Nine Tips for Weight Loss!

Food prep. When we’re on the go, it becomes much easier to grab an unhealthy snack instead of taking the time to find something nutritious. I’m often faced with this dilemma on campus, but unhealthy food choices unfortunately exist all around us. One solution I’ve found is to prep your meals and snacks in advance. Invest in some good Tupperware and plastic bags.

Set aside one evening to prepare some meals and snacks that you will use throughout the week. For me, this means cutting up celery (I soak the cut celery in water to keep it from going bad), making protein bars (I use a recipe from food.com, but there are a variety of simple recipes out there), and creating snack size portions of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other nutritious snacks that I can take with me when running errands or going to school.

Though at first it may seem like a hassle, you’ll soon realize that prepping food in advance helps you save money as well as reducing your waistline!

Eat. Though this may seem counter intuitive  remember that your body needs calories to function. Everything you do throughout the day, even sleeping, burns calories. You have to keep eating enough calories to help your body function well — eating less calories than you need will actually send your body into ‘starvation mode’ and cause your metabolism to slow down.

According to optimalbodyweight.com, “Since your body is wonderfully designed to protect you, it will slow down your metabolism to conserve energy so it can keep vital organs such as the brain and the heart going for as long as possible in the face of the perceived threat. While it will burn fat for fuel, it will also start burning lean muscle mass for fuel, which will slow down your metabolism even further.” In other words, counting calories is fine. But cutting calories too much will actually cause your progress to slow down and even halt.

Know yourself. To prevent starvation mode, make sure you are aware of your basal metabolic rate — the amount of calories you burn. Thankfully this isn’t just some random number — there’s an actual nutritional formula for it. There’s also a great BMR calculator at www.muscleandstrength.com. Knowing your BMR helps provide you with a target for your calorie intake.Since there are about 3,500 calories in a pound, you now know that in order to lose a pound you need to burn off 3,500 calories in a combination of diet and exercise.

So if you cut about 500 calories a day through exercise and cutting calories, you will lose about a pound a week.