The Slim Habit Blog

If you want to be successful at losing weight, you need to know about fats.

So much of our food today is processed in some way or other. Much of it is tasty and ‘moreish’. Food manufacturers have been very clever at putting temptation in our way, but this abundance has not gone hand in hand with health. A lot of the processed food we eat is detrimental to our health. Much of this is due to the ingredients added in the manufacturing process. One of the additives you should be most aware of is fats. Consume too many of the wrong fats, and weight loss will be impossible. You’ll also run the risk of raising your cholesterol and developing heart disease. 

Your body needs fat, but not a lot. Fats are essential for energy and promote cell growth. They also help your body absorb some nutrients and produce important hormones. But there are ‘good fats’ and ‘bad fats’. You need to be aware of two ‘bad fats’: saturated fat and trans fat. These are fats which are most commonly included in the processed foods we eat. Saturated fats are found mainly in margarines, cooking fats, sweets, chocolate, biscuits, ready meals, animal produce and dairy produce. Your diet needs to contain no more than 7% saturated fat.

Trans fats are produced when vegetable and fish oils are ‘hydrogenated’. These fats commonly appear in margarine and shortening. Trans fats are ‘bad’ fats and your diet should include only 1% of them because your body can’t digest them properly.

As your food awareness grows, look out for the fats on the labels of the food you buy, and avoid saturated and trans fat products as much as possible.

‘Low fat’ products are fine, but just be careful that extra sugar hasn’t been substituted for fat.

If you want to lose weight permanently here is a useful weight loss tip: know your fats. Permanent weight loss means that you must always be on guard when it come s to fats. Too much of the wrong type of fat and your weight loss program will not be successful.

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What do you think the phrase ‘We’re all creatures of habit’ means?  Can it be true? Does this mean that habits control our lives? Actually, we would be totally lost without habits.  Habits help us to run our lives more efficiently. They help us to manage and survive in our world

It’s helpful to think of a habit as a learned response. The way we learn habits is through repetition and practice. Once learned we can do it without thinking. Our actions become ‘automatic’.

Having the ability to do something ‘automatically’ or without having to think too much, allows our brain to concentrate on more important things. Established habits allow us not to have to think about basic routines or take fresh decisions about everyday occurrences. They give us more time to evaluate and reason, and make sense of things. They allow us to explore new ‘possibilities’ and to make progress.

When we learn a habit through repetition and practice, it gets ‘hotwired’ onto our brain, and there it will stay. We can’t change a habit, but we can learn a new one to supersede or act in place of it. Which is just as well because not all the habits we learn are good ones. We learn lots of good habits and we learn lots of bad ones. Bad habits can make us lazy. When it comes to our health, if we allow it, bad habits can do us a great deal of harm.

The cause of most people being overweight or obese is nearly always because they’ve have learned lots of bad habits. They’ve probably given into temptation on a number of issues and not had the self-discipline to prevent bad habits becoming established. These bad habits then take over their lives.

What is the most common reaction to being overweight? Of course, to go on a diet. The weight loss that follows is, unfortunately, only short-term. The weight soon returns, and the bad habits remain.

This is why The Slim Habit is so ‘revolutionary’. ‘Revolutionary’, is an overused term, but it is exactly what it is. Why? Because it gets to the heart of the problem. It gets you to learn new habits, slim habits, and this makes permanent weight loss possible. It creates the conditions that allow change to take place – which is important because if you stay doing the same old things, nothing will ever change and you’ll never lose weight.

The Slim Habit is a weight loss program that will change the way we look at weight loss. It’s simple and straightforward, but it delivers what all people who are overweight want – the ability to change the way they are by learning new habits, and lose weight – permanently.

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You can imagine the scene from an old black and white movie. It’s Main Street in some town in the mid-west. There’s a smartly dressed man wearing top hat standing on the back of an open topped wagon selling his cure all elixir. An eager crowd listen intently as he describes how their lives are about to be transformed. Eager hands proffer their dollars. His pretty daughter hands out the bottles.  Before too long and as soon as people have dispersed, the horses are harnessed and they get out of town before the honest citizens discover they’ve been had.

It has been forever thus that some people take advantage of those who need help most. Unfortunately, it’s a long established human trait. What is also an established human trait is gullibility. Too often we take people’s word, we believe the advertisement and we fail to question.

Questions are essential because they reveal information, and information is what we need in order to take informed decisions. It may come as little surprise to learn that we take most of our decisions based on as little as 5% of the available information. Little wonder why we make so many mistakes, why there are so many misunderstandings and people are duped by the modern day equivalent of the snake oil salesman.

When we want to lose weight do we really take enough time to think about what we want the outcome of our diet to be? Do we just want to lose a few pounds to keep trim or do we need to lose some serious weight?

When we purchase a diet, do we believe that all our accumulated weight is going to fall off and never reappear? If we are overweight, do we honestly believe that all those extra pounds are going to fall off in an instant and never trouble us again, despite the fact that they have taken years to build up?

There is no denying that diets are very good at delivering short-term weight loss, but is that what we really want? Surely we want the weight to and not come back? If that’s the case we need to ask more questions because the only way weight is not going to reappear is if we change our habits. Our bad habits have got us to where we are. Now we’ve got to learn new habits – slim habits, if we are to lose weight permanently.

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It takes absolutely no effort at all. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Just a few words will justify your decision to yourself and you’re off the hook. Wow! That wasn’t difficult!  With your conscience clear, you’re back to your bad old ways again – just like that!  

It’s so easy to make excuses. We all do it every day and we’re pretty good at it. We’ve had so much practice. We manage to convince ourselves every time. When we sense that decision time is coming close, we are very good at finding ways of avoiding the issue. It’s always another day, another time.

There’s a price to pay for constantly making excuses – unfortunately. The longer you leave something, the longer you put off what you know in your heart of hearts you’ve got to do, the more difficult it becomes to reach a positive outcome.  Excuses actually make life more difficult. They also make you feel bad about yourself, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself otherwise.

To lose weight you have to stop making excuses and get on with it. The longer you put off addressing your weight problem, the more of a problem it will become.

So what’s the best way to get over the excuse syndrome? There is no easy way. The most effective way is for you to become the catalyst and take the decision to do something and to stop making excuses. Just get on and do it! This first step can actually be a great motivator. The buzz you get when you finally stop making excuses and you realize that you’ve taken a decision at last, can be very strong.

What you need to develop is self-discipline. Many people are scared off by the word ‘self-discipline’. To many, it represents restriction and hardship. It’s actually totally the opposite. Self-discipline is something to feel good about. It helps you to realize your true potential and optimize your performance. It helps you to do what you have to do to lose weight. It will help to ensure your success.

Before you rush off to find the best diet or weight loss program, think how you can develop your self-discipline. An easy way to start is to make a list of things you have to do – and do them! It’s that simple. Soon you’ll be looking for things to do and when that happens you can claim victory. A new slim you can’t be far away!

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If you’ve decided to lose weight there are some decisions to make. One of the first things to do before you start is to do an audit of all your bad habits. You don’t have any? I don’t think so!

The purpose of an audit is to highlight what changes you need to make in order to ensure your weight loss efforts as effective as possible. You’ll find it a very worthwhile thing to do – providing you don’t cheat, of course!

Somewhere on the list should be that amount of alcohol you consume each day. Most of us don’t think we drink very much. The reality is usually very different. The RDA (recommended daily allowance) is 3-4 units of alcohol for men and 2-3 for women. It’s easy to find the number of units in a drink, but as an example, there are between 2 -2 ½ units in a double whisky, 2 units in a can of beer, 2 -2 ½ units in a large glass of wine.

So what does your score look like? Why does the amount of alcohol you drink matter when you’re trying to lose weight? Is alcohol fattening? From a health point of view, it’s important that you keep within the guidelines. From a weight loss point of view, alcohol isn’t fattening, but it will prevent you from losing weight – and there is a difference.

As alcohol doesn’t contain any carbohydrate, the body can’t store the calories provided by the alcohol you drink. It doesn’t know what to do with them. What it does is to turn this ‘energy’ into ‘acetate’. Your body then uses this ‘acetate energy’ in preference to the energy you have stored in your body as fat.

If you go out for a meal and you had two glasses of spirits and three glasses of wine, your calorie intake from alcohol could be anywhere between 700 and 1000 calories. A three course meal would probably be 1500 calories. Within a couple of hours you will probably have exceeded your daily calorie allowance – aided and abetted by alcohol. For a significant period after your meal, all your energy needs will be supplied by ‘acetate energy’.  All the calories from your meal will be safely stored away. This is a story of weight gain, not weight loss!

It is so easy to pile on the calories, isn’t it? You can see what effect alcohol has. If you’re serious about losing weight, drinking alcohol is something you should probably do without – the sacrifice will be worth it!

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After much deliberation you’ve made a decision. Maybe it was the fleeting reflection of yourself in the dress shop window as you mentally poured scorn on those pawing their way through the rack marked ‘size 12’. Or was it the sight of your jeans on the clothes line billowing like the mainsail of a large schooner that finally made you realize that you had to start making some changes in your life.

It’s the thought of what you have to go through to lose weight that’s the worst thing of all isn’t it? It’s when you switch off your autopilot for a brief moment and you suddenly realize that you’ve got some work to do. You become aware of other people and you start making comparisons – which is the very thing you try not to do every day – because it hurts.

Losing weight is probably a pain to you because you’ve tried so many times to get shot of the pounds , but the weight just comes back again. It’s a familiar story. To lose weight permanently and to keep your sanity, you need to make personal change. Why? Well if you keep on in the same old way you’ll never lose weight. A process, like a diet is not going to do it for you either. You have to make the effort to change or you’ll stay the way you are forever.

Here are two things will help you. The first is to focus on the outcome you want. If you start to visualize what you want the outcome to be, what you want to look like when you’ve lost weight, for example, it will help to motivate you and strengthen your resolve.

The second thing to do is to do an honest personal audit of all your bad habits. Honesty is important here. If you are economical with the truth, you will not be doing yourself any favours: anyway who is going to see this audit? It’s personal, and it’s for your eyes only, so be really, really honest with yourself. It’s important.

It will help you enormously if you can build up your self-awareness, the more effective the process of change will be. Living a lie or living your life with your autopilot switched on is a recipe for no change. No change, no weight loss – it’s that simple.

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Is the Body Mass Index (BMI) a good indicator as to whether you have a healthy body weight or not? The short answer is ‘yes’. BMI compares your weight and height and is meant to be an estimate rather than an accurate measurement. BMI is the most widely used tool to identify whether you are overweight or obese.

The BMI was first used nearly a hundred years ago and has been used by doctors ever since. Should it be trusted? It is certainly the quickest and simplest tool available. Where it becomes less reliable is when the person has a lot of muscle. Manual workers, footballers and some athletes may have a high BMI and yet be very lean. The reason they register a high BMI is that muscle weighs 50% more than fat. It is quite common for a football player to have a BMI of over 30 and yet have barely an ounce of fat on their body.

It’s always a good to know what your BMI is. If you do then you can take action when you get near the weight limit for your height. If you are already overweight or obese, it’s a useful prompt to take action!

Here are the BMI bands you need to be aware of;

Normal: This is between 18.5 and 24.9

Overweight: This is between 25 and 29.9

Obese: Above 30

Your health is at risk if you have a high BMI, particularly from heart disease, stroke and diabetes. You might think that you have a healthy diet, but if your BMI is high, the reality is that something somewhere is out of balance. There is usually a good reason. You might think you have a healthy diet, but how much are you eating, and how much exercise are you taking? It’s worth having a quick ‘personal audit’ to check to see where the imbalance is occurring.  Honesty has to be the best policy here – if you’re economical with the truth (with yourself), you’re the only one that’s going to suffer!

If you find your BMI is too high, don’t rush off and grab the first diet that promises you instant slimness. Think about what you want and then set some goals. Goals will make all the difference to how successful you are at reducing your BMI.

The one thing you are going to have to do is ‘change’. You will probably find it helpful to get a program that will help you to make the changes you need to make – and that will deliver a permanent solution to your BMI problem rather than a short-term fix.

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It’s the question everybody who is either overweight or obese asks is – what’s the best way to lose weight? It’s an understandable question because there are so many different diets and weight programs to choose from. Will it be ‘low carb’ or ‘low fat’, GI, Atkins or Cabbage – it is all very confusing.

What is alarming is the number of diets and weight loss programs that offer a ‘quick fix’. Somehow the speed at which you lose weight has become all important. What’s the reason for this? Weight that has probably taken years to accumulate has to suddenly disappear! As if by magic, the consequence of inattention to diet – or excess, plus lack of exercise, has to be put right in a flash. It’s all totally unrealistic and rather silly.

The reality is that the faster weight comes off, the faster it’ll be put back on again. Because time – or speed – has become an important issue (at least in the selling of diets and weight loss programs), it has given people a very false idea of what is possible and provided a distorted impression as to what to expect from a diet.

No matter what the diet or weight loss program, if there is an emphasis on the speed that weight loss can be achieved, it should be looked at with great scepticism. It will almost certainly mean the program involves severe calorie restriction or a distortion in nutritional intake.

What all diets and weight loss programs totally ignore is the fact that if you want to lose weight permanently (is there anybody who doesn’t want to lose it permanently?) you need to ‘change’.

It is totally unrealistic to believe that you can continue in the same old way and still reduce weight permanently. It just won’t happen. Diets deliver short-term weight loss, which nobody really wants.

Instead of bouncing from one diet to another, it’s far better to find a program that will deliver permanent weight loss: one that can take you through the process of change and help you to replace all your bad habits with new ones.

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