First, staying hydrated helps us with all of our body’s processes.  We need sufficient hydration for proper digestion, brain function and other bodily needs.  Second drinking water helps keep your stomach full and also gives you some sort of oral fixation that helps you avoid doing things which are detrimental to your weight such as snacking.  Also, by drinking lots of water, we have to go to the bathroom more, which gets us off our lazy butts, out of of our desk chairs and over to the restroom more often.  This may seem like a silly benefit, but for people who work in an office and are literally sitting for four hours straight, it is a huge benefit to get up and walk around once every few hours.

I have heard different arguments about how much water a healthy person needs to consume each day.  I have heard anywhere between 64 and 128 ounces of water per day.  I think it varies from person to person, weather and activity level.  For example, a large man who goes for a run on a hot day in the sun is going to need a whole lot more water than a small person who works indoors all day.  You just need to listen to your body and drink water as you see fit.  One indicator for me is urine color.  If it is a darker yellow, I am probably not getting enough water and need to drink more.  If it is a clear color, I am doing OK.

I have a desk job, so it is pretty easy for me to satisfy my hydration needs each day.  I have a 32 ounce cup with a lid and a big straw.  It is pretty goofy looking, but works very well.  I make sure to fill it each morning and refill it several times throughout the day.  It always sits on my desk to the left of me and I take a sip anytime that I have a slight pause in my work.  Whenever it is not there, I often catch myself grabbing for it and feeling slightly confused when its missing.

Another great time to get your water needs is to drink water with your meal.  You can help curb your appetite by drinking a lot of water around meal time.  Simply drink a glass of water before you start eating, a glass of water with your meal and then a glass of water after your meal.  You can end up having smaller meals and feeling fuller while getting that extra water you need.

So we will start with #5 - grapefruit.  Grapefruits are high in fiber and have a lower glycemic value, which makes them actually help you lose weight.  Countless studies have shown that adding grapefruit to your diet can help you lose more weight than if you didn’t eat any at all.  You can either cut it in half and go at it with a spoon, drink grapefruit juice, or peel and eat like an orange.  As long as you are getting plenty of grapefruit in you each day, the weight should just fall right off.

Next, we have #4 - Spinach.  Normally we put lettuce on our sandwich or salad.  Lettuce isn’t bad, it just doesn’t have that much nutritional value.  Its mostly just water.  Spinach is different.  Spinach has loads of anti-oxidants, more protein, way more vitamins and minerals, and a lot more fiber.  The one downside is that there are a few more calories in spinach, however this is basically negligible.  You may not like spinach, but it is a way better weight loss diet food than lettuce could ever be.

#3 - Water. What better beverage to consume than water.  Water not only helps our digestion, it also keeps us hydrated, healthy and sometimes full.  Research shows that we need between 64 and 128 ounces of water per day.  I have a 32 ounce cup I drink throughout the day and refill several times.  Drinking lots of water will help you lose weight and control appetite and cravings.

#2 - Tofu. Tofu is a great alternative to meat products.  Tofu has plenty of great stuff like fiber and protein, but a lot less fats and calories.  Try and opt for a tofu dog instead of a regular beef frank whenever possible.  Eat tofu burgers instead of regular hamburgers.  Use tofu in your cooking instead of ground beef.  Use tofu to replace normally fatty foods to help achieve your weight loss goals.

#1 - Chewing Gum.  Have you ever noticed how hard it is to eat when you are chewing gum?  A lot of the time, when we are hungry, it is because we just want to be eating something.  We just want to be munching on something that tastes great.  A stick of gum usually has about 5 calories, and can last for hours.  If you get the craving to snack when you shouldn’t be, just plug your mouth with a stick of gum to help satisfy your cravings.

Losing weight can be easy.  Take advantage of the whole book of tricks, and always remember to exercise.

1. If you order a burger, always ask for no mayo or dressing, and no cheese. These items are super high in fat and totally unnecessary. Season with ketchup and mustard instead.
2. Avoid shakes like the plague. Not very much nutritional value and tons of calories. A shake could be anywhere from 400 to 1000 calories.
3. Do you want fries with that? NO! While delicious, fries are just another source of unnecessary calories and fat.
4. Salads are not always a healthy option. The Southwest Salad at McDonalds has 530 calories and 26 grams of fat. A Big Mac has 540 calories and 29 grams of fat. Not a whole lot better. Salads can be a good alternative, but just make sure you know what you are doing.
5. Chicken or Fish are not always better than beef. A hamburger at McDonalds has 250 Calories and 9 grams of fat. A McChicken has 360 calories and 16 grams of fat. A Filet-O-Fish has 380 calories and 18 grams of fat. This is because these items are deep fried.
6. Less is more! If you don’t want to look like a diet-freak in front of your friends analyzing the nutrition pamphlet before ordering, just order a smaller meal. Ordering one hamburger is ok.
7. Get a water. Save a buck and some calories. A medium soda is going to run you a few hundred extra empty calories.

Ok, here are my top choices for each of the major fast food restaurants:

1. McDonalds - If you are hungry, get the Premium Asian Salad with either grilled chicken or no chicken at all. Add the sesame ginger dressing and you are doing pretty well. Worst case (you get the chicken) you are at 390 Calories and 12 grams of fat for a full meal. If you skip the chicken, you are at 240 calories and 9 grams of fat.
2. McDonalds - If you are just looking for a snack, just get a regular hamburger. With only 250 calories and 9 grams of fat, you aren’t looking too bad for a semi-meal.
3. Burger King - BK is a little worse than Micky-D’s. If you are looking for a full meal, get the TenderGrill Chicken Garden Salad with Light Italian Dressing. This will run you 400 calories and 18 grams of fat.
4. Burger King - For just a quick bite, grab a Whopper Jr. with no mayo (250 calories, 12g fat) or a BK Veggie with no mayo (350 calories, 8g fat).
5. Wendys - Wendy’s has some good options. For a meal, go with the Ultimate Chicken Grill. Only 320 calories and 7g fat.
6. Wendy’s - Snack: Go with a Jr. Hamburger. 220 cals and 8g fat.
7. Taco Bell - The bell can be difficult because you usually feel compelled to order multiple things. Don’t be! Let yourself be satisfied with only a few items. Taco Bell has a “Fresco Menu” - always order from this. For a meal, go with the Fresco bean burrito for 330 cals and 7g of fat.
8. Taco Bell - For a snack, go with a Fresco Ranchero chicken soft taco or Fresco grilled steak soft taco for about 160 calories and 4 grams of fat.
9. Jack in the Box - For a full meal, be careful. Get the Asian chicken salad with grilled chicken and low fat balsamic dressing. This will only cost you 200 calories and 3 grams of fat. Be careful of other salad/dressing combos, because they could run you 600 calories and 20 grams of fat.
10. Jack in the Box - Snack: Get the Grilled Chicken Strips for 180 calories and 2 grams of fat!

I hope that is enough info to get you on your way. Try to avoid fast food restaurants if at all possible, but in the rare occasion that you have to make the dive, you will be prepared.

There are two parts to weight loss: Eating the correct diet foods in the right proportions, and getting enough exercise.  I find the eating part a lot more challenging than the exercise part.  Getting exercise is simple; all you have to do is move your muscles around a little bit.  Anything can be considered exercise, whether it is dancing, playing sports, running, hiking, even walking!  The idea is to just pile on as much exercise as possible.  You don’t have to be a scientist to create an exercise plan that will help aid in your weight loss.

The more difficult part is figuring out exactly what foods you should be eating that will help you lose weight.  There are so many different diets and so many different nutrients.  You need to keep track of calories, carbs, sugar, fat, fiber, vitamins, etc.  It very quickly becomes overwhelming.  Then you are faced with the difficult task of picking exactly what foods you are going to buy, figuring out how much you should be eating each day, and then sometimes actually cooking the meals.  Then you have to factor in snack foods, desserts, eating out, drinks, etc.  It all adds up to a nightmare that is often impossible to sort out.

Thankfully, there are some systems that help make it a little more simple.  The first step is to simply pick a diet system.  You can choose a points-based system such as weight watchers which allows you to eat whatever you want.  The only catch is that every food has a “points” value that is based on the calories, fat and fiber in each food.  You only get so many points to eat in a day, so it helps you make wise diet food choices.  The problem is in keeping track of all your points and using the points calculator to figure out exactly how many points are in each food.

Another system could be something like the Atkins diet or some sort of low-carb diet.  The only problem with this is that there are rumors of heart problems relating to diets like this.  The idea is that you completely eliminate any foods with carbs in them.  This diet is proven to work, but the problem comes in figuring out which foods have carbs.  It seems that almost any food has carbs in it, so you are really limited in terms of what you are allowed to eat.

Finally, what I found to be the least stressful is having diet food delivered right to your door.  Sign up for a program and they will send you all the food that you need to eat for a month.  When you need a meal, just heat and eat.  This system is a no-brainer.  Just stick to the food that is ready for you to eat and you will have your dieting side of the weight loss equation in check.  Throw in some physical activity and the pounds will start falling off.

All too often I see diets fail because of improper planning.  Whether it is an impossible diet food plan, unsustainable exercise routine, or simple lack of motivation, poor planning will lead to a failed weight loss attempt.  Even if the weight loss trial starts working, the diet may fail and result in gaining all the weight back that you worked to hard to lose in the first place.

Here are a few steps that you can take to ensure the success of your diet and weight loss attempt:

1. Create a solid diet food plan.  If you simply tell yourself that you will just be counting calories, odds are that you will fail.  Counting calories is more of a theoretical weight loss strategy, but is not a practical plan that you can easily follow each day without thinking.  You need a more practical diet food plan, for example, create a huge list of different meals that you can prepare for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and snacks throughout the day.  If you want to take this a step further, assign estimated calorie values to each meal.  When you are trying to figure out what to eat, go to your list and pick something.  This will make it a lot easier than trying to guess what to make each meal.
2. Create a list of exercises you enjoy.  There are literally a million ways to get exercise.  All you have to do to exercise is literally move.  Thats it.  Just get muscles moving for an extended period of time and you can call it a workout.  If you hate running or going to the gym, forcing yourself to go will only be a temporary solution.  Create a large list of specific activities that you enjoy.  Here are some examples: biking, hiking, walking the dog around the block, tennis, swimming, dancing, jumping jacks, etc.
3. Make it easy to stick to your diet food plan.  Get rid of all the junk food from your house.  When you go grocery shopping, make sure that you are full so you don’t grab a bunch of junk food.  If you really can’t help grabbing junk food at the grocery store, grab a bag of chips or a candy bar right when you walk in and eat it while shopping.  You will satisfy your craving for junk food right there and won’t be tempted to buy more for later.  Just be sure to pay for the stuff you ate!
4. Make it easy to stick to your exercise routines.  Join a gym that you really like.  Involve friends and family in fun exercise activities so they force you to go with them.  I have a stationary bike in my living room right in front of the TV.  If I am watching something really exciting, I usually forget that I am even exercising!  The time flies right by.

What do all these ideas have in common?  They help make it easy for you to stick to your weight loss and diet plans.  I believe that consistency is the key to successful weight loss, and making it easy for yourself to stick to it is the key to consistency.

There are plenty of diets out there, from low carb to raw food.  All are supposed to help you lose pounds and keep them off.  Regardless of what your specific diet is, the basic premise of weight loss is that you are spending more energy than you are taking in.  You should be getting daily exercise in conjunction with choosing healthy meals and cutting out any empty calories (such as soda, cookies, chips, etc.).  Weight will slowly start to come off if you adjust your eating and exercise habits.  Eventually, you will get down to the weight that you want to be, and as long as you keep your diet and exercise routines going, you will stay at a healthy weight for a long time to come.

The one problem that most people encounter is trying to find healthy diet food that they can continue to eat for sustained periods of time.  Many people find one or two different healthy meals that they enjoy, but have difficult creating any sort of variety.  They consistently eat the same few health food options, but eventually they get sick of eating the same things over and over again.  A good idea is to have an assortment of healthy diet food options so that you will get some variety in your diet and be able to continue your diet for much longer than you had imagined.

If you are trying to find a variety of healthy diet food, you have a few options that may help you find what you are looking for:

One idea is to cook everything yourself.  The problem with this is that it takes a lot of time to cook yourself a meal every time you want to eat.  Also, having all the ingredients might not be easy or economical (products going bad before you finish them).  If you do want to cook, you can do what my dad does: batch.  Go ahead and cook yourself an entire week’s worth of meals in one day.  Put them in some containers, freeze everything and then heat and serve when you want to eat.

Another option is to go to the grocery store and start picking healthy pre-packaged diet meals.  There should be a ton of options in your frozen food section.  The only problem is that it can be expensive, you really have no idea what you are getting, and you don’t even know where to begin.

Finally, my favorite option is to order all your diet food online and have it delivered to your front door.  You can do this for relatively inexpensive, and they will send you literally everything that you need to eat for that month.  Just heat and serve when you need to eat.  This service takes all the guess work out of picking your healthy diet food.

Always keep in mind that sustainability is the key to success for any diet.  Find something that works for your taste buds, schedule and wallet.

One thing that is tough is that breakfast foods always seem to be high in calories.  A wimpy bowl of cereal has at least several hundred calories.  A donut is obviously bad, but some people don’t know that a bagel can be a whole lot worse!  Here are some good diet breakfast food ideas:

1. Egg whites - Eggs are really good for you, but some people think they are high in fat and cholesterol.  Remove the yolk (the yellow part) and you have a pretty nutritious breakfast.
2. Diet cereals with skim milk - A lot of diet cereals might be low in calories and high in other good nutrients.  The only drawback is that they are traditionally more expensive than regular cereal.
3. Whole grain toast - white bread doesn’t have much nutritional value, but whole wheat bread does.
4. Diet food delivery service meals. - Check out medifast and other diet food delivery services and see what breakfasts they have to offer.

Just remember that skipping breakfast is not an option.  It truly is the most important meal of the day!

When comparing diet foods, it is sometimes difficult to determine the weight of different attributes.  For example, one diet food may taste great and be rather expensive, but another one may be really cheap yet taste awful.  Who is to say which one wins?  If you are just scraping to get by, the cheaper food might win hands down for you every single time.  If you just can’t stand the awful taste and need to dish out a couple extra bucks for the more expensive yet tastier one, you will probably pick the more expensive one every single time.

So how can you say that one diet food is better than the other?  I have written a list of a few different attributes that should guide you through selecting your top diet foods.

1. Sustainability - This might be a combination of a few different attributes, but is the most important item to look at.  If you absolutely can’t sustain this diet for the rest of your life, there is no point.  If you eat these diet foods for a month then quit, you will just gain any weight back that you had lost.  The top concern is to select a diet that you can sustain.
2. Taste - If you can’t stand eating it, you won’t be able to sustain.
3. Availability - If you find yourself having to cook your diet food every single meal, or you have to go to a special diet-food store that carries it on the next town over, its probably not all that sustainable of a diet.  If you want to save yourself the trouble of going to the grocery store regularly, you can take a look into different diet delivery service products that are available on the internet today.

If you are looking to buy cheap diet food, you are probably going to run into a bunch of problems.  The bottom line is really that you get what you pay for.  If you try to save a bunch of money by buying some cheap diet food, you are probably getting something that is.. well, cheap.

If you by the absolute cheapest stuff you can buy at the grocery store, you should just assume they are cutting corners.  It could be that they aren’t using the best ingrediants, maybe it isn’t very low-calorie after all, or you are just eating a lot of chemicals and partially hydrogenated oils.  Either way, you are still getting what you pay for.  If you decide to cough up an extra few bucks, you are going to be getting a much higher quality diet meal.

One alternative to getting cheap diet food without sacrificing quality is to sign up for a diet food delivery service such as medifast or ediets.  With one of these systems, you get all the food you need for one low price.

You are in luck because there are a ton of healthy alternatives around today.  You can use beans, tofu and other soy products to supplement your diet.  However, there are a lot of other foods that you need to cut from your diet if you are vegetarian and your goal is to lose weight.  Everyone loves cake, cookies, chips, snacking and overeating.  Even as a vegetarian, you will have to overcome a lot of your cravings.

One method to easily figure out what vegetarian diet food you should be eating is to sign up to a diet food delivery service and select the vegetarian option.  This is really a convenience thing that is offered by medifast, ediets and a lot of other services out there.  You won’t have to make frequent trips to the grocery store, calculate out all the nutritional facts, check every product that you buy if it has meat in it or not, etc.

I was a vegetarian for six years and I know first-hand how difficult it is to easily get vegetarian diet food.  It seems there is always some meat product in the meal that you want which just makes things plain frustrating.  With a meal plan from one of the aforementioned providers, you can simply heat and eat!  It really takes the thinking out of eating and dieting.