Planning a good diet

It is important to establish a healthy diet that contains all the essential food groups, especially if you are following an exercise program to help with your weight loss. This should include lean protein, complex carbohydrates and fats, remember healthy fats are very good for the body and should not be avoided. Protein and fruits/veggies should make up a large part of your diet, excellent food sources include but are not limited to;

Protein:
Chicken
Turkey
Lean beef
Tuna
Salmon
Eggs
Cottage cheese

Carbs:
Brown rice
Wholewheat pasta
Wholemeal bread
Oats
Potatoes
Broccoli
Cabbage
Spinach
Beans
Apples
Bananas
Oranges

Fats:
Nuts
Olive oil
Cod liver oil
Flax seed oil
Avocados

You should also drink plenty of water instead of soft drinks, green tea can also have great health benefits and can help lower cholesterol and reduce high blood pressure.

Eat healthy, get healthy

One of the most important factors when it comes to weight loss is too eat more often, this might sound counterproductive but your body won't think so. Your metabolism is most active and burns fat quickest when it has food to turn into fuel, if your not eating regularly your metabolism will slow down resulting in more food getting stored as fat.

Worst case scenario is if you starve yourself, your body will automatically start trying to store any food you eat as fat, this is because the body goes into "starvation" mode and you are left feeling weak, tired and vulnerable to illness. When you start eating regularly again your body will rapidly put on fat again.

That is why having regular meals and snacks is essential, preferably eating every 2-3 hours whilst you are not asleep. Breakfast should be your biggest meal of the day, this gives the metabolism a "kick start" in the morning and sets you up for the day feeling energetic and awake.

The key to losing weight though, is to make sure you are eating the right food and the right amount. If your daily calorie maintenance is 2500 calories then aim to eat 400-500 calories under that a day. This way you can loss the weight gradually and preserve muscle ensuring that its the fat you are losing. You can work out your daily calorie maintenance from this site http://www.stevenscreek.com/goodies/calories.shtml.

Set Your Goals.

Once you reach that decision in your life when you decide you want to lose weight, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the vast amount of information available to you to help with your new found goals. There are literally hundreds of different "fad" diets and pills that promise to help you lose 14lbs a week and so on. Likely hood is you have already come across some of these already.

The truth is, the majority of these claims are lies designed to pray on your insecurities and the only thing you end up losing is your money. There are no quick fixes and most short term solutions lead to long term problems.

The best way to avoid these pitfalls is to set yourself a realistic goal and work hard towards achieving it, take each day as it comes and keep focused on your long term goal and you will reach it sooner than you expect.

A good way to do this is to set goals for each day, week and month;

• Your daily goal should be focused on a healthy diet and exercise routine.
• Your weekly goal should be focused on making sure you stick to your daily goals and lose 1-2lbs for that week.
• Your monthly goal should be to ensure your weekly goals are stuck too.

That might not sound like you are losing much weight but over the course of a month you could lose up to 7-8lbs which is good. Losing weight to fast can lead too just as many health problems as being overweight.