Summer Weight Loss Tips

As we all seem to be in for more hot weather more often, it’s a good idea to think about how to adjust your diet when the temperature rises.

A great year round solution is to adopt a recommended diet and I have mentioned Patrick Holford’s Nutrition help in the past and so I thought you would like some idea of how to change your diet from him below.

Getting ready to diet is a bit like the warm-up before you exercise. You not only need to know what to do – follow my low GL diet – but also how to actually get motivated and do it. I’ll give you some quick wins to kickstart your weight loss here.

Realistically, you’ll need a week to prepare – restock your fridge with low glycemic load (GL) foods (see The Low GL Diet Made Easy), find the best alternative foods and drinks and your nearest suppliers, and get used to some of the new foods.

Remove temptations

You’ll also need to remove any edible temptations. Start by using up or throwing away any of the foods you’ll need to avoid from your fridge or larder. This is a great time to have people round for dinner!

Restock your kitchen with the recommended foods and drinks and do the same at work.

Some of the foods on this diet may be new to you, but all of them are readily available in your local health food shop or supermarket. There’s a shopping list for you in my books.

Setting your targets

Most people start diets hoping to lose in a month what they gained in a year. They vow never to eat chocolate again and to exercise every day.

This approach usually ends in failure. So here’s my advice on easing into this new way of eating and exercising.

Be realistic

Be realistic, and take it one step at a time. Set yourself targets for changing your diet and taking exercise that you know you will reach. The weight will look after itself.

It is far better to take one step towards permanently changing your lifestyle than to take four steps forward and four steps back because you were overambitious to start with.

After all, we often eat because we are under pressure or stressed. Boredom, frustration, anger or a lack of direction all lead to feelings that can be temporarily suppressed with food.

Even making small dietary changes is, to begin with, stressful.

It takes time to adjust. So don’t add to your stress by expecting too much from yourself and then failing to meet your targets.

You begin to make more lean muscle so you won’t lose so much weight, because lean muscle is heavier than the fat you burn off. But you will lose inches, since muscle is more compact than fat.

Making muscle is good news not only because you’ll look leaner. Muscle cells are more metabolically active and therefore have the capacity to burn off fat, while fat cells don’t.

So, as you make more lean muscle, your ability to burn fat increases.

Week-by week planning

When setting your target, it is good to have long-term and short-term objectives. Let’s call your long-term objective your goal.

What weight would you like to be, ideally? The following questions help to give you a realistic yardstick to go by.

• What do you weigh now?
• What, in your opinion, is your ideal weight?
• When were you last that weight?
• What is the most you’ve ever lost on a diet?

When you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a good idea of your ultimate goal. Once you’ve set it, you can work out your target, week by week.

For example, if you want to lose 15lb, your target after one week would be to weigh 1½lb less and so on for 10 weeks, until you achieve your goal.

Three quick wins to kickstart your metabolism

1. Have a 13 hour break from food. How? Finish dinner before 8pm and don’t have breakfast before 9am, for example.

Thirteen hours without food is all it takes to switch your body into fat burning mode and also switch on autophagy, the amazing self-detox process that gets rid of old cellular matter and gives you a face lift.

2. Go fishkins for three days. Now we’ve all heard of the Atkins type meat/cheese heavy no carb diet. Short term it can force you into ketosis, which leads to more weight loss. But this way of eating is not healthy.

However, you can get a weight loss boost by something similar with fish. This is another variation of a low GL diet but an excellent kick start to get out of the sugar slump. You only need to do it for three days in a row to drive your weight loss forward and detox from sugar. Oily fish is best.

3. Crank up insulin sensitivity. There are two ways to do this  and first is simply to supplement the mineral chromium (200mcg) with Cinnulin (100mg – a potent extract equivalent to 1 gram of cinnamon), twice a day eg breakfast and lunch.

As well as following my low GL principles, you want to keep your blood glucose level dead even. Any peaks push up insulin demand.

One tip is to try cutting down sugar and replace with some xylitol. It has a ninth of the GL of regular sugar.

Helpful information:

I know very few women who don’t have weight issues around Menopause and hotter weather is the ideal time to diet.

Theoretically, we are less likely to turn to the heavy, rich, comfort foods that we love so much in the winter. Though there are also temptations such as ice cream instead!

Hormone balance also plays a part, as if you are oestrogen dominant that is linked to weight gain and does need balancing with bioidentical progesterone.

It can help you lose weight as it acts as a natural diuretic so a combination of Serenity, the Serenity progesterone only cream, and supported with Weight Control Capsules can be effective.

But if bloating is also a concern, this article will be helpful.

https://anna.blog.wellsprings-health.com/7-anti-bloating-tips-to-help-improve-weight-loss-2/