We have gotten used to immediate results in today’s world. Whether it is good or bad is open to debate. There are no real instant weight loss programs. With the current technology and scientific understanding of the human body, instant weight loss is impossible unless you have a liposuction operation. However, there are small things you can do right now that will help you lose weight.

1. More H2O

This one is easy. If you are not getting adequate amounts of water, your body will hoard more water which adds to your overall body weight. Bodybuilders prepare before a competition by removing as much excess water from their body as possible so that they will look exceptionally defined. Their regiment is rather complex and probably not a good idea for the average person.

You can easily emulate what they do by drinking more water. Eight cups of water is recommended but, you won’t die if you drink twice as much. There might be more trips to the bathroom but, you’ll live. I’ve heard stories of people “drowning” themselves by drinking too much water. Maybe it is a rumor; I don’t know. Regardless, you will have to a drink an enormous amount of water for it to become harmful. The more physical activity you undergo, the more water you will need. There is plenty of water so you don’t need to ration it.

2. Eliminate Liquid Sugar

You’ll be surprised how many calories you consume in liquids on a daily basis. Any drink that is sweetened is likely to have a hundred calories or more in sugar. Diet and sugar free drinks should be safe. The average person drinks 20% of their total daily calories. The drink isn’t going to make you feel full for any lasting period of time because your body isn’t counting calories. Eliminate the sugary drinks and you’ll reduce your daily caloric intake by 20%.

3. Don’t Fear Fat

Low-fat diets used to be popular but now, we know it doesn’t work. If you’ve ever tried going on a low-fat diet, you’ll know that it doesn’t work. Some people will blame their lack of dedication or self-control. Man was never intended to live off a diet of bread and salad. One of the worse thing you can do in any diet is to avoid fat. You need to eat fat to lose fat.

Fat has this great property of keeping you feeling fuller longer. You obviously shouldn’t over eat on fatty foods but, don’t avoid it like the plague. Fat keeps you satiated so that you’ll end up eating less.

4. Replace a Meal

The easiest diet to maintain and follow is a meal replacement diet. You replace a meal with a liquid meal known as meal replacements. They are usually in the range of a couple to a few hundred calories and should have an optimal blend of carbs, fats, and proteins as well as vitamins and minerals. These meals are designed to be low in calories and make you feel satisfied.

You can buy an over-the-counter meal replacement product in the form of ready to use cans or powders that you need to blend. You can also make your own with the ingredients that you want. The latter is most complicated unless you know what you are doing.

5. Eat More Often

This is the popular diet mantra today and it works. However, the idea is not to eat gigantic meals. This is easiest to accomplish when you use it with the tip above about meal replacements. You want to eat five to six meals or more a day instead of three. Each meal will be smaller but, you will keep your metabolism running in high gear all day long.

A high metabolism will allow you to burn fat while you are doing nothing more than sitting around. You could be at work in front of a computer or watching TV on the couch. A high metabolism will help you burn more calories while doing the least physically taxing activities.

6. Don’t Starve Yourself

Some people use the strategy of starving themselves for a few days to dramatically lose weight. I try to make sure I never feel like I’m starving. It isn’t a pleasant feeling. What’s worse is that while you starve yourself, your body is breaking down muscle to use as energy. It is not breaking down fat.

In the long run, you will end up gaining weight. Muscle increases your metabolism because it takes energy to maintain. Breaking down muscle means you are losing muscle. While your weight will go down so is your metabolism. Once you return to eating as usual, the weight will come back with a vengeance.

7. Sprint

If you are like most people using a cardio machine at the gym, you are aiming for the “optimal fat loss zone”. That is all nice and dandy if you are going to be running no where for the entire day. If you are only going to spend twenty to thirty minutes on that thing, there is nothing optimal about what you are doing.

You want to employ the idea of high intensity interval training–HIIT. All you need to do is to add sprints to your cardio routine. Instead of going a steady pace for twenty minutes, you’ll sprint for 30 seconds and then go at a slower pace for a couple of minutes and then sprint again for 30 seconds and so on and so forth.

It’ll be a lot more fun and it won’t feel like twenty minutes. The concept here is that sprinting will keep your resting metabolic rate higher for the rest of the day and beyond. You will burn more calories all day long and end up burning more calories than you would have if you ran at a steady pace the entire time.

8. Want the Muscle

Most guys want to be somewhat muscular. We might not all want to look like a bodybuilder but, we also don’t want to have twig sized arms–I hear it isn’t very attractive. Most girls fear weights because they think they’ll get big. The only thing you need to know is that you should lift weights. The guys who are afraid they’ll turn into Arnold are dreaming and the girls who think they’ll look like Chyna–former female wrestler–are misinformed.

It takes an immense amount of work and “help” to achieve bodybuilder-like results. A woman is pretty much incapable of becoming huge because her body was not designed for it. Estrogen has the natural gift of making sure muscle growth is kept in check.

There is nothing more useful for losing fat and looking good than a healthy dose of muscle. It fills out clothing better and you look more human! Use the weights at the gym to put on some muscle. Every pound of muscle will help you burn about 50 calories a day by just existing. Don’t aim to be a stick figure–they don’t look good in art or real life.

9. Cheat to Stay Consistent

Although not good advice in a relationship, it is great for a diet. Give yourself a meal a week for anything you want. It won’t matter what it is or how many calories it is. You won’t destroy all the progress you’ve made with your diet. It will be completely guilt free.

The cheat meal will help you stay consistent by satisfying an urge on a recurring basis so that you won’t toy with the idea of forgetting this whole diet thing altogether. As long as you are consistent with your diet, the results will come. Being extremely strict and thinking that you can maintain it indefinitely is a losing battle. You’ll only end up caving in and never returning to the diet.

10. Snack of Celery

I’m not the biggest fan of vegetables but, celery has the great property of taking more calories to digest than it contains. So eating celery can be equated to eating negative calories. How awesome is that? Of course you’ll have to forgo the dip and anything else you might add. Celery is also supposed to be an aphrodisiac. Why not snack on it?

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Perhaps it is illogical to think that not eating will actually force your body to store more fat. The fact is, starving yourself is going to trigger your body to go into survival mode. Instead of doing what you want it to do–lose fat–it’ll do the opposite to keep you alive. That is more important than looking like a model, right?

If you have ever tried any sort of starvation diet you should know that it doesn’t work and probably made things worse. I like food so I can’t imagine starving myself. It’ll just be horribly painful. I will assume that most people enjoy eating food as well. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are all common get-together events with friends and family. Not only is a starvation diet highly inconvenient, it is also going to place a damper on the joys of life. What good is being thin if you have to sacrifice such a fundamental part of life?

Ironically, starvation diets don’t make you thin. It leads to muscle destruction and it is muscle that helps you tear through extra fat. If you start dropping weight by not eating, it will mostly be a loss of muscle. Muscles require energy to exist. Calories are energy. So muscles will burn calories just by lying around. Because of that, muscle will be the first to go.

Back in ancient times when man had to hunt and kill his food, food was a lot more scarce. The rabbit might get away one night and there would be no dinner. You never knew for how long you would go without getting enough to eat. Fat is a store of energy that doesn’t require much energy to keep around so the human body does the only intelligent thing: it keeps the fat.

The longer you can survive, the better your chance of finding the next meal. We didn’t climb up the food chain by being evolutionary rejects. The human body knows how to survive–it has done it for millions of years. Today, there is more food than we need and we need not even bring our own spears.

Knowing that starvation leads to more fat storage–not less–we can design diets that facilitate the use of fat as energy. Diet gurus have been promoting this idea for many years now. You want to eat more than just three square meals a day. Several small meals spaced throughout the day will raise your metabolism and tell your body that food is in abundance so don’t keep any fat!

The idea is not to eat five or six versions of a meal from a three meals a day plan. If you usually consume 1000 calories a meal, eating five of those will give you 5000 calories a day. Unless you are an athlete, you don’t need that much food.

What you want is to eat five 500 calorie meals. So where you would have consumed 3000 calories eating three 1000 calorie meals, five 500 calorie meals will be 500 less calories. Those kinds of savings will help you lose a pound a week by merely tweaking the size and amount of meals you eat.

So how do you go about doing this? It will be quite difficult to count calories and prepare meals that fit the calorie criteria. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands or a personal chef–I would love that, the best bet is to try meal replacement shakes.

It also does not have to be five 500 calorie meals. You can mix up the numbers as long as it still falls into a total calorie amount that is less than what you eating now. A meal replacement diet might end up being seven 300 calorie meals. The math tells us that it works even better than five 500 calorie meals.

Remember, the worse thing you can do if you want to lose weight is to starve yourself. It might work for a few pounds but, the long term result is quicker weight gain in the future. It is a losing strategy. There are better ways to reduce your daily calorie consumption. A diet should not be unpleasant. We didn’t struggle for millions of years hunting giant mammoths with stone spears to purposely starve ourselves today.

If it doesn’t feel good, it probably isn’t good for you.

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I never noticed what was so strange about ordering a clearly fattening food–like McDonald’s–with a Diet Coke. Some people find it contradictory or ironic or something. I’m not sure. My reasoning is always the same. Why would I want to consume a beverage loaded with empty sugar calories when I already lost one battle by giving into my urge for greasy fast food? The only logical answer is that I don’t want to. Why add to the damage when I can avoid it?

On average, 20% of our daily calorie consumption comes from liquids. That means we can reduce our caloric intake by 20% without feeling any less full. Beverages don’t make us feel full so we aren’t going to eat 150 less calories if we have a drink that has 150 calories. A person who consumes 2000 calories a day would save a whole pound in calories in 10 days. You can lose 3 pounds a month without eating any less food or doing any more work other than drinking more water and other low calorie drinks.

Water is important. It certainly doesn’t taste as good as soda, energy drinks, juice, or any other sweetened beverage. Most of our body is made up of water so there is really no reason to be frugal with it. Muscles are made up of 80% water. Start reducing your excess liquid calories by replacing soda consumption with H2O.

You can also choose the diet variety of many soda’s if you can’t avoid drinking it for whatever reason–maybe you just have an urge. It is probably a good rule of thumb to stay away from all sodas but, if you are going to drink it you might as well save yourself the calories–drink diet.

Coffee and tea are both low calorie drinks if you don’t add anything to them. Black coffee and regular tea have almost 0 calories. Most of us don’t drink our coffee black or our tea without sugar or something else to make it taste better. I’m not really a tea drinker so I don’t even know what to add to it besides sugar so I just do nothing to it when I do drink it.

I’m a big fan of coffee for many reasons that I’ve alluded to before. When I go to Starbucks, I will add the non-fat or low-fat milk plus one packet of Splenda. It helps retain the flavor of the coffee without turning the drink into liquid candy. There are other coffee places that make the coffee for you–like Dunkin’ Donuts–in which case I still order it the same way. Most places will make it if you ask.

I also happen to consume energy drinks–my second favorite caffeine source. I generally look for the sugar free versions. RedBull, RockStar, Monster, and the rest of them all offer sugar free or low carb varieties. They generally contain anywhere from 5 - 10 calories per serving. Compared to the regular sugar-loaded versions, it is a big savings.

My biggest consumption of empty liquid calories comes from alcohol–it’s probably the same for you. For the most part, I don’t think too much about calories when I’m drinking. I don’t drink all the time but, I do consume a fairly large amount of it if I planned to be drinking. If I am doing the right things the rest of the time, the extra calories from alcohol from partying isn’t going to kill me. The last thing I want to worry about is calories when I’m out having a good time–what a buzz kill.

Alcoholic calories have this special property of being unstorable. Your body cannot store calories from alcohol so it has to use it first before it can burn anything else for energy. So when you are at the bar, club, lounge, or whatever and you are drinking, do something more than just sit or stand around–maybe dance?. You might as well burn the calories on the spot–it’s basically asking for it.

For those who have a couple of drinks a day, studies have shown that it helps prevent heart disease but, you probably shouldn’t overdo it.

The next time you have a craving for fast food–maybe delicious White Castle?–order a diet soda with it. There is nothing at odds about limiting the damage of the “treat”. Consume more water throughout the day to keep your body and muscles hydrated. Avoid as much sugary beverages as you can and you’ll be dropping pounds faster than ever.

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Once upon a time, the idea of eating fat to lose fat–or weight–seemed like a pretty silly thing to do; oxymoronic, if you will. I had some weight loss talk with co-workers recently and they thought I was out of my mind when I bashed the Food Pyramid–and this newer Food Pyramid–and recommended a much more simpler system of giving percentages to carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

This article explains some more fat fighting tips including using fat to fight fat. My basic nutritional guideline is to adjust the percentage of carbs, proteins, and fats that I consume depending on what I’m trying to do–protein usually gets the largest share of the pie.

The seemingly insane idea of consuming 20% of your diet as fat isn’t so ridiculous when you understand a few things. It is true that a gram of fat has more than two times the calories of a gram of carbs or proteins. Obviously eating a lot of fat is not going to do you much good. However, limiting your fat consumption to some ridiculously low level by replacing it with more carbs is not going to help you either.

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