Overweight / Obesity (Obese)

There are numerous diets to choose from. If you don't know what diet to choose, or if you already tried a few diets and none of them worked for you, check this list of many popular diets with a short description and pick the one that is right for you.

Gyms offer a wide range of service such as workout equipment, instructed courses and personal training. More professional (and more expensive) gyms also help you to determine your BMI (Body Mass Index), optimal workout heart rate and have access to examined physiotherapists and nutrition coaches.

You can work with machines, free weights, ride a stationary bicycle or run on a treadmill. Some gyms offer a use of pool and sauna. Most gyms offer free trial training sessions so you can try out multiple local gyms before you commit to one. 

Before using any gym equipment, be sure to inform yourself about using them properly so you don't hurt yourself. 

Swimming is a very good exercise for people of all age and fitness levels. Swimming builds up muscles, is a good cardio exercise and preserves your joints. It is also considered safe for people with asthma. It would be best if you could swim in sea, clean river or a lake. But if you do not have that option, swimming pool in your local community will do just fine.

Regular jogging can help you lose weight and prevent numerous life-threatening diseases. Before you start jogging, you should consult your doctor. There are numerous programs on the web that will give you thorough training sessions that are suited for you.

Don't get frustrated if you are not able to run for more than couple of minutes. If you never jogged before, your body will need some time to adjust. If you keep at it, soon you will build up your stamina and will be able to run longer and faster. Start easy and don't overdo it to avoid sore muscles and injuries. To help you start your jogging journey, visit Running for Beginners.

Several studies found that keeping food diaries aids in losing weight. People who keep food diaries six days a week tend to be more successful in losing weight than people who don't. Write down everything you eat and drink during the day. You might be surprised how many calories you actually consume in a day.

Tracking down everything you ate automatically raises your awareness about what, when and how much you eat. This might help you deduce what triggers your overeating or make you realise how many unnecessary calories you obtain from snacks and sodas. One funny (but true) benefit of keeping a food diary is that you will often think twice about eating something because you will be too lazy to write it down.

You might think that going many hours without anything to eat is a good way to lose weight but it is not. Not only will it be an absolute torture (especially for someone who likes to eat), it will also do you more harm than good. This is why:

1. The longer you go without food, the hungrier you will get. Sooner or later you will break and have a huge meal. You will eat like there's no tomorrow. All that calorie surplus will be stored in your body as fat. The very thing you are trying to lose.
2. When your body goes long periods without food, your metabolism becomes worried. It slows down because it doesn't know when will the next meal come so it becomes really economical with calories. And when you finally eat, your metabolism will still be slow in spending calories thus adding more fat to your body. Again, the very thing you are trying to lose.

It is in your best interest to keep your metabolism fast and to do that make sure that you eat regularly.

The best way to avoid eating junk food at home is to completely remove it from the premises. When you have a craving for sweets or for a salty snack, and you are well stocked with it, nothing stops you from overeating and obtaining a huge amount of calories. And then you feel bad and are depressed.

If you have absolutely no unhealthy snacks at home, you are more likely to resist the urge, especially if it is the middle of the night or if there is no store in the walking distance of you. It will be hard, and you will be frustrated, but you will endure, and afterwards you will feel good about yourself.

If you absolutely must snack on something, replace junk food with healthy alternatives. Fresh or dried fruit, nuts, rice crackers, etc. are a good choice.

Just because a certain food is considered healthy, doesn't mean you can eat as much as you want. Healthy food still has calories. For example, almonds are considered healthy because they contain fiber, good fats, minerals, vitamins, and protein, but it is really easy to go into calorie surplus with them. A handful a day is enough.

Be especially careful with "healthy" processed food like canned food, low-fat cereals and dairy products, low-sugar/fat snacks, substitutes for butter (margarine, canola, soy or corn oils) etc. They claim to be healthy, but if you carefully read labels, you might get shocked.

Most cereals and dairy products that are low in fat, are high in sugar. Sorry to burst your bubble, but when you remove fat from yogurt, it tastes horrible. That is why manufacturers add sugar, various high-fructose syrups or artificial sweeteners.

Snacks that claim to be low in sugar, tend to be high in fat and contain artificial sweeteners that are connected to various diseases, including cancer.

Butter substitutes are industrially made vegetable oils (canola, corn, soy) and various kinds of margarine that bring disbalance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids to your body and are also filled with potentially cancerous ingredients. Use butter or homemade olive oil instead. Just like with any other food, all within reasonable limits.

Bottom line, stay away from the processed food as humanly possible, no matter how healthy it claims to be. Stick to the real, whole food.

If you want to make sure you will eat healthy while in school or at work, bring your lunch from home so you are not dependent on selection in the cantine which often can be anything but healthy. That way you decide what and how much goes into your meal. Get creative with it. Possibilities are endless.

Your GP can exclude diseases or hormonal disbalance that may be causing the weight issues. A GP can also prescribe supplements that support your diet plan and are in line with any medical precondition.

A vegetarian diet is not specifically designed for weight loss, but this fiber-rich nutrition combined with regular workouts may support weight loss as a positive side product. Becoming a vegetarian won't make you lose weight all on its own. You still have to take care of your daily calorie intake and sugar and fat consumption.

For a healthy life, make sure that your everyday menu includes a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Try to reduce (as much as possible) intake of saturated and trans fats and replace them with unsaturated fats such as those found in various nuts and oils. And remember, no matter how healthy and diverse your diet is, if you eat more calories that your body can spend, you’ll gain weight.

Before becoming a vegetarian, consult your doctor. Read more about vegetarianism here.

Eating many small meals during the day means that the body can more easily burn every meal into energy, instead of harvesting the excess energy of large meals for later. This process is called metabolism. Read more about a correlation of metabolism and weight loss here.

If for some reason, you are unable to do any sport, or perhaps, you just don't feel like it, try walking. It doesn't sound like much, but any activity is better than no activity. Walking at least one hour per day, especially after a meal, can help you lose weight.

Cut down on driving in a car, or in a public transportation system. Use stairs instead of elevators. Walk everywhere you can if you have time and your health/physical condition allows it.

• Soft and carbonated drinks are filled with sugars and artificial ingredients that give you extra calories without any nutritive value. Stop drinking them and switch to water or green tea. If you can't do it instantly, do it gradually. If you miss the flavour, you can add squeezed lemon in your water or tea.
• Alcoholic beverages add a lot of unnecessary calories and even suppress the ability of your metabolism to burn fat and make it harder for you to lose weight. Remove it completely from your diet or at least decrease consumption.
• Coffee on its own won't affect your weight much, but if you drink it with lots of cream and sugar, then it becomes a problem. If you drink several cups of coffee a day, those extra calories from sugar and cream can really add up. Gradually reduce sugar, cream and whatever else you put in your coffee until you start drinking it black or with low-fat milk.

If you can't survive without sugar (and pretty much all diets require you to give up sugar) and you simply must eat something sweet every day, let that something be in your breakfast and not in lunch or dinner. Of course, in reasonable limits. Your body is more likely to burn that breakfast sugar during your everyday activities (especially if you exercise) so you will be able to enjoy something sweet without feeling guilty while still losing weight.

Becoming dehydrated can signal your body that you are hungry. So try to drink a bit more than you normally would. When you feel hungry, and it's just been an hour or two after your last meal, instead of eating something, try drinking a full glass of water and see if that helps.

To get a sense of how much water is optimal, check out this table.

Being sleep deprived harms the way your body burns calories. Learn more about how sleep deprivation affects your weight here.

When you chew your food slowly, it takes you more time (naturally) to finish your meal which allows more time for your stomach to tell your brain that it is full. Not chewing properly (besides causing you digestion problems) allows you to put in your body lots of calories that you don't actually need because your brain hasn't had enough time to realise that you are full.

For more information about slow eating read here.

Using apps that track your daily calorie intake or workout sessions can help you monitor and improve the way you consume and burn calories.

Some of the popular (and free) fitness apps are:

1. Strava (Android, iOS)
2. Endomondo (Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone)
3. Lose it! (Android, iOS, Kindle, Nook, web)
4. Map my fitness (Android, iOS, Windows Phone)
5. MyFitnessPal (Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone, web)
6. Touchfit GSP (iOS)

There are many more fitness apps. Find one you like the best.

If you don't have time and/or money to go to a gym or do any outdoor sport, you can always work out at home. There are numerous exercises you can do at home free of cost and in very short amount of time. 

At Scooby's workshop you will find everything you need to know about working out at home.

When you decide to lose weight, be careful about how you measure your success. If you focus only on weight loss, you might get depressed or disheartened for no good reason. Weight and BMI (Body Mass Index) are not a perfect way to evaluate your progress. Many top athletes  with well-defined muscles (including abs) and extraordinary physical abilities have over 200 pounds with BMI between 25 and 30. That would make them "overweight", which of course is not true.

When losing weight, you want to lose fat, not muscle. If you combine exercise with healthy eating, you could gain some extra muscle and your weight might not go down the way you expected it.

The best indicator that you are on the right track with losing weight is your waist size. See these instructions to learn how to properly measure your waist. Most of unused calories your metabolism doesn't spend are stored as fat in your abdominal region so when your waist size starts decreasing and your pants are getting too big, you know that you are doing a good job, regardless of what your scale says.

Salt makes you retain water which adds to your weight and makes you look bloated. If you are overweight, you are most likely eating too much salt. Refrain from  eating salty snacks, processed meat, canned food and anything with high amount of sodium. Recommended daily sodium intake is 2400 miligrams. Try not to go over it.

You can still have a big breakfast because your metabolism will have enough time to burn calories while you do your everyday activities. But as the day goes by, make your meals smaller and smaller. You should have your last meal 2 hours before you go to bed. While we sleep, metabolism is low because it has almost nothing to spend calories on. Learn to go to bed half-hungry. It will do your body good in more than one way.

Studies show that eating in front of a TV makes you eat up to 300 calories more per meal. When watching TV, you eat mindlessly and don't even realise that you are full. When eating, focus just on eating your meal and proper chewing. Think about how much and what you eat. You will get full sooner.

When you are done eating dinner, brush your teeth to suppress late-night munching. People are less likely to eat anything after brushing teeth. First, most food tastes horrible if you eat it after brushing your teeth. Second, there is something about the perfect cleanliness of your mouth and teeth that you just don't want to ruin with eating and then having to brush your teeth all over again.

Drinking green tea has many positive effects on your body. One of them is boosting up your metabolism and make you burn up to 70 calories a day thanks to the antioxidants it contains. It might not seem like a lot, but every bit helps. Especially if you drink it instead of sodas.

Spicy food that contains hot peppers has a couple of effects on your metabolism:

1. It can increase your basal metabolic rate thanks to capsaicin, a component that gives hot peppers their hotness. Because capsaicin is an irritant for humans, every time you eat it in high doses, your body releases adrenaline which usually stimulates your metabolism and its capability of burning calories.
2.  It can act as an appetite suppressant. If you are not used to spicy food, adding hot peppers(Cayenne pepper for example) in your meals will make you eat less because you simply won't be able to eat in excess due to fieriness of the meal. 

Ignore this solution if you have a condition that doesn't allow you spicy food.

Several studies have concluded that certain colors can lower our appetite while other can increase it. Of all the colors, blue is considered to be the best appetite suppressant. This is due to the fact that rarely any food in its natural state is blue. So when we see blue, we don't connect it with something we would eat. This is how you can implement blue color in your kitchen or dining area:

• Paint your kitchen and dining room walls blue
• Put blue light in your fridge instead of a regular light
• Serve food on blue plates
• Cover your dining table with blue
• It's a bit extreme, but you can even dye your food blue using natural food coloring you can buy in every supermarket

Never eat snacks directly from large bags or boxes. When you do this, you have no sense of how much you ate. Also, many people eat as long as there is something to eat. So if you open a huge bag of chips, you just might eat all of it just because it was there.

If you can't resist snacks, at least portion it in a way that you separate a handful of snacks in a small bowl, put the rest of the bag away and don't touch until tomorrow.

If you need to lose 30-40 pounds, don't set your goal to be 40 pounds. It could easily frustrate you when several months have passed and you still haven't reached your desired weight. Instead, let your goal be to lose 5-10 pounds. And when you reach it, set your goal for another 5-10 pounds and so on. Reward yourself every time you successfully reach a goal.