Secret 7: Turn off the Tube
Time spent watching TV is time spent being completely sedentary (and thus expending minimal amounts of calories) and often eating as well. Most people mindlessly consume snacks while mesmerized in front of the television, not noticing the rapidly multiplying calorie intake. Case in point: The successful NWCR “losers” watched less than 10 hours of television per week.

Don’t be a couch Potato!

Secret 8: Retrain Your Brain
Interestingly, most people who have lost and kept off the most weight tend to be “lower left” brained, meaning they are organized, controlled, methodical and disciplined. This is not to say that those of us who thrive on spontaneity or embrace clutter are doomed- it’s just a matter of retraining our brains. Encourage clients to become better organized by writing a grocery shopping list and sticking to it! Before your next exercise session, plan your workout schedule for the next week and make a promise to stick to it. These efforts will help solidify their lifestyle change and make permanent weight loss more of a reality.

Secret 9: Start Today and Don’t Cheat
It’s easy to put off starting a serious lifestyle change to a later date. Likewise, it’s easy to “cheat” and eat an extra piece of cake here, a pizza there. It’s important to be diligent when attempting to lose weight, because people who don’t cheat on a regular basis are 150% more likely to maintain their weight loss. Encourage clients to adopt a “doable” healthy lifestyle they can stick with; this will reduce those compelling urges to unwittingly sabotage their weight management success.

Be strong! Don’t give in to temptation!

Secret 10: Know that Birds of a Feather stick together
A study of 12,067 people followed over 32 years concluded that obesity spreads through social ties. That
is, obese people tend to have obese friends. Pairs of friends and siblings of the same sex seem to have
the most profound effect on each others weight loss. Some researchers suspect that the spread of obesity
has a lot to do with an individual’s general perception of the social norms regarding the acceptability
of obesity. The logic works like this: If my best friend and my sister are both obese and I love and admire
them all the same, then maybe it’s not so bad that I gain a few pounds. Clients can reverse this psychological
phenomenon by inviting pals to work out at the gym or go for a bike ride with them to stay or get fit.

We hope you can implement some of these tips into your daily life to help you with your weight loss goals. If you would like further help, please fill out the consult form by clicking the link below!

Exercise more. When you walk, run, or lift weights, you increase the energy required of your body, which raises your metabolism then, and for hours afterward.

“It’s not a huge spike, but it makes a difference,” says Gary Miller, PhD, associate professor of health and exercise science at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.Work out with weights. During weight training, muscle tissue is stressed; afterward, it’s repaired — which raises metabolism.

A woman who strength trains three times a week for six months can build enough muscle to burn 10 to 32 extra calories a day, according to Robert Wolfe, PhD, professor of geriatrics at the University of Arkansas.

Practice portion control. This helps ensure you don’t overload your metabolism with a surplus of unusable energy (that is, food).

Use a food scale or measuring cups to identify proper portions. Or use your hand as a guide. A fist equals a serving of fruit, a cupped hand equals a serving of cereal or grains, two cupped handfuls equal a serving of leafy green vegetables and an open palm equals a serving of meat.

Eat smaller meals more often. Some experts recommend eating smaller meals throughout the day, known as grazing. “Grazing helps normalize blood sugar levels rather than producing three large spikes, which is what happens eating three meals a day,” says Nick Flynn, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas.

Determine the amount of calories you need at Mypyramid.gov. Then keep that number in mind as you transition from eating three ordinary-sized meals to five smaller ones.

Laugh it off. When researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, put people into a “metabolic chamber” (a small room that measures heat output in order to calculate a person’s metabolic rate) and showed them funny videos, the subjects’ metabolic rates rose by 10 to 40 calories. It’s a small increase, but every calorie counts for those seeking weight loss, says lead researcher Maciej Buchowksi, PhD

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