Drink water as your main beverage. Most people need to drink at least eight glasses of water a day. Minimize or eliminate your consumption of carbonated beverages or soft drinks, since even diet versions of these drinks can be unhealthy. Water can help you reduce your weight almost effortlessly. 2. Eat several small
meals instead of three large ones. Instead of overstuffing yourself with food two or three times a day, break your food consumption up into five or six small meals and snacks. Eating several small meals in this way will reduce the amount of insulin your body releases. This will help keep your blood sugar even and will also help control your hunger. 3. Walk whenever you can; it's one of the easiest ways to exercise. Instead of driving your car several blocks down the street to the store, walk. It's especially important that you build walking into your day if you've got a sedentary job. Shoot for at least 45 minutes a day, which can be done in small increments of 5 or 10 minutes. And this is no "boot camp" approach. Simply making sure that you build moderately fast walking into your day will help you lose weight without overly stressing yourself. Walking builds stamina, increases cardiovascular health, and can help build muscle. It also burns calories, which can help you lose weight. 4. Use small plates when you eat instead of larger ones. Studies have shown that our eyes can deceive us into thinking we are eating less food when plates are larger, and more food when plates are smaller. By downsizing food plates and coffee mugs, you can more easily control portion sizes and eat less. You'll save on extra calories you don't need. 5. Bulk up on vegetables during meals. As another "no boot camp" means of losing weight, vegetables not only contain significant amounts of vitamins, minerals, and healthy fiber, but they're also water dense, which means that they fill you up faster. Minimize starchier vegetable consumption like corn or potatoes and focus on vegetables like broccoli, tomatoes, cabbage, and so on. You can truly use vegetables to buck up your meals, too. "Stretch" a pasta salad serving with filling vegetables like carrots, tomatoes and broccoli. Similarly, you can add vegetables to stir fries, or stuff omelettes with broccoli, mushrooms, onions, etc. 6. Minimize your consumption of refined carbohydrates. These can help you gain weight very easily, because they are mostly empty calories that leave you feeling hungrier faster. They also make your blood sugar spike up and down. Instead of eating foods like white rice, white flour and white sugar, focus on brown rice and wheat flour, and use natural sweeteners like molasses or turbinado sugar sparingly. 7. As the old saying goes, "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." Eating a good breakfast when you first get up not only ensures that you are going to burn those calories off during the day, but it also gives your metabolism a good boost. And you're also less likely to be really hungry during the day. It should be said, though, that breakfast calories should come from whole grains, complex carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins -- and so should calories from your other meals. In other words, slathering jam on a white flour bagel is not going to fuel you for the day or start you off right. The rest of your meals during the day should be smaller as you go, with lunch lighter than breakfast and dinner lighter than lunch. And avoid late-night eating; stop eating at least three hours before you go to bed.
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