise raises your metabolism about 10% for 4 to 6 hours afterwards. If you exercise at night, a portion of the time your metabolism increases is when you’re sleeping. That’s when you burn the least amount of energy. Change your exercise to the morning and that 10% increase will burn off more energy.

Have a cup of soup before dinner. Soup takes longer to eat and fills you up before you get to the main course. Stick with the broth based soups and away from cream soups.

Where ever you drive, park your car at the far end of the parking lot. You will be amazed at the extra walking that squeezes into your day. Extra walking means more calories burned. Of course stay safe, if you’re in a dark neighborhood park close to your destination and under lights.

Take the stairs if you only need to go up a few flights.

Eat a salad 15 minutes before your dinner. It’s takes about 20 minutes for your tummy to signal your brain that it’s full and has had enough food. If you can kick start the timer by having a nice green salad first, you’ll feel fuller faster.

When you eat out, eat half of what’s on your plate: half of the appetizer, half of the salad, half of the entrée, half of desert. Odds are you’ll be just as satisfied and you’ll have cut the calories in half. If you eat out once a day like most people do, you can drop a couple of pounds a week with just this one change.

If you want something to snack on, drink a glass of water. Sometimes the urge to put something in our mouths isn’t hunger but boredom.

Exchange your potato chips, corn chips and other fried snacks for pretzels. The fat content in pretzels is far lower than the other snacks. And you still get the crunch.

Don’t drink fruit juice, eat the whole fruit instead.

Exchange one fatty item in your diet for a nonfat item. For example instead of whole milk use skim milk; instead of regular mayonnaise use nonfat, instead of full fat cream cheese use nonfat.

Lets face it, most diets are boring and the trouble with fat burning is you have to exercise to do it. So wouldn’t it be nice if you could reduce those “love handles”with a bit less effort.

Well there is some good news.

The Chinese have for centuries extolled the virtues of Green Tea for its medicinal qualities, but recent studies may be of more interest to all you dieters out there.

One recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Vol. 81, No. 1, 122-129, January 2005), indicated the ingestion of a tea rich in catechins (catechins are a major component of green tea extract) leads to a lowering of body fat.

There is further evidence to support the facts that:

• Green Tea can lower cholesterol and increase energy expenditure

• Green Tea also causes carbohydrates to be released slowly, preventing sharp increases in blood-insulin levels. This promotes the burning of fat.

• Drinking green tea can facilitate weight loss by affecting glucose

All of this is good new for those trying to lose weight.

There are, however, major benefits to drinking Green Tea other than fat burning.

Today, scientific research in both Asia and the west is providing hard evidence for the health benefits long associated with drinking Green Tea.

There is research indicating that drinking Green Tea lowers total cholesterol levels, as well as improving the ratio of good (HDL) cholesterol to bad (LDL) cholesterol.

Researchers recently concluded that a compound in Green Tea inhibits the growth of cancer cells.

Green Tea’s secret is that it is rich in EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate ) which is a powerful antioxident. Antioxidants work by neutralizing highly reactive, destructive compounds called free radicals. From warding off heart disease to slowing degeneration of the brain and eyes, talk of the health benefits of antioxidants are quite common today.

Research suggests that consumption of antioxidant-rich foods reduces damage to cells and biochemicals from free radicals. This may slow down, prevent, or even reverse certain diseases that result from cellular damage, and perhaps even slow down the natural aging process.

Green tea has also been shown to be effective in inhibiting the abnormal formation of blood clots.This takes on added importance when you consider that thrombosis (the formation of abnormal blood clots) is the leading cause of heart attacks and stroke.

Should you take Green Tea as a means of losing weight and burning fat? Well the weight of evidence shows that it will definitely assist, just don’t expect the pounds to drop off without taking any other actions.

So should you take Green Tea to help as part of a healthy diet? Absolutely, the potential health benefits are enormous and if you are no fan of caffeine then Green Tea has roughly half the caffeine content of coffee.

Diet, weight loss, fat burning

My mother always told me that eating after sundown would result in obesity because the body doesn’t have the opportunity to “burn up” the calories, and they turn directly into fat

So does the old saying “have breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper have any truth in it?”

The best evidence would appear to support the view that it’s the total energy you eat throughout the day that’s important. You can eat all of your daily food intake after 8pm, and you won’t gain any more weight than if you ate it earlier in the day.

Weight gain occurs when you consume more energy than you expend.

So it looks like for the majority of us there’s nothing wrong with eating at night, as long as we don’t consume more calories than we burn

There may, however, be health risks associated with eating late at night in people who suffer from GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and/or asthma.

The American Journal of Gastroenterology states that “asthmatics have more nocturnal gasping and reflux symptoms than non-asthmatics, and they are related to bedtime eating.”

Late night Eating