Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Tips to Keep You from Tipping the Scale

Ask any bride, the weeks leading up to the wedding can be filled with joy, stress, and tension. Sometimes that stress leads to extra eating. After all the fittings you don't want your wedding dress to be too snug. Here are a few tips to help you keep your weight down.


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 8 glasses of ice water a day, you’ll lose a pound a week


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 entrĂ©e, 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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I never know that ice water can help burn our calories.NEW INFORMATION for me. But, if i don't mistaken, ice water was not good for those that have using their voice such as for singing, long high energy speech and etc. For Dee, I think you should include the worst thing would happen if we take more ice water everyday...