Want to cut calories and eat a healthier diet? We offer concrete tips to kick off your new year in a healthy way.
We don’t believe in diet fads – hopping on and off the latest “nutrition” craze can actually hurt your weight loss goals, not help. (see Weight loss is hard: Study of The Biggest Losers reveals why.) Instead, we are all about making small, incremental changes in diet and exercise to lower your calories in and raise your calories out – the true secret to better health. In that vein, we liked this article from MedlinePlus: 10 concrete tips for cutting 500 calories a day. We’ve listed the tips – click the link for more info about how to do this.
- Swap your snack.
- Cut one high-calorie treat.
- DO NOT drink your calories
- Skip seconds.
- Make low calorie substitutions.
- Ask for a doggie bag.
- Just say “no” to fried food.
- Build a thinner pizza.
- Use a plate.
- Avoid alcohol.
Great tips – we thought we’d add a few tips that we favor that can also help with cutting calories
- Understand how calories work.See: What is a calorie and how many do we need?
- Substitute vegetable “rice” or vegetable “pasta” to reduce carbs and calories.
- Plan healthy snacks into your day. Imagination and planning mean you can have treats you look forward to and minimize the risk of a spontaneous poor snack choice. See Healthy snacks under 200 calories.
- Plan ahead for dining out. See our posts: Restaurant dining can be a nutritional minefield! and On-the-Go Healthy Dining.
- Read the labels. Understanding nutrition labels can help you to make smart choices. The Skinny on the New Nutrition Labels
- Pre-prep meals and be careful about portion distortion. Having small portions will help keep you from overindulging. See How we are tricked into eating too much
- Make small changes. Forget drastic diets. See our post on “Spot the difference” to see how small modifications to meals can slash calories.
- Get more fruits and vegetables by adding smoothies to your diet, but be careful of the high calorie commercial smoothies in malls – make your own. See our post Add nutritious smoothies to your diet.
It’s not just about calories in – it’s also about calories burned.
- Keep a handy list of exercises and calories that you burn. Before you have a snack, stop to think how much exercise you need to do to burn the snack off. See Calorie burn rate calculator and Calories burned chart.
- Here are a few posts that we’ve made with some ideas for burning calories:8 Ways to Exercise at Work; Running for Beginners; and Fit for life: Workouts for different stages in your life.