Not sure of where to start! I went to the doctor today and found out that my BMI is 33.55 at 227lbs and 5′9″. I do lift weights and have always had a bigger build. I have done 1/2 marathons but have not done much cardio due to cold weather, ice and snow. I don’t like the treadmill. However I want to lose the extra weight and know I need to increase exercise but I also know my eating habits need to change. I have tried Atkins in the past but not sure I want to do that again. I liked the results but it was a hard and possibly unhealthy diet. What diets are recommended for a guy who has a bigger build – and wants to lose the extra weight and reduce bmi. Thanks for your time! Steve
When you have a sudden craving for a candy bar or a big bowl of fries smothered in ketchup, are you really hungry … or is it just emotional hunger?
It can be surprisingly hard sometimes to figure out exactly what we’re feeling! If you’re on a diet after quite a long period of being overweight, you may have to get back in touch with your body’s hunger signals – many of us fall into the trap of nibbling constantly, and not really having much appetite when it comes to meal-time.
One of the keys to health is taking regular exercise (and if you doubt that, just check out this story of a 100 year old British woman taking keep fit classes!) But many of us find it difficult to stick with an exercise routine. Perhaps we’re too busy or too tired, or maybe we just don’t enjoy exercise that much.
Being active doesn’t have to feel like a chore or a punishment – it’s a great way to boost your mood, to keep your heart and bones healthy, and to burn calories and build muscle. Here’s how you can fit regular exercise into your life – and enjoy it!
In the haste to give up calories in order to lose weight, many dieters lose sight of what they should be eating for the nutritional value. All too often people are quick to skip breakfast or deny themselves a piece of fruit in order to save a few calories. Later on, however, they manage to justify a glass of wine or some diet ice cream “just this once” and “since I’ve been so good today”! Here are a few points to help you manage your calorie level and your nutrition at the same time.
Have you slipped into bad habits over Christmas and the New Year? It’s easy for bad eating patterns to creep up on us. With me, one of the signals of this is when chocolate goes from being an occasional treat to a two-or-three-times daily indulgence!
It’s all too easy to kid ourselves that we “usually” eat a healthy diet – because surely, birthdays, weekends, meals out with friends, and one-offs don’t count, right? The problem is, if you’re regularly putting away chips, candies, cake or ice-cream, your body doesn’t care where the calories come from. You’ll put on weight all the same.
One of the best habits you can develop to help improve the nutritional value of your diet is to plan ahead. Whether you want to lose weight, maintain your current healthy weight, or even just avoid a vitamin deficiency, you have to do a little work ahead of time to be sure everything falls into place by the end of an average day. Otherwise, you may discover a few extra grams of fat or a few hundred extra calories have found their way into your system by the end of the day, and maybe not enough calcium or vitamin C.
It’s January – when hundreds of thousands of us will be going on a diet. You might be looking to lose those few extra pounds that you put on over Christmas. Or perhaps you’ve got a longer journey ahead, and you’re determined that 2010 will be the year when you finally succeed in getting down to a healthy weight.
My jeans are fitting a little too snugly at the moment, after gaining a few pounds through a combination of busyness, slipping out of my usual exercise routine, and enjoying a bit too much of my mum and grandma’s cooking over the holiday period! I’ve been preparing myself for success – and here’s how you can too, however much weight you need to lose.
If you are like many people across the world, you are planning a New Year’s resolution to begin in just a few days. And if you are like thousands of others, it probably has something to do with weight loss. And, if you’re like most of them, you’ve probably done this before, and at some point a few weeks into the year you’ve given up in hopeless frustration. Why is it so hard to stick with our plan to lose weight? One reason might, of course, be the plan itself. Another reason to consider–maybe it wasn’t so important for you to lose weight.
Many of us spend the New Year period taking stock: often making resolutions to do better with our diets, to stick to our healthy eating, to take up exercise, and perhaps also to achieve particular goals in personal or career projects.
What we don’t always consider is what we might need to cut out of our lives. Somehow, we end up forgetting that we only have 24 hours in a day – and that we have a limited amount of energy and attention.
If you’re going to see real dieting success next year, what do you need to cut out of your life?
During the holidays we are so busy running around to find those perfect gifts for the kids, our parents, our friends, and other loved ones. This season, stop for a moment and consider giving a gift to yourself, specifically to your body.
I encourage you to take some time this week to stop a few times during the day and think about what your body would ask for if it could. Perhaps some more sleep? A nice tall glass of cool, clear water? Maybe a little walk to stretch the muscles and get the heart beating a bit. How about some fresh fruit for fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants!
Much of what we do each day is habit … and that covers our eating and exercising as well as the rest of our lives. If you always skip breakfast, that’s a habit. If you always eat a donut at 11am, that’s a habit too. And if you end up getting take out most evenings – despite resolving to cook – guess what? Yup … it’s a habit.
The good news is, you’ve probably already got some good dieting habits – and you can build on these to create a simple set of habits which will lead you onwards to success. Sounds good? Here are the three steps you need.
Have you piled on the pounds in recent years? Do you have a sedentary job which involves a tedious commute through traffic, and sitting at a desk for most of the day? Many of us do – and our jobs have a big influence on our health.
Here are four different aspects of your job which could be making you fat – and what to do about them.
Do you put on weight everysingle winter? Many of us find that our weight creeps up over November and December, with Thanksgiving and Christmas merging the early winter into a holiday from our diet … and then those January resolutions last all of a week.
Here’s how to get through the winter without gaining weight, despite the twin dangers of cold weather and Christmas.
(Apologies to those of you in the southern hemisphere: hopefully the Christmas tips will help, and you can use the cold weather ones in six months’ time…)
Perhaps you’re a seasoned and successful dieter … or even someone who hasn’t ever needed to diet. Even if you’re not currently on a diet yourself, the chances are, you know someone who’s is: here in the UK, 37% of women claim to be on a diet “most of the time”.
If you have a friend, relative or colleague who’s dieting, how can you help them?
(Psst – if you are dieting yourself, how about emailing this article to your friends and family? You might start getting the support that you need…)
So many of us look forward to the Thanksgiving celebration in anticipation of a buffet of scrumptious food… and afterwards spend days regretting overeating. This year, plan ahead to eat reasonably. Enjoy the array of holiday foods but don’t overdo it. Here are some tips to get you through the day:
Fill up on the veggie platter. Most people have appetizers out for snacking until dinner is prepared. This often includes a tray of cut vegetables. Help yourself to carrots, cauliflower, celery, radishes and other raw vegetables. Just go light on the dip. The fiber and water in the crudites will help fill you up so you aren’t starving by the time dinner is served.
When you go on a diet, you might see it as an intensely personal matter: your weight – and your weight loss – is your business, not anyone else’s. While this is true, it’s also true that other people can have a significant effect on whether or not your diet is likely to succeed.
These are three key ways in which your friends, family and even strangers might be affecting your diet…
So many people have iPhones and iTouches and Blackberries these days. If you’re one of them, take time to find some of the many apps made to aid people in their weight loss efforts. You can log your food intake (and for regular readers, you know what a proponent of food diaries I am!), track your calories burned through activity, even see what you’ll look like when you get to your goal weight!
It’s a dilemma many dieters face: is it possible to eat out while you’re trying to lose weight? Or do you need to stay in while friends are out living it up? Some diet plans are so rigid that there’s no room for eating out anyway – like the cookie plan or the cabbage soup diet.
In a few cases, it might be appropriate to avoid eating out. Perhaps you’re in the first few days of your diet and trying to get off to a really good start – or perhaps you’re trying hard to get back onto the dieting wagon. Usually, though, I believe that if eating out is part of your “normal” life, then you definitely should continue to eat out when you’re on a diet. Otherwise, you won’t really be changing your eating habits for good.
One big enemy of dieters is hunger. If you’re making serious attempts to diet – counting calories, or cutting out snacks between meals, for instance – you might well end up feeling hungry at times.
Sometimes, this is good: when you go on a diet, you get back in touch with your natural appetite. In the modern world, with food available 24/7, we often end up grazing between meals, snacking constantly, and never feeling a real sense of hunger.
We’ve all started diets that have lasted just a few weeks or days (in fact, I think I’ve been on a diet or two which didn’t make it past the first few hours!)
Starting a diet is fairly easy, especially when you’re feeling motivated. Sticking to it and maintaining your weight-loss … that’s much harder.
Here are six secrets – three “do”s and three “don’t”s – that’ll help you stick to your diet.
You’ve probably heard lots of experts blame the “obesity crisis” on a fall in activity levels, and if you’ve used You On A Diet’s activity calculator, you’ll know that the more exercise you do, the more calories you’ll burn.
I am trying to lose some weight, especially around my abdomen. My plan is to eat fish, chicken, fruits, vegetables, and drink a lot of water. I also plan to jog twice a day. How much weight could I lose in a month? Fifi
Answer:
Dear Fifi,
It sounds like your plan is to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet with lean protein, and wholesome produce choices for vitamins, minerals and fiber (especially if you include whole grains and low-fat dairy products as well). I’m also guessing this is a big change for you and, if so, you may be a little bit overly-optimistic at this point. Making many changes in your diet and exercise program at one time is often a difficult regimen to maintain.
We would like to take a moment to congratulate our very own Laurie Beebe on her TV debut. As most of you know, Laurie is our nutritional expert here at YOAD and has written countless posts that have helped our readers make healthier choices. Laurie was featured on Great Day St. Louis on Oct. 15. Check her out in the video below or visit the Great Day St. Louis Website
When you have a sudden craving for a candy bar or a big bowl of fries smothered in ketchup, are you really hungry … or is it just emotional hunger?
One of the keys to health is taking regular exercise (and if you doubt that, just check out this story of 
Have you slipped into bad habits over Christmas and the New Year? It’s easy for bad eating patterns to creep up on us. With me, one of the signals of this is when chocolate goes from being an occasional treat to a two-or-three-times daily indulgence!
It’s January – when hundreds of thousands of us will be going on a diet. You might be looking to lose those few extra pounds that you put on over Christmas. Or perhaps you’ve got a longer journey ahead, and you’re determined that 2010 will be the year when you finally succeed in getting down to a healthy weight.
Many of us spend the New Year period taking stock: often making resolutions to do better with our 
Much of what we do each day is habit … and that covers our eating and exercising as well as the rest of our lives. If you always skip breakfast, that’s a habit. If you always eat a donut at 11am, that’s a habit too. And if you end up getting take out most evenings – despite resolving to cook – guess what? Yup … it’s a habit.
Have you piled on the pounds in recent years? Do you have a sedentary job which involves a tedious commute through traffic, and sitting at a desk for most of the day? Many of us do – and our jobs have a big influence on our health.
Do you put on weight every single winter? Many of us find that our weight creeps up over November and December, with Thanksgiving and Christmas merging the early winter into a holiday from our diet … and then those January resolutions last all of a week.
Perhaps you’re a seasoned and successful dieter … or even someone who hasn’t ever needed to diet. Even if you’re not currently on a diet yourself, the chances are, you know someone who’s is: here in the UK, 
When you go on a diet, you might see it as an intensely personal matter: your weight – and your weight loss – is your business, not anyone else’s. While this is true, it’s also true that other people can have a significant effect on whether or not your diet is likely to succeed.
It’s a dilemma many dieters face: is it possible to eat out while you’re trying to lose weight? Or do you need to stay in while friends are out living it up? Some diet plans are so rigid that there’s no room for eating out anyway – like the cookie plan or the cabbage soup diet.
One big enemy of dieters is hunger. If you’re making serious attempts to diet – counting calories, or cutting out snacks between meals, for instance – you might well end up feeling hungry at times.
We’ve all started diets that have lasted just a few weeks or days (in fact, I think I’ve been on a diet or two which didn’t make it past the first few hours!)
You’ve probably heard lots of experts blame the “obesity crisis” on a fall in activity levels, and if you’ve used 