The Importance OfA Weight Loss Plan And Accountability
In this article Jill Fleming shares on losing weight and accountability.
Jill Fleming is a certified nutritionist and author of Thin People Don't Clean Their Plates.
Kevin:You also mention one of your principals is to write it down.
Can you explain that? Jill: I think during the learning phase when you are first trying to lose weight, if you write down everything that you eat or drink and how much exercise that you're getting, you're instantly going to have accountability.
You're going to see what your doing and I use a little lifestyle diary.
I actually have it on my website.
It's a free download for the PDF file, because I find this to be the most important weight loss tool people can use and I stuck it one there, because so many people were e-mailing and saying how do I get hold of your diary.
So I just thought let's just give it away so people can get started and when you write down what you're eating, you get to circle little fruits and vegetables if you've consumed them.
You get to circle little glasses of water and you get to circle little exercise guys.
You will find it's like sitting down with a dietician or a trainer and they'll say, gosh you didn't eat breakfast.
You didn't eat any fruits or vegetables and you drank 3 sodas and no water.
What do you think you should be doing? Because most people know what they should do and most people are aware fruits and vegetables are better than doughnuts.
They know this.
So you don't have to go sit down face to face with a dietician and say help me.
You can plug it in yourself and say, oh, if I just worked on breakfast this week, next week we'll work on adding vegetables and the third week we'll start walking at lunch time.
It almost seems too easy.
Kevin:It does.
Jill: Yeah.
Kevin:But what stops us? Jill: I think that we all just caught up and busy and we kind of put our health on the back burner and we're also very drawn in on the things we see on infomercials and the things that we see and here's a new book out and it's not the high protein now, but it's something else and we want to believe it.
We want to believe it's the magic bullet.
What we truly need to do it so just go back to eating like normal people again.
Kevin:Yeah.
Jill: How did our grandparents eat? We never sat down at a meal with my grandparents without their being vegetables on the table.
Nowadays it's pizza on the fly or if you look in the cars as you're driving next to people they're eating a big burger as they're driving down the street and drinking a soda, because they've got hurry and get to hockey practice or to ballet or to gymnastics and so planning ahead with the meals is a big part of it and when your writing down what your doing you could even do it in a notebook, but if you're writing it down you might start thinking what are we going to have for dinner tomorrow night.
Oh, we do have hockey tomorrow night.
Maybe it will be a crock pot meal that we put it in, in the morning.
The planning ahead is the single best thing that you can do, because the most inconsistent meal of the deal of the day is the dinner meal.
So if you can plan tonight what you're having tomorrow for dinner and it's ready, you can scratch stopping at the fast food place off of your list or throwing another peanut butter sandwich at your kid as you're running out the door.
Kevin:Yeah and with kids and having a busy schedule and having a full time job planning is one of the things.
Are there any other tips that you can give someone who has that situation? Jill: I think one of the best things you can do is to just waste energy and I'm constantly doing this.
When I used to get to school to pick up my kids I would sit in the car and maybe read a book or something and I thought I was making good use of my time.
Now, I will on purpose get to school early, hop out of my car and I will walk around the block possibly three times until the bell rings.
Kevin:Great.
Jill: So you can do something.
At work stay away from the elevators and make kind of a game of it.
I do this with my children all the time.
We'll stop at the hospital or clinic for a check-up and we'll say, "See that guy in the red flannel shirt? I bet we can beat him up to whatever floor he's going to.
" And we'll ask him what floor he's going to and he'll say third floor.
We run up to third floor taking the stairs and then we stand there as he gets out of the elevator and my kids think it's the funniest joke ever and we're showing that you can actually go faster, plus your burning calories at the same time.
The funny thing is that we may have only been going up to second floor but just raced this guy and made a game out of it.
Kevin:Right.
Jill: So where can you burn the extra calories? One of the things that I like to do, I mentioned briefly, squeezies.
It's isometric toning that you can do anywhere and I always teach people to do this.
You can just sit where you are right now, push your lower back back against the chair and pull your stomach in almost as if your belly button is being pulled back towards your spine and you just hold that.
Continue breathing while you're holding it, but hold it until it starts to hurt and then just five seconds longer.
It's a simple thing that isolates the muscle and gets your it helps to tone the muscle even its hiding beneath the fat you're starting to tone the muscle so the next time when you start to lose your weight and the fat starts to come off your noticing that you've got nice muscle tone underneath the fat.
You can do this at a red light.
Every time I hit a red light I sit and squeeze my stomach muscles.
I'm standing in line at the grocery store and I'm squeezing my butt muscles together, my butt cheeks, my glutinous maximus.
Kevin:Yeah.
You can't squeeze your stomach muscles in the line at the grocery store.
Jill: No.
It's a little bit harder, because you want to push your lower back back against whatever chair you're sitting in.
Kevin:And people are going to look at you funny, too.
Jill: Well, people can't tell that you're doing it when you're standing in line at the grocery store flexing your butt muscles.
My daughter calls them buttocks.
People can't tell that you're doing it, but you are toning.
Kevin:Right.
Jill: While you're brushing your teeth you can do just little side leg lifts while you're brushing your teeth, just really slow on the saddleback area which is hard for most women to target.
If your foot is at a 45 degree angle you can really target that.
You're doing it two minutes twice a day.
You've just added four minutes of toning without adding any extra time to your day.
Kevin:Right.
Jill: So people that are busy can add the squeezies or the leg lifts or when making your path from your brushing your teeth to your bed, you stop and drop down and do 10 really slow pushups.
That's part of my routine.
Kevin:Okay.
Jill: So where can you add the fitness in if you don't have an hour to devote at one time? Where can you squeeze it in throughout the day? Kevin:I think people make the mistake that they think they have to exercise for an hour straight everyday.
Jill: Oh right, right and that's so not the case.
Kevin:Yeah, because if you look at any society, ancient society they don't sit down and exercise for an hour a day.
They never had treadmills or anything.
Jill: No.
No and they didn't hop on a bicycle to go to the grocery store or one of the things I do with my kids sometimes is I'll park three or four blocks away from where I'm picking them up from an event and then when we come out we play where's the car.
Oh, I can't remember where the car is and so we kind of zig and zag until we find the car and whoever sees it first runs and wins the race getting to the car.
So making a game out of it with your kids, you're just helping them helping increase their activity, too, because they're not getting enough of it in schools nowadays anymore either.
Kevin:Yeah.
I think that's incredibly easy to use advice.
I really think that's incredibly valuable and I think it kind of makes this call even more valuable, because it's real information.
It's not theory.
Jill: No.
Exactly and that's what I've found.
The people that say they're too busy.
When I ask them do you think you could lift your legs while you're brushing your teeth they say, "Yeah.
It's not that hard to do.
" Well, start doing that and then you start doing that for a week and then what can you add and I think so many times with weight loss people are trying to take things away.
I'll never eat chocolate again.
I will never have lasagna again.
Stop taking things away and start adding things.
Adding the stairs, adding fruit, when you want a sweet, adding more of the healthy things and then the junky things just kind of fall away and you don't feel deprived.
Jill Fleming is a certified nutritionist and author of Thin People Don't Clean Their Plates.
Kevin:You also mention one of your principals is to write it down.
Can you explain that? Jill: I think during the learning phase when you are first trying to lose weight, if you write down everything that you eat or drink and how much exercise that you're getting, you're instantly going to have accountability.
You're going to see what your doing and I use a little lifestyle diary.
I actually have it on my website.
It's a free download for the PDF file, because I find this to be the most important weight loss tool people can use and I stuck it one there, because so many people were e-mailing and saying how do I get hold of your diary.
So I just thought let's just give it away so people can get started and when you write down what you're eating, you get to circle little fruits and vegetables if you've consumed them.
You get to circle little glasses of water and you get to circle little exercise guys.
You will find it's like sitting down with a dietician or a trainer and they'll say, gosh you didn't eat breakfast.
You didn't eat any fruits or vegetables and you drank 3 sodas and no water.
What do you think you should be doing? Because most people know what they should do and most people are aware fruits and vegetables are better than doughnuts.
They know this.
So you don't have to go sit down face to face with a dietician and say help me.
You can plug it in yourself and say, oh, if I just worked on breakfast this week, next week we'll work on adding vegetables and the third week we'll start walking at lunch time.
It almost seems too easy.
Kevin:It does.
Jill: Yeah.
Kevin:But what stops us? Jill: I think that we all just caught up and busy and we kind of put our health on the back burner and we're also very drawn in on the things we see on infomercials and the things that we see and here's a new book out and it's not the high protein now, but it's something else and we want to believe it.
We want to believe it's the magic bullet.
What we truly need to do it so just go back to eating like normal people again.
Kevin:Yeah.
Jill: How did our grandparents eat? We never sat down at a meal with my grandparents without their being vegetables on the table.
Nowadays it's pizza on the fly or if you look in the cars as you're driving next to people they're eating a big burger as they're driving down the street and drinking a soda, because they've got hurry and get to hockey practice or to ballet or to gymnastics and so planning ahead with the meals is a big part of it and when your writing down what your doing you could even do it in a notebook, but if you're writing it down you might start thinking what are we going to have for dinner tomorrow night.
Oh, we do have hockey tomorrow night.
Maybe it will be a crock pot meal that we put it in, in the morning.
The planning ahead is the single best thing that you can do, because the most inconsistent meal of the deal of the day is the dinner meal.
So if you can plan tonight what you're having tomorrow for dinner and it's ready, you can scratch stopping at the fast food place off of your list or throwing another peanut butter sandwich at your kid as you're running out the door.
Kevin:Yeah and with kids and having a busy schedule and having a full time job planning is one of the things.
Are there any other tips that you can give someone who has that situation? Jill: I think one of the best things you can do is to just waste energy and I'm constantly doing this.
When I used to get to school to pick up my kids I would sit in the car and maybe read a book or something and I thought I was making good use of my time.
Now, I will on purpose get to school early, hop out of my car and I will walk around the block possibly three times until the bell rings.
Kevin:Great.
Jill: So you can do something.
At work stay away from the elevators and make kind of a game of it.
I do this with my children all the time.
We'll stop at the hospital or clinic for a check-up and we'll say, "See that guy in the red flannel shirt? I bet we can beat him up to whatever floor he's going to.
" And we'll ask him what floor he's going to and he'll say third floor.
We run up to third floor taking the stairs and then we stand there as he gets out of the elevator and my kids think it's the funniest joke ever and we're showing that you can actually go faster, plus your burning calories at the same time.
The funny thing is that we may have only been going up to second floor but just raced this guy and made a game out of it.
Kevin:Right.
Jill: So where can you burn the extra calories? One of the things that I like to do, I mentioned briefly, squeezies.
It's isometric toning that you can do anywhere and I always teach people to do this.
You can just sit where you are right now, push your lower back back against the chair and pull your stomach in almost as if your belly button is being pulled back towards your spine and you just hold that.
Continue breathing while you're holding it, but hold it until it starts to hurt and then just five seconds longer.
It's a simple thing that isolates the muscle and gets your it helps to tone the muscle even its hiding beneath the fat you're starting to tone the muscle so the next time when you start to lose your weight and the fat starts to come off your noticing that you've got nice muscle tone underneath the fat.
You can do this at a red light.
Every time I hit a red light I sit and squeeze my stomach muscles.
I'm standing in line at the grocery store and I'm squeezing my butt muscles together, my butt cheeks, my glutinous maximus.
Kevin:Yeah.
You can't squeeze your stomach muscles in the line at the grocery store.
Jill: No.
It's a little bit harder, because you want to push your lower back back against whatever chair you're sitting in.
Kevin:And people are going to look at you funny, too.
Jill: Well, people can't tell that you're doing it when you're standing in line at the grocery store flexing your butt muscles.
My daughter calls them buttocks.
People can't tell that you're doing it, but you are toning.
Kevin:Right.
Jill: While you're brushing your teeth you can do just little side leg lifts while you're brushing your teeth, just really slow on the saddleback area which is hard for most women to target.
If your foot is at a 45 degree angle you can really target that.
You're doing it two minutes twice a day.
You've just added four minutes of toning without adding any extra time to your day.
Kevin:Right.
Jill: So people that are busy can add the squeezies or the leg lifts or when making your path from your brushing your teeth to your bed, you stop and drop down and do 10 really slow pushups.
That's part of my routine.
Kevin:Okay.
Jill: So where can you add the fitness in if you don't have an hour to devote at one time? Where can you squeeze it in throughout the day? Kevin:I think people make the mistake that they think they have to exercise for an hour straight everyday.
Jill: Oh right, right and that's so not the case.
Kevin:Yeah, because if you look at any society, ancient society they don't sit down and exercise for an hour a day.
They never had treadmills or anything.
Jill: No.
No and they didn't hop on a bicycle to go to the grocery store or one of the things I do with my kids sometimes is I'll park three or four blocks away from where I'm picking them up from an event and then when we come out we play where's the car.
Oh, I can't remember where the car is and so we kind of zig and zag until we find the car and whoever sees it first runs and wins the race getting to the car.
So making a game out of it with your kids, you're just helping them helping increase their activity, too, because they're not getting enough of it in schools nowadays anymore either.
Kevin:Yeah.
I think that's incredibly easy to use advice.
I really think that's incredibly valuable and I think it kind of makes this call even more valuable, because it's real information.
It's not theory.
Jill: No.
Exactly and that's what I've found.
The people that say they're too busy.
When I ask them do you think you could lift your legs while you're brushing your teeth they say, "Yeah.
It's not that hard to do.
" Well, start doing that and then you start doing that for a week and then what can you add and I think so many times with weight loss people are trying to take things away.
I'll never eat chocolate again.
I will never have lasagna again.
Stop taking things away and start adding things.
Adding the stairs, adding fruit, when you want a sweet, adding more of the healthy things and then the junky things just kind of fall away and you don't feel deprived.
