20 Days to Lose Weight Fast and Easy (Day 5)

21.  Eat before shopping

Eat a healthy meal before you go grocery shopping. This will provide you will a full stomach of nutritious foods and keep you satisfied when you venture into a store with many temptations. A pre-shopping meal will help you avoid making the bad choices you may choose if you’re very hungry and have a hard time avoiding sweet or salty temptations. Another great tip is to take a protein smoothie with you to the grocery store and walk around sipping on this delicious treat. Using a blender, add 2 cups of Carb Countdown milk, 1 scoop of protein powder, 1 cup of your favorite fruit and some ice. This smoothie will cure your sweet tooth and keep you busy while passing all of the tempting aisles of unhealthy foods.

22. Shop the outer perimeter

The grocery store is strategically designed to make you purchase items you may not need. Ever wonder why the milk and eggs are positioned way in the back of the store. It’s designed that way to make you walk through the entire store before picking up these core items. While walking past hundreds of other items, most people will see many things they think they need or even worse, they will make impulse buys which include unhealthy items like sweets (candy, cake, donuts) and salty foods (chips, crackers). Try and focus on shopping the outer perimeter of the store. This is the outer corners which include the produce section, meat/poultry/fish areas, and milk/eggs sections. While walking through the grocery store, look around you and consciously think about the way the store is setup and the number of unhealthy food choices available to wreak havoc on your weight loss plan. Once you understand how you’re really trying to be “trained” into making bad choices, you will start realizing how you should overcome this and be focused on making healthy food choices for a healthy lifestyle!

23. Watch those portions

Portion control is extremely important when it comes to losing weight. With all of the super size portions out there, it’s very hard to really understand what the correct portion size is. A good rule of thumb for your protein needs when eating meat/poultry/fish is to choose a portion size that is equivalent to size of a deck of cards. When eating out, if it looks too large then it probably is. Simply eat a small portion and take the rest home for another meal. By controlling your portion sizes, you will be able to condition your mind and stomach into learning what the correct amount of food is. This is crucial for creating new habits and following a healthy nutritional plan.

24. Eat negative calorie foods

Although no food is actually “negative calorie”, there are certain foods that have such few calories that the act of digestion in the body will burn more calories than the food itself, creating a negative calorie balance. Typically, a 25 calorie piece of broccoli (100 grams) requires 80 calories to digest it in the body which results in a net loss of 55 calories! Some great foods which are extremely low in calories and require lots of energy for the body to break them down include asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, lettuce and zucchini. These are great foods to include in your weight loss plan.

25. Build calorie burning muscle

Muscle is the most metabolically active tissue in your body and it’s your “furnace” for burning calories throughout the day. If you can add 1 extra pound of muscle, it will burn about 50 extra calories a day! It’s very important to include some type of strength training routine into your overall fitness plan.

You are reading part 5 of the ShapeFit’s Amazing Weight Loss Tips eBook.