Our Best Tips for Weight Loss and Healthy Eating in the New Year

Well, the Apocolypse did not manifest itself and I am left regretting the Christmas candy and cookies that I ate! All kidding aside, most people right about now are coming down from their sugar high and resolving to eat better and lose weight in the New Year. In fact, "lose weight" was the #1 New Year's resolution for 2012, according to the University of Scranton, Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Making a resolution to eat healthy and take off excess weight is easy. Following through on that commitment and actually succeeding is hard. Statistics show that about 71% of resolutions make it through the first two weeks and less than half are being acted upon midway through the New Year.

So how are you going to make yourself successful this year? Instead of jumping on the next fad diet, which generally offers more hype than hope, consider that making a few explicit changes to your normal routine can translate into life-long healthy behaviors. Small steps to changing your eating behaviors are not only manageable, they also deliver results. In fact, the University of Scranton states, "People who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions."

In this sharepost, some of the writers at HealthCentral offer explicit behavior changes for weight loss and healthy eating. Perhaps you will make these changes in yourself, or they will inspire you to make other healthy eating habits.


Unprocessed Grain

"Whole grain" really is meant to be whole and unprocessed, not just brown. Examples of whole grains include: oat groats, quinoa, and brown rice. Substituting quick-cooking, high-glycemic load foods like rolled oats, white rice and pasta with true whole grains is a smart way to look and feel better.

- Christina Lasich, MD
Writes for HealthCentral on Diet and Exercise, Chronic Pain, and Osteoarthritis


Perimeter Shopping

Shop primarily around the perimeter of the grocery store. That piece of advice -- courtesy of Dr. Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at New York University -- means that you'll have plenty of choices of produce, meats, dairy, eggs and bread. You'll also be avoiding the aisles that are full of processed foods, sodas and other choices that aren't as healthy.

- Dorian Martin
Writes for HealthCentral on Diet and Exercise, Menopause, and Alzheimer's


Dinner Fast

Since our weight naturally goes up and down every day, the easiest way to lose weight is to take immediate action to stop the upswing. I do that by skipping dinner any day that my weight is up from the previous day if I weigh more than my goal. This means that I weigh myself each morning. It's as simple as that, and it works for both physical and psychological reasons. By not eating anything after lunchtime my body has several extra hours to recover from my eating too much the previous day. But it usually doesn't come to that, because I now always limit what I eat more carefully since I really would prefer not to forgo dinner. I have had to skip dinner only nine times in the past 180 days to stay at my goal weight.