Diet plans are a dime a dozen. The tried and true are few and far between. Weight Watchers has been one of the rare successful methods of losing weight and keeping it off. Their success has been seen and recognized worldwide for the past 50 years. But have you seen their price tag? So what’s their secret? How does Weight Watchers work? And can you get the same results for free?

To answer these questions, this article will look at each of the four pillars of the Weight Watcher’s philosophy:

• Food
• Exercise
• Behavior
• Support

By looking at these four principles of weight loss and health practices, hopefully, we will discover the secret of weight loss to live by.

Food

The first pillar is probably the most basic, and most obvious. Food is where losing weight starts. Or more specifically, watching and monitoring what you eat is where losing weight starts. Weight  Watchers approach to food is based on nutrition and calorie points, but it’s not just a diet based on counting calories or carbs. Weight Watchers follows these principals regarding food:

1)   Talk withe your team (more on that later) about your dietary habits.

2)   Decide which foods you need to avoid or eliminate. Rely on your team to discuss the best meal plans health choices, and rely on each other for accountability.

3)   Count your calories. This step is not the whole step, but it is the key one. You can do an internet search for a free download of the Weight Watchers point chart. If you were to sign up for the program, they would send you a personalized chart based on your weight, lifestyle, exercise requirements, and weight loss goals.

4)   Like what you eat. If you don’t enjoy your food, then you won’t stay the course for long. Utilize the chart to make healthy choices for the kinds of foods you will enjoy eating.

5)   Remember, this is not a diet, it’s a new lifestyle. So you don’t need to starve yourself. Skipping meals will only slow down your metabolism and cause you to put on weight. Get in the habit of eating light and often.

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Exercise

Monitoring your food intake and counting your calories will only go so far. It’s only one pillar after all. The second pillar is exercise, and it completes your nutrition calculations.

1)   The basic concept of losing weight is to burn off more calories than you take in. Exercise is the key to this. It will also boost your emotional stability, enthusiasm, and vigor.

2)   Monitor your calorie calculations as you increase your exercise. The more you exercise, the more calories you will need to take in. This process is best supported in a group, as well as with your professional health care provider.

3)   Don’t just run. Exercising is about building strength as well as burning calories. Building strength will help your overall health as well as give you the strength to press further in to your cardio work.

4)   Just like enjoying your food is key to staying the dietary course, having fun is key to staying the exercise course. Don’t enslave yourself to the gym. Get out and do those activities that inspire you to keep doing them.

Behavior

Behavior will tie your food and exercise efforts together. This is where Weight Watchers shifts from being just another diet to being successful.

1)   Track your progress. Keep tally of your success, and be honest about your slip ups. The key here is setting goals and achieving them. You can’t do that if you’re not tracking your progress.

2)   As you track your progress, reward your successes and penalize your failures.

3)   Behavior is the pillar you build new habits on. This is the part of the Weight Watchers program that teaches you to live differently, because being healthy requires a full lifestyle change. If it didn’t, you would be looking for Weight Watchers secrets.

Support

This complete and total lifestyle change is all but impossible without the fourth pillar, Support. Don’t go it alone. Your chances of success, and continued health, increase dramatically if you are supported by friends who are also pursuing the same goals.

1)   Meet regularly. Weight Watchers meets once a week, on the same day each week, and at the same time.

2)   Hold each other accountable. Don’t just get together and laugh about all the slips you had through the week. Be honest with each other, and encourage your friends to stay the course.

3)   Eat together. This can be a great way to exchange meal ideas and exercise tips. It’s also a way to keep the focus on losing weight, and being proactive about it.

Weight Watchers success is undeniable, but it’s not a secret that you can just download. Read over these four pillars, share them with friends, and embark on your new life. Success is yours to be had if you are willing to build it on all four pillars.

Losing weight on the road can be much more difficult than losing weight at home. When you aren’t in your own environment with your own food and tools at your fingertips, it becomes more difficult to eat healthy and to exercise. The following weight loss tips for travelers will help you to continue dropping the pounds, even when you are away from home.

Working Out on the Road

Let’s face it; it’s simply not possible to take serious workout equipment with you. While you may not be able to take your home gym with you, a couple of resistance bands fit easily into any travel case. With a little creativity, you can still perform most weight training exercises using these bands. Be sure to take a couple light resistance bands and a couple of heavy resistance bands, and the strength training portion of your workout routine can be addressed. Still, there are other weight loss travel tips that can help you on the aerobic side.

Any more, almost every hotel room you can possibly stay in will have a DVD player. This makes it easy to simply pop in a workout DVD each morning and get in your workout before you start your day. While it’s true that you are unlikely to get much resistance training when you use a workout DVD, it will be plenty to get your heart rate up, burn some calories, and keep you in the mindset of regular exercise. This means that it will be much easier to get back into your normal weight loss routine when you get home.

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Plan Your Meals in Advance

Plan your meals as much as you can. Most major restaurants will list their menus online, if not their complete nutritional information. This gives you the opportunity to plan out your menu ahead of time and select items that are conducive to your weight loss efforts. Admittedly, you lose the surprise of opening that menu and reveling at all the options, but it allows you to choose your food more objectively, which is an important part of rapid weight loss.

Don’t Forget the Snacks!

Snacking can be the make or break aspect of weight loss, so snack planning during your travels needs to be addressed. Whether you are travelling by train, airplane, or automobile, you will find plenty of opportunities to get chips, pretzels, candy, and other processed junk food that is the bane of someone trying to lose weight. If you don’t have any snacks with you and you wait until you’re hungry to purchase something, your body will almost always crave sugar. The simple solution is to simply bring something with you, such as nuts, to soothe those snack cravings when they occur.

Rapid weight loss is still very possible, even when you spend a large portion of your time travelling. All it takes is a little planning. Whether you plan your meals ahead of time to ensure that you remain in your calorie limit or you make arrangements to be able to exercise in your hotel room, there are plenty of things you can do in order to maximize your weight loss efforts. The quickest way to lose weight is through sustained effort wherever you are, not just when you’re at home.

Have you heard of the liquid diet weight loss program? It is the newest diet fad among weight-conscious individuals. But not everyone is well-versed about this new diet program and how it really works. Although a lot of those who have tried it can attest to its efficacy, it can be a very unhealthy way to lose weight.

What is a Liquid Diet?

As the name suggests, this diet program involves replacing your regular meals with liquids. So you do away with eating solid food and concentrate on taking soups or shakes instead. The liquid diet still aims to provide your body with all the necessary nutrients even with the absence of solid food. The problem is, you often end up eating far to few calories.

Photo by Mr. T in DC

Is it Healthy?

There is a predetermined number of calories that you should take in a day to achieve optimum health. If you are going to follow a liquid diet weight loss program, you have to make sure that you get the number of calories that you need each day. However, as I mentioned above, it is very difficult to get enough calories from liquids alone. One way around this is to have liquids for breakfast and lunch and have a healthy dinner in the evening. (Or you could have a solid breakfast with a liquid lunch and dinner. Whatever is more convenient.) If done correctly, this weight loss program can be a safe and convenient way to shed off some extra pounds.

Why Do You Lose Weight on a Liquid Diet?

You lose weight on a liquid diet for the same reasons that you can lose weight on any diet. You eat fewer calories than you burn. Since it can be very difficult to eat enough calories for liquids alone, this diet makes it easier to achieve a calorie deficit.

How to Safely Follow a Liquid Diet

I may sound like a broken record here, but if you are on a liquid diet you need to make sure that you are getting enough calories and getting the proper nutrition. The number of calories you need depends on your weight, but you should never eat fewer than 1,200 calories per day. One way to make sure that you get enough calories and get the proper nutrition is to use meal replacement shakes.

The meal replacement shakes for weight loss are very easy to find. They are readily available in the supermarket or health shops. They usually come in a powdered form that you have to mix with water or milk. But you can also find them in bars or puddings. These products supply around 500 to 800 calories to your body in a day. So you see, they are very low in calorie content. This makes it easier for you to lose some unwanted weight. And when it comes to your one real meal, make sure to choose healthy and oil-free food. If you are doing the liquid diet but still eat high calorie food, the program and your effort will just be put to waste.

People are always searching for the best fat burning foods that are available. There are two main ways that fat burning foods successfully work. One way is in their increasing the metabolism level. A faster metabolism means that more calories (and more fat!) will be burned even when you are resting. Fat burning foods can also be things that take more work for your body to digest. Foods that are difficult to digest mean that more calories are burned during digestion.

As mentioned, the very best natural fat burning foods work hard to increase your metabolism. An increased metabolism makes your body more efficient. Instead of it storing those excess calories, it will immediately burn them up. Green tea and cayenne pepper are two great examples of foods that speed metabolism. Cayenne pepper is proven to be a great fat burner. Tests have shown that some men doubled their metabolic rate by adding it to their meals. It then in turn increases heart rate as well as the temperature of the body. It is almost the same effect of one performing a light workout. If you don’t like the taste or heat of cayenne, there is a capsule form available for use.

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Also falling into the best fat burning foods designation is green tea. Included in it is caffeine that will certainly increase ones heart rate. In addition, you will find it contains an antioxidant that is very strong and linked to weight loss known as EGCG. EGCG has been tested in a number of weight loss studies. However, there isn’t a lot of consensus on exactly how it works. This was one of the supplements that Tim Ferriss used in his infamous PAGG stack. Many people find a pull form easiest to take, but it you prefer to drink it be sure to avoid green tea that is loaded with sugar.

Here are some of the most common foods that can help you burn fats naturally.

• Fatty Fish: Fish like sardines, salmon, tuna and mackerel contain omega-3 fatty acids. This type of acid is essential when it comes to maintaining your body’s health, reducing the amount of triglycerides, and preventing the risk of various cardiovascular diseases.
• Beans: Cholecystokinin is a digestive hormone found in beans. This hormone serves as an appetite suppressant, which can help you prevent overeating. Aside from that, beans are a good source of fiber, iron, and protein as well.
• Asparagus: This is also considered as a fat burning food that contains a certain chemical known as asparagine. This is an alkaloid, which is helpful in stimulating the function of the kidneys and in improving the circulation of the blood. Alkaloids are helpful when it comes to dealing with fatty cells and breaking them down.
• Tomatoes: Tomatoes contain lots of vitamin C and oxalic acid that is helpful in oxidizing fats. They have a considerable amount of enzymes as well, that can help boost the body’s metabolism. Aside from that, the lycopene content of tomatoes is very helpful when it comes to preventing various cardiovascular diseases.

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• Hot Peppers: This fat burning food has a compound known as capsaicin. This compound can help you boost the rate of your metabolism and increase the amount of fat you burn. It is also very helpful in reducing the cholesterol levels in the body and aids in the breakdown of fat cells.
• Grapefruit: This is also a helpful fat burning food that contains pectin, which serves as an appetite suppressant aside from being able to regulate the insulin level of the body.
• Garlic: You may not be aware of it, but garlic is also a great fat burning food. Garlic contains a compound known as allicin, which has an antibacterial property. Aside from that, it also contains diuretics, which is helpful in the elimination of body toxins. This is one of the foods I recommend you eat during a 3 day detox.
• Cabbage: This should also be included in your menu as this is considered one of the best natural fat burning foods. Cabbage contains sulfur and iodine and aids in cleaning the stomach’s mucus membrane.

Fat burning foods can be very filling and can lower your hunger rate between meals. You can eat them as your main dish or as a side dish. Check out a post I did a while back for a wide range of  foods that can speed up your metabolism.

For more helpful, “need to know” information on this topic and many others, including how to lose belly fat, visit LeanBee.net.