Practical Weight Loss Tips

Here are some practical tips for helping you to eat healthily and manage weight loss.

Eat Your Greens First!

Eating salads and vegetables before eating the rest of the food on your plate is such an easy and healthy way of filling up with nutritious low-calorie food.

Salads are full of volume and take time to cut and crunch and they are quite hard to eat quickly, so this allows us to tune into our fullness signals.  Research shows that beginning a meal with a green salad leads us to consume less calories over a meal. 

When I was young, a salad consisted of lettuce, cucumber & tomato!  This no longer has to be the case – salads can be so interesting and nutritious.  There are so many offerings on the supermarket shelves including seeds, grains, pulses, spices and leaves!  A fun and colourful way to combine health benefits with weight loss!!

The same applies to vegetables – I used to associate vegetables with simply being boiled – cabbage, broccoli, carrots!  It kind of put me off them for a number of years.

But there are so many more vegetables available to us now (kale & okra are 2 of my favourites) and so many readily available recipes online providing interesting ways of cooking them – steaming, roasting, baking vegetables, often combining them with interesting spices or herbs.

I do appreciate that some people have digestive ailments, and I would recommend that they simply experiment with what works best for them!

Are you Hungry or Thirsty?

Many of us simply don’t drink enough liquid.   We can get our signals confused and we think we are hungry when we are actually thirsty!  It’s a form of unconscious self neglect.  

We’ve got in the habit of stretching towards the cookie jar thinking that is what we need and that’s going to satisfy a craving, without realising that we are actually needing more hydration!  Stop here and reflect – is that YOU?  

Many of us simply don’t drink enough water.  Water – and it has no calories! – actually increases our energy, and gives us better concentration, positivity and improved overall heath.  Obviously, it also aids our ability to flush out toxins etc as we need to go to the loo more often.

Everyone is different, but it’s recommended that we have around, at least 1.5 litres of water each day. 

It could be straight water, it could be herbal or fruit teas.  But it’s a good idea to have a way of measuring it – get yourself a transparent water bottle and keep it near you.  That way, you can gauge throughout the day how much you have drunk and if you need to drink more. 

Aim to fill it up in the morning, refill it at lunchtime and refill it early evening!  If you feel that drinking in the evening will disrupt your sleep, then just drink more during the day, if this is suitable for you.

Weight Loss is a concerning aspect of many people’s lives – especially so due to Lockdown.  So I am launching a 21 Day Online Weight Loss Challenge where I give you 21 days of Self Help Strategies to Positively Empower YOU to be able to have the control to sustainably shift those unwanted lbs!

Contact me to get on the list! Email gillian@gilliandalgliesh.com or call 07593 082 349.

This article was originally published in the Stockbridge Spotlight