How Much Water Should I Drink to Lose Weight?

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People who lose weight and keep it off succeed by adapting a healthy lifestyle, not by dieting. You must enforce healthy eating habits that will continue to be part of your life forever. Weight loss isn’t something you can do for a few weeks or month. It’s a life-long commitment.

Here are twenty-five tips that will help you adapt a slow and steady weight loss plan that you keep help you lose weight and stay healthy.

1. Start with achievable goals

2. Don’t expect to drop excess weight quickly. Research shows that people who lose weight slowly are more successful than others who experience quick weight loss.

3. A realistic weight loss goal is two pounds a week.

4. Don’t look for miraculous weight loss. If you lose weight quickly your will probably gain it back.

5. Slowly change your eating habits and lifestyle.

6. Weigh yourself once a week maximum. Hoping on the scales everyday will drive you to distraction and will become obsessive. It actually takes as much as two weeks for any weight loss to occur.

7. Eat smaller portions and replace three meals a day with five smaller ones. This helps to control blood sugar and it’s easier to burn calories from small, light meals.

8. Mix carbohydrates, protein and fruit for a healthy meal.

9. When enjoying your favorite snack, read the nutrition chart and measure the recommended amount into a bowl. Never eat snacks such as chips, out of a bag. This leads to over-eating.

10. Prepare measured snacks ahead of time. That way you can just go to the cupboard and get a small bag. Never go back for seconds.

11. Drink flavored no-calorie water instead of soda, or add lemon juice or avocado juice to water for a refreshing, thirst quenching drink.

12. Don’t use food for comfort or de-stressing.

13. Leave the table immediately after you’ve finished eating. Avoid desserts or have a cup of low fat yogurt.

14. When you are home and craving an extra rich treat, tie on your walking shoes and go for a walk. By the time you get home the craving most probably will have passed.

15. Walk for at least 30 minutes a day. This can be broken into two, five minute increments, if desired.

16. Park your car at the outside edge of the parking lot, where it’s much easier to get a parking space, and then walk to the store. This will help you get in your minimum daily requirement of walking.

17. Wear a pedometer and walk between 5,000 and 10,000 steps per day. This will help you lose weight more quickly while doing so in a healthy manner.

18. Eat a bowl of broth based soup, such as minestrone or vegetable, before eating your meal. This will take the edge off your hunger and you will eat less. Do not eat cream soups, as they are much higher in calories.

19. Reward yourself once a week with a small treat. This helps you to avoid binging and brings weight loss success.

20. Learn to love yourself as you are. Beauty is in the heart and soul. Remind yourself that you are beautiful.

21. Never eat anything after 8 pm.

22. Write down everything you eat. This helps you keep tabs on your food intake. You’ll be surprised at how quickly it adds up.

23. Keep food off the table. Place single servings on plates and put them at the place settings. You’re more apt to take seconds if the food is within easy reach.

24. Eat vegetables first. Vegetables have lots of fiber, which helps make you feel full before you get to the carbohydrates and fat.

25. Put your fork down between mouthfuls of food. Chew thoroughly and swallow before picking up your fork for the next bite. This allows you to savor your food and it helps you to eat slower, which improves digestion.

People who lose weight and keep it off succeed by adapting a healthy lifestyle, not by dieting. You must enforce healthy eating habits that will continue to be part of your life forever. Weight loss isn’t something you can do for a few weeks or month. It’s a life-long commitment.
Here are twenty-five tips that will help you adapt a slow and steady weight loss plan that you keep help you lose weight and stay healthy.
1. Start with achievable goals
2. Don’t expect to drop excess weight quickly. Research shows that people who lose weight slowly are more successful than others who experience quick weight loss.
3. A realistic weight loss goal is two pounds a week.
4. Don’t look for miraculous weight loss. If you lose weight quickly your will probably gain it back.
5. Slowly change your eating habits and lifestyle.
6. Weigh yourself once a week maximum. Hoping on the scales everyday will drive you to distraction and will become obsessive. It actually takes as much as two weeks for any weight loss to occur.
7. Eat smaller portions and replace three meals a day with five smaller ones. This helps to control blood sugar and it’s easier to burn calories from small, light meals.
8. Mix carbohydrates, protein and fruit for a healthy meal.
9. When enjoying your favorite snack, read the nutrition chart and measure the recommended amount into a bowl. Never eat snacks such as chips, out of a bag. This leads to over-eating.
10. Prepare measured snacks ahead of time. That way you can just go to the cupboard and get a small bag. Never go back for seconds.
11. Drink flavored no-calorie water instead of soda, or add lemon juice or avocado juice to water for a refreshing, thirst quenching drink.
12. Don’t use food for comfort or de-stressing.
13. Leave the table immediately after you’ve finished eating. Avoid desserts or have a cup of low fat yogurt.
14. When you are home and craving an extra rich treat, tie on your walking shoes and go for a walk. By the time you get home the craving most probably will have passed.
15. Walk for at least 30 minutes a day. This can be broken into two, five minute increments, if desired.
16. Park your car at the outside edge of the parking lot, where it’s much easier to get a parking space, and then walk to the store. This will help you get in your minimum daily requirement of walking.
17. Wear a pedometer and walk between 5,000 and 10,000 steps per day. This will help you lose weight more quickly while doing so in a healthy manner.
18. Eat a bowl of broth based soup, such as minestrone or vegetable, before eating your meal. This will take the edge off your hunger and you will eat less. Do not eat cream soups, as they are much higher in calories.
19. Reward yourself once a week with a small treat. This helps you to avoid binging and brings weight loss success.
20. Learn to love yourself as you are. Beauty is in the heart and soul. Remind yourself that you are beautiful.
21. Never eat anything after 8 pm.
22. Write down everything you eat. This helps you keep tabs on your food intake. You’ll be surprised at how quickly it adds up.
23. Keep food off the table. Place single servings on plates and put them at the place settings. You’re more apt to take seconds if the food is within easy reach.
24. Eat vegetables first. Vegetables have lots of fiber, which helps make you feel full before you get to the carbohydrates and fat.
25. Put your fork down between mouthfuls of food. Chew thoroughly and swallow before picking up your fork for the next bite. This allows you to savor your food and it helps you to eat slower, which improves digestion.

Many beginner athletes start exercising to lose fat. They workout 4 or 5 times each week, for 30-60 minutes per session. After 6 weeks or so they evaluate their progress and realize that they weigh roughly the same weight, and their total body fat has only dropped 1-3%. Surely after all that exercise they would have made a profound impact on their body composition, losing inches and pounds of fat, right? WRONG!
Why You Will Not Lose Fat With Exercise Alone
Why? Your diet is responsible for 75-80% of your progress when trying to drop fat.
The one, simple rule that you must remember is this:
total calories consumed – total calories burned = total calories stored as lard
The fact of the matter is that if you consume more calories in a day than you burn off, you will store them all. The caveman in you says, “Oh boy, extra energy that I can store for later, when there’s a drought or a shortage of animals to kill and eat!” Your body doesn’t understand that you’d rather see those calories floating around in a toilet than floating around on your midsection and buttocks.
A recent study actually demonstrated this exact problem. Two groups of people eat roughly the same diet, some junk food, some healthy food… a decent mix. The study lasted for a respectable 10 weeks. Half of the group did not exercise, while the other half exercised 5 times a week for 30 minutes. The group who exercised ended up losing little weight, if any, and their total fat mass only changed by about 1%. This means exactly what I am trying to tell you: unless you have your diet under control, no amount of exercise will optimally give you the results you want.
You could go on an exercise bender by working out 7 days a week for 5 hours a day, but unless you are genetic freak Olympian Josh Phelps, you will just get sick and injured. Besides he eats 12,000 calories a day. Trust me when I say you don’t even want to know what this man is capable of eating in one meal.
How You Can Use This Knowledge to Finally Lose Weight
Apply strict diet principles to lose weight fast, or adopt a healthy lifestyle eating regimen to lose weight slowly. Depending on your goals you can cut fat by dieting like a bodybuilder for a month or two, or you can move straight into a healthy eating phase, which you will need to adhere to for 99% of the rest of your mortal life.
Calculate your average maintenance calorie intake by multiplying your current weight in pounds by 14. If you burn more calories than this number in a day, you will lose weight. If you burn less calories than this number in a day, you will gain weight. Does it get any easier?
Simply take this number and add or subtract 100-200 calories each week based on number of pounds you lost the previous week. If you lost more than 3% of your bodyweight, you should add 100 calories to maintenance. (Ex: if a 200 lb man lost more than 6 lbs.) If you lost 1% of your bodyweight or less, or gained weight, you should subtract 100 from maintenance. (Ex: if a 200 man only lost 1 lb or less.) This way you won’t have to adjust exercise at all, you can simply base your weight loss on dietary changes only. Of course, adding additional exercise will speed up the process, but remember not too lose too much weight at once or you will end up sacrificing precious muscle mass.
Don’t bother justifying eating a whole pizza today by saying, “I will start my serious diet on Monday.” Just start today by considering each piece of food that you put in your mouth. If it’s bad for you, start today by just not eating it. Good luck!

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com. In this excerpt, Jill Fleming shares on weight loss results; how to achieve them and how to keep them.The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Jill Fleming, a certified nutritionist and author of Thin People Don’t Clean Their Plates.Kevin: Why don’t you tell me about results? I love hearing results. I love hearing about results. Why don’t you tell me one or two success stories that people that you’ve basically helped them change their lives?Jill: When I teach 8 week weight loss classes, which I do in my local community, I continue to monitor people after they’ve completed the class and the time they started the class to completed the class and we did this with measuring tapes and weighing and then I continue to track them for two years after taking the classes.Kevin: Two years? Wow!Jill: Two years. Yes, because beyond two years people moved and it was hard to get hold of them and then they didn’t want to come in and we had 92% success rate, which is exciting, which is how I knew I needed to put the information into a book, because so many other people could benefit from this information. When I speak in settings with large audiences the funny thing is to me that I’m up there talking to them about how they can improve their health and lose weight and feel better and have more energy and usually about one or two just really intensely take the information to heart and I will get an e-mail a month later that will say I’m 56 years old — I just got this two days ago – - 56 years old and never thought I could lose weight and gave away all of my smaller sized clothes and now lost 25 pounds and I have more energy than I ever had. Everyone’s asking how I did it and it was all because I added breakfast. It was all because I added more fruits and vegetables and had a smoothie and a salad a day. All because and they took away one or two nuggets of what we were talking about where they were weak in their Wellness Triangle and improved it to reach their ultimate goals. They’d given up. They thought they couldn’t do it.
In my local community I had a guy that when through my weight loss class and then he took it again and he took it a third time. He lost 115 pounds and just e-mailed me probably a month ago and said that he’s maintained 105 but the other 10 came back on and he’s going to get that 10 back off again and the interesting thing is he’s within about 10 pounds of his ideal body weight. He was planning to go through gastric bypass. I talked him out of it, because he loves food. He loves to eat as much as I do and I said if you love to eat, you’re really going to be giving up that choice. You’re going to be so limited in the amount and the types of things you can eat that it won’t be an enjoyable lifestyle for you. He agreed. He loves to go out and barbeque. He just has a little bit less of the fattier foods and he really went to town on the vegetables.Kevin: Okay.Jill: Exercises everyday and has tons of energy and he is definitely a role model that I keep coming back to him and saying how did you do that again? What are you doing?Kevin: Yeah.Jill: Tell me how you did that again? What was the piece of information that stuck out for you? But the interesting thing is that it’s different for every person.Kevin: Yeah.Jill: So what Dennis had to do versus what I had to do versus what someone else who wants to lose weight has to do, you can take all the information and see which is going to most affect your life in the positive direction.Kevin: And how did you measure the 92% success rate? What were the criteria?Jill: They could not gain more than 2 pounds back of what their final weight was.Kevin: Wow.Jill: The majority of people went on to lose even more weight, because they only had them, well we did an 8 week class with a one month follow up, so we only had these people for three months, but the changes that they made in three months were changes that they’ve kept for a life time. They said they could never go back to their old way of eating because they had too much information one and number two, they felt too good.Kevin: WowJill: And that’s the big thing. It’s not just about looking great in your skinny jeans. It’s about the energy that you have. You don’t need to fill your body with caffeine and chemicals to stay awake and alert. You can do it naturally.Kevin: Yeah. In a world where the studies say that 98% of people who lose weight gain it back a 92% success rate is just absolutely incredible.Jill: I think the big part of the success we had with our classes was that I was able to individualize and help people see how they could fit their lives into the plan. Not just switch from their life to the plan, but incorporate little things from the thin choices routine into what they were already doing. If they weren’t eating breakfast that was an easy one and I didn’t give everything all at once. I said lets work on breakfast and water today. Those are the only things that you’re going to work on this week and then come back and we’ll see how that feels and then start adding something else. So I think I think that’s the big part. Looking at the person and seeing where is the stress in their life and if they’re a stress eater, they’re eating for reasons other than true hunger. You’ve got to help that person realize what they can do to get the stress either out of their life or to help relieve it. Maybe they just need to do some meditation or take a yoga class. Their stress comes back under control and they’re better able to make choices in the other areas of their life.Kevin: And it’s probably not just about — I don’t actually know this. It’s not about what kind of stress or what they’re doing. It’s just about them recognizing it. Correct?Jill: Yes. Yes and if you’re turning to food, because you’re depressed maybe we need to look at the depression. What is the reason? Is it you’re living in Wisconsin and you don’t have enough sunshine in the winter? Maybe you need a sun lamp as opposed to turning to the food. I went through that about two years ago. We had 25 days without sun and I was just depressed and I was just craving chocolate and I thought what is wrong with me. I gained about 7 pounds and I just couldn’t get out of it. Well, I realized that it was a lack of sun, so I went on a vacation. As soon as we got about the clouds in Minneapolis and the sun was shining in, I was just drawn to the window and I realized that sunshine is a big part of my health, so I needed it. So I regularly schedule vacations in the middle of winter to get out of out of the cold and that helps to keep my stress level down, because I turned to food when I was feeling depressed.Kevin: It’s amazing how the health clues kind of unveil themselves as you continue on.Jill: Yeah and it was so interesting to me that no one else was impacted by this lack of sun in my house. I was the only one, so I just thought that I was crazy. I thought do I need drugs? What do I need? Do I need more chocolate? All I could think was that I needed chocolate, because I couldn’t think clearly.Kevin: Right.Jill: But it’s amazing, that sun. I thought, okay. That’s what I needed and I’m learning and you learn more about yourself everyday I think. You just have to be open to it and listen to what your body’s telling you.Kevin: Yeah. That’s incredible advice. Why don’t you –Jill: It could just have been the vitamin D that I needed, but I’d rather lie on a beach and think about it.Kevin: Yeah. Get your 15 minutes in.Jill: Exactly.Kevin: Where can someone go to find some more information about you and what you – why don’t you tell them what you have to offer?Jill: Okay. I have a website called simplelifestylechoices.com. You can also get there through thinchoices.com and you can get the book, Thin People Don’t Clean Their Plates, there and it doesn’t say this on the website, but anyone who ever orders a Thin People Don’t Clean Their Plates book, it’s been instructed that they will also get a Lifestyle Diary sent out with that.Kevin: Oh, cool.Jill: The Lifestyle Diary is so important and it’s just a small, probably 5 inches by 4 inch book that you can stick in your purse or carry in your back pocket and you just write down what you’re doing. For people who that just want to go to the website and get the free download, it will come out on a full size 8×11 paper but just start writing down what you’re doing, keeping track of it. Track it for a month. You’ll probably after three or four days of tracking see where you can make improvements and once you start doing that it will almost seem too easy and then please do e-mail me at jill@thinchoices.com, because I love the success stories. They just keep me motivated and that’s why I continue to do what I do.Kevin: Great. Well, Jill, thank you so much for that information. I know how valuable your time is and I want to thank you for sharing this information with us.Jill: You’re welcome. It’s very its fun. It’s always fun sharing your passion with others that it can help.Kevin: Yeah and I think what you’ve talked about really seems so easy and I think really it kind of is.Jill: It actually is so easy. I think we’ve made weight loss much more difficult than it needs to be. Stop dieting. Start listening to your body. It’s truly all about your choices.