Lose Weight Before Your Wedding

Now that I’ve given you an idea of what you will need to do, I’ll give you some specifics to get going with on your way to getting that dress on. When I say lowering your carb intake, I mean down to approximately 25-30 grams of carbs per meal. No more than 30, except on your carb loading night meals. 2 days a week, you’ll have the chance to replenish your glycogen so that you don’t get all cranky and run out of energy because your glycogen is depleted. This is the time to have those two or three slices of pizza that you’ve been thinking of, along with a nice piece of fruit and some good vegetable carbs. On these nights, you’ll want to have no proteins and save the calories for the carbs you’ll be eating. I always choose Wed. night and Sat. night to carb load because I love spaghetti and pizza on the weekend. You may choose to have different nights for carb loading, it only matters that they are about 3-4 days apart. By then, if you’ve been eating the correct way, you’ll be depleted of your glycogen and ready for some energy boosting. I will be giving you some menu examples to start with and show you how to choose what you will want to eat.

It’s really important to start out with a good high protein breakfast to get the day started, Protein fills you up and keeps you fuller longer, so you won’t be hungry too soon in the morning before you have a mid morning snack.  I sometimes have an omelet with one whole egg and two egg whites, 1-2 ozs. of chicken cut up and mushrooms, peppers, and onions in my omelet, with a sprinkle of ground flax seed on the eggs and a sprinkle of low-fat or no-fat cheese too.

 That is an example of a good breakfast that will keep me going until snacktime easily. Later I might have a plain greek yougurt with a chocolate protein powder mixed in with it and cinnamon sprinkled on top with a dab of anise to give it an little licorice flavor. That snack is only about 170 or so cals and will keep me until lunch. The protein powder I prefer is an eggwhite protein powder, but I can’t always get eggwhite, so whey protein will do in a bind. Don’t use a soy-based protein powder, it isn’t the right kind of protein for what you want to accomplish.

 Lunch might be a homemade beef or chicken soup and a big salad or large serving of broccoli, maybe 1-2 cups of it.  Real butter, not more than a regular pat and some spices for extra flavor on top will fill me up. No margarines with trans fats in it for the broccoli, just some real butter, preferably unsalted because you’re using spices for added flavor.

Afternoon snack might be an oz. of walnuts and 2 or 3 slices of shaved roast beef or turkey breast. It’s surprising how a few walnuts will satiate your hunger if you eat them slowly and really chew them up before eating another one. Walnuts have a good fat in them that satisfies the taste for a fatty food in our brain. 

Supper might be a center cut pork loin with a bit of seasoning on it and half a sweet potato with some butter and seasoning and some green beans with balsamic vinegar and an oz. of no-fat feta cheese crumbled on it.

If you feel like a sweet snack later on, another greek yogurt with chocolate protein powder seems like choc. pudding  for dessert. That’s a typical days food and is more filling and healthy than a lot of people’s diets even when they aren’t trying to lose weight. There’s no need to be hungry while you lose weight on this diet, always have a glas of water with you as well and that will fill you up more often than not. Sometime we think we’re hungry and we are really just thirsty and getting dehydrated, so water is the best thing to drink.

You can just hear those wedding bells and everything’s all taken care of; from the menu to the flower girl’s bouquet, everything except, “the” dress won’t fit. Let’s take care of that. Our list for the grocery store will include salad ingredients, but not just the rabbit food you’re dreading to hear about. I use all kinds of different vegetables in my salads and I never go hungry, not then, not now.

The more water there are in the vegetables, the better off you are because it will fill you up and not be high in calories. I have cauliflower, tomatoes, mushrooms, red, yellow,orange, or green peppers, onions, garlic, fat-free feta cheese, and 2-4 ozs. of a lean meat or fish in my salads along with a balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing. Most of the time I don’t bother with cucumber unless I’m not having anything else with a lot of liquid in it, like tomatoes. So salads don’t have to be boring and they don’t have to have the same ingredients all the time either.

I use olive oil and balsamic vinegar to make the base of my dressings and put different spices into it to change up the taste. I use extra virgin, cold-pressed olive oil. If you don’t use cold-pressed, then it isn’t worth the bother because if it is heated when they process it then the important nutrients like omega-3′s are cooked out of it changing the chemical composition. What that means to you is that you get the calories, but not the essential oils that you need to keep your skin from getting dry and wrinkled.

You need some oil(fats) in order to lose fat. If your body isn’t getting enough fats, it won’t let go of any fat that’s already in your body’s fat cells. It thinks you’re starving it and hangs onto every last bit of fat, which is the exact opposite of what we want. About 20-25 grams of fat per day is necessary to help you get rid of body fat.  

 Eat enough food, taste good, and not be boring; that’s what we need for a successful diet. That’s the downfall of most diets, they’re boring and so restrictive that no one can stand it for very long. The difference with this diet is that it changes all the time, unless you want to eat the same thing every morning or have the same snacks, etc.

You also need to eat more times a day to keep from getting hungry. 5-6 small meals a day instead of 3 large meals will keep you from getting too hungry and binging  on food that is high in fat and calories. You’ll always know that another meal or snack is right around the corner and you’ll be less hungry all the time because you’ll be drinking water and green tea as well. If you need to sweeten anything, use stevia, it’s healthy and has no calories.

I buy quite a bit of fish and lean meat such as chicken and lean beef or center cut pork loin. A can of pink salmon may be more expensive than tuna, but it goes further and has about twice as much healthy essential fatty acids as tuna and it tastes a lot better too. White meat(breast) chicken is also a good meat to buy, don’t eat dark meat from poultry because the fat content in it is way too much for your daily allotment.

Lean roast beef is a good sandwich meat and is good for the extra protein you need to keep the muscle you have and build more when you exercise. The more muscle you have the more fat you burn. That’s just the way it is and muscle keeps burning fat even after you stop exercising. Studies have shown that you could continue to burn fat as much as 12 hours after you are done exercising if you are building lean muscle by eating enough protein.

Some things to think about while you are shopping : stay away from anything that has any trans fats in it. There is nothing healthy or necessary in trans fats and they are the hardest fat to get rid of as well. Watch out for sodium content, it will cause you to retain water to try to dilute the amount of salt in your blood and other body fluids. It is sometimes used to replace fat so the food will taste good, so watch out for it. Replacing salt in your food with other more healthy spices and herbs are great ways to jazz up your food and learn a new way to flavor your cooking. Your new husband to be will thank you for it as well.              

Can't get your wedding gown zipped up?

I know we’ve all said “I need to lose a little weight” at some point in our lives, but now it’s really a priority. The most important dress you’ll ever wear doesn’t want to zip/button up. That’s not good. I’ve been there/done that. It freaks you out and puts you in panic mode.

Maybe it does zip up, but it doesn’t look just right, not sexy, slinky hot like it did when you first bought it. There are some bulges and bumps that don’t look good at all. What are you going to do? Lose the extra pounds, that’s what. It can be done and I’ll show you how to do it.

If you do what I show you how to do, you will lose weight. You have to be committed to do it though. There is no maybe tomorrow, or maybe later. Later is here and now. It will take some planning and preparing to get it done, but it’s going to be so worth it. When your husband-to-be looks down the aisle at you and he’s blown away by how beautiful you are in your gown, you’ll know it was worth it all.

If you’ve made the decision to do this, let’s get going. No time to waste.  First, let’s look at what you’ve got around the house to eat. Is it all fast food or boxes of instant this and that? If it is, then it has to go in the trash, or to someone else’s house. More than likely, it’s way too many carbs, so it’s got to go. People eat excessive amounts of carbohydrates and most of the time they don’t even realize that there are carbs in what they’re eating. Healthy carbs are one thing, but most of us aren’t eating enough of those. I’m talking about vegetables; those are basically carbs, fiber, water, and assorted vitamins and minerals that we need. The good stuff that helps us stay healthy and lose weight, but not feel tired and cranky after we eat them the way most breads, pastas, and pastries do.

More protein, less carbs are the way to quickly lose fat and get energy too. I’m not talking about some extreme high protein diet that’s excluding a whole food category, just a lower carb amount than you’re probably used to having every day.

We’ll get into specifics once you’ve gotten rid of all the junk around the house and we’ll go shopping for fat-burning foods.