Have you reached a weight loss plateau? If your weight loss has stalled, take a look at my top 5 tips to get help you avoid a weight loss plateau and achieve your dream weight.

One of the more frustrating parts of weight loss is the inevitable weight loss plateau.  Everything seems to be going along fine, and then all of a sudden – no matter what you do – you find that the scale just doesn’t budge.  When you find that your weekly weight loss has stalled that’s often known as a ‘weight loss plateau’ and many dieters find the sudden lack of progress deeply frustrating. Let me help you understand why your weight may plateau and give you some ideas to make sure you continue to meet your goals so that your weight will start moving again.

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One key to maintaining a healthy weight is to balance the calories you eat with the calories you burn.  But that’s sometimes easier said than done.

Balancing your calories sounds deceptively simple.  Eat more calories than you burn and you’ll gain weight. Take in fewer calories than you burn and you’ll shed some pounds. Keep your “calories in” and “calories out” about the same, and your weight should stay pretty stable.  So why is it that hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t complain to me that they’re “exercising like a madman, but not losing any weight” or, “eating like a bird but the scale won’t budge”?  It simply boils down to this: when it comes to counting calories accurately – the ones you eat and the one you spend – there are so many ways it can go wrong.

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Everywhere you go, it seems, there’s pressure to eat.  Here’s how to push back.

For most of us, the last thing we need is the pressure to eat more.  But it happens all the time.  A few years back, one of the fast food chains in the US began a push to add a whole extra meal to your day –  “the meal between dinner and breakfast”.  I do understand the desire for an occasional midnight snack – sometimes you eat dinner early, you stay up late and you get hungry. But once that midnight snack morphs into “the fourth meal”, it starts to sound more like an everyday need – which just makes it easier to justify why we cave into the pressure to eat it.

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An occasional indulgence isn’t really cheating – especially if you’ve planned for it.

Cheating – on your taxes, on a test, on your partner – is just plain wrong.  And chances are, even if you were to consider cheating, you probably wouldn’t ask for permission from your accountant or your teacher…or your mate.  So why are people always asking me if it’s “okay to cheat” on their diet?  Does it feel “good” to be “bad”? Do they want to place the blame on my shoulders if their cheating doesn’t lead to weight loss?  Or are they simply saying, “I just can’t be this strict with myself every single day – I need a break!”

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January is all about resolutions and “turning over a new leaf”.  So all this month, we’re talking about the big nutritional benefits you can get from making just a few small changes.  Now let’s take a look at ways you can start to eat less without leaving your tummy grumbling.

We started with little adjustments you can make when you’re buying food, and in the last post I suggested some ways in which you could make changes in the way you prepare your foods to shave calories and make them healthier.  You might already be reaping some benefits if you’ve been trying to make these changes – and you may even be thinking that there isn’t a whole lot more tweaking you can do.  Maybe you haven’t given it much thought, but a little fine-tuning in the way your foods are served can also affect your food intake, too.

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Small changes to your recipes can lead to big calorie cuts.  A few ingredient swaps can make home-cooked dishes so much healthier.

Now that the holidays are solidly behind us, the reality of those New Year’s promises we made to ourselves are starting to settle in.  Many of us start out the New Year with big plans for big changes…which is why all this month we’re focusing on the ‘little things’.  That’s because small steps – taken together – can add up to big results, and are often easier to handle than huge sweeping changes that can be unsettling. In the last post, I made some suggestions for small changes you can make at the grocery store – that is, after all, where the path to healthy eating begins.  But now that you’ve brought your healthy ingredients into the house, you want to make sure to keep them that way when it’s time to cook. And with just a few small changes, you can make every dish you prepare at home a little bit better for you.

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The best diet is the one that works best with your lifestyle, your budget, your food preferences and how much effort you’re willing to give.

One of the more entertaining aspects of my work is that whenever I meet a new weight loss client, I never know where the conversation will lead.  Usually, I’ll start by getting some history – I want to know what’s the most and the least they’ve ever weighed, what motivates them to eat better and get into shape, and also what’s worked for them in the past and what hasn’t – that sort of thing.  From there, I can start to get a sense for how much effort each particular patient is willing to put forth, and what their expectations are.  And then we come up with a plan. But I can’t just tell someone what they need to do – I need to help them figure out how they’re going to do it, too.  And we work together to figure out what’s going to work best for them.

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You know that after-meal bloated feeling? Let’s talk about what can cause a fat belly through indigestion, and what can you do about it.

Ever had this happen to you?  You finish eating a meal and all of a sudden – you can practically watch it happen – your belly seems to almost double in size.  It’s not that you’ve eaten too much – it’s more like your belly has suddenly been pumped full of air, like a balloon.  Your tummy  presses against your belt or your waistband, and you grow more and more uncomfortable.  Finally, you just have to give in – loosening your belt, unzipping your pants or rearranging the elastic on your underwear – since your increasingly fat-looking belly is becoming more uncomfortable by the minute.

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Nutritionist, Susan Bowerman visited Herbalife this morning and we seized the opportunity to ask her a few questions.  If you’ve ever wanted to know what motivated Susan to become a dietitian or about whether she ever indulges in guilty treats then read on…

Welcome to Herbalife Headquarters, Susan.  Thousands of people read your nutrition posts each week and everyone wants to know about how you stay healthy.

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Here are some reasons why you might eat when you’re not hungry – and what you can do about it.

You’re not hungry but you eat anyway:

Life and calorie control would be a whole lot easier if we only ate when we were truly hungry.  Then it would simply be a biological drive that needed to be satisfied – like downing a glass of water when your throat is parched. It’s the rare person who doesn’t eat for reasons other than hunger – most of us find ourselves doing it from time to time.  Read more »

You can look thin on the outside, and still be fat – it’s called skinny-fat

“Skinny-fat”.  It sounds like a conflict in terms – like “jumbo shrimp” or “freezer burn”.  But I see skinny-fat clients all the time – they’re people who look as if their weight is about right, but they’ve actually got a lot of excess body fat.  And – hard as this may be to believe – some of these people are, technically, obese.  You’d be wrong to think that all obese people are large.  Obesity simply means that someone has too much body fat – regardless of their weight they can be skinny-fat.  So even if body weight falls within a ‘normal’ range, a person can still be obese. Or to put it another way, normal weight + high body fat = “skinny-fat”. Read more »

Kids can be picky eaters, but here’s a short list of some nutrition-packed foods that most kids enjoy.

It’s always funny to me when people ask me how my kids ate when they were little. I’m sure that most of them think that since I do what I do, my kids must have been perfect eaters – or that I had some special tricks up my sleeve that made them beg for broccoli. Truth be told, my kids were no different from most other kids – they had their likes and their dislikes – and they’d go on food jags where they’d want to eat the same thing every single day. Read more »

When it comes to your meals, what do you do to make them special? I’ll bet if I asked you what you ate for lunch two days ago, chances are pretty good that you can’t remember.  Maybe you worked through lunch and ate at your desk, or picked at some leftovers from the refrigerator.  Or you were so caught up in your favorite television show, that you scarcely noticed what was on your plate.  On the other hand, if I asked you to recall a special meal you’ve had lately – not even a holiday or birthday meal, just what you’d call a ‘nice meal’ – you can probably recall that meal in great detail.  And it’s likely that it was more than just the food that made that meal memorable.  It’s the little things, too, that make meals more special – and, more satisfying. Read more »

 Did your New Year’s resolutions include a vow to “eat right”?  Many of us make that promise to ourselves in January, but by about March we find our old eating habits sneaking back up on us. Maybe you tried to tackle too much – or maybe you hadn’t really thought about what ‘eating right’ really means.  Eating right involves more than just  making the right food choices – it’s also about eating the right foods at the right time.  So here are seven tips to help you to ‘eat right.’ Read more »

Most of my clients know the healthy eating drill pretty well – keep your fats down, eat plenty of fruits and veggies, make most of your grains “whole” and focus on low fat protein. But many of them have adopted some eating habits that they truly believe are healthy – and I have to spend some time trying to convince them otherwise. These eating habits sound like they’re healthy – but they really end up being less so when they’re put into practice. Are your eating habits as healthy as you think they are? Read more »