Weight Loss For Beginners

Well, as a follow on to the last post here at Weight Loss For Beginners, where I looked at the problems associated with eating refined white flour products such as white bread, pasta and the dreaded cakes and biscuits, I hinted that there actually are alternatives to the latter two products. So here I’m going to look at healthy alternatives to cakes and biscuits!

If you are serious about losing weight, cakes and biscuits are the two main naughties that you are going to have to exclude from your diet as they do you no good whatsoever. However, that said there is an alternative if you are willing to work for it, although it must only be had in small quantities and infrequently. These are the cakes and biscuits that you make yourself from wholesome ingredients. Don’t believe it? Read on…

You can actually make several types of cake that are really quite nice using wholemeal flour as a substitute for plain, refined white flour or self raising flour. It produces a cake that at least contains all the nutrients and dietary fibre from the wholemeal flour, which cakes made from refines flours are devoid of. There are other things you can do to improve its healthy disposition, too. Instead of using butter or margarine, substitute it with extra virgin olive oil! It’s true, you can and it makes for a great tasting cake! You will still need a sweetening agent and white white refined sugar is a no-no, you can reduce the impact by substituting this with either honey, black molasses, or unrefined brown sugar. You can still use eggs as they are a necessary binding agent and you can argue that there is plenty of protein in them! You cannot, however use fresh or artificial cream!

Ok, the finished cake will still contain a good deal of calories, but it will be lower than a propriety shop-bought cake or one you make yourself from all the ingredients the cook-books tell you to use. You can use cocoa powder in the mix and even top the cake with dark chocolate if you must have a chocolate cake. Dark chocolate contains some health benefits as does the cocoa powder in the form of antioxidants, so the additional calories are worth it for a great tasting cake that is healthy as well.

You should still limit the portions of this cake you eat to sensible amounts and make sure its all eaten within a week (I’m sure your family will help you out!), as it contains no preservatives.

Same idea can be used with home made biscuits and cookies. You can use ground hazelnuts or almonds to give extra texture and flavour and as long as you can avoid the temptation to eat too many in any one day, you can include these as the “treat” part of your diet as long as you do enough exercise to burn off the extra calories that these will inevitably put on!

So dieting is not all rigid calorie counting and nice food deprivation. You can make allowances for the fact that you are human and need some variation and alternatives to add some excitement to your diet. After all, when you enjoy a diet, you’re far more likely to stick to it, as I’m sure I’ve said once or twice before!

Weight Loss For Beginners

Weight Loss For Beginners comes in many forms and there are many aspects to diet that can make or break your attempts to lose weight naturally. So in this post, we’re going to look at avoiding refined wheat products in your diet and some of the reasons why you should do this.

Refined wheat products that fall into this category are white bread, white pasta, cakes, biscuits and cookies made from white flour and in fact anything else that is based around refined, white flour. Lets look at some of the worst offenders:

White Bread is Bad For You

If there’s one thing you should know about refined wheat products more than anything else, that’s the fact that white bread is bad for you. No only bad for you, but from a weight loss perspective, white bread in your diet will cause weight gain. This is one of the things you definitely do not want!

Its also something that plenty of dieters don’t want to hear. To millions of people, white bread represents a staple in their diets, even though they are blissfully unaware that it is doing them far more harm than good in many areas. Why do you think that is?

White bread contains no useful nutrients whatsoever. All it contains are starch and high GI (Glycemic Index) carbohydrates, which are the type of carbs that the cause blood sugar levels to rise sharply causing the body to store fat and make you feel hungry again soon after. White bread contains no dietary fibre, which the body also needs to effectively remove waste. So by eating a load of white bread, all you’re doing is bulking up with fat, most of which is stored around your belly, raising your levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol and unbalancing your blood sugar levels, which can lead to type II diabetes. Nice.

White Pasta is Bad For You

Just in the same way that white bread is bad for you on many levels, so is white pasta. Its also made from refined white flour and has all the same negative effects on your body as white bread.

Cakes and Biscuits Are Bad For You

Well, I guess there’s no denying the fact that if you eat a load of cakes and biscuits based on refined white flour, butter or margarine, refined white sugar and full fat cream, you are heading for Obesity City in the fast lane! Just to add to the woes of these massed produced sweet products, they also contain a load of salt, which can lead to high blood pressure in addition to all the other nasties I already talked about above.

What are the alternatives?

There are always alternatives if you know what to look for. The alternative to white bread is wholemeal bread. Wholemeal bread is made from unrefined, wholemeal flour which contains all the goodness, nutrients and importantly, dietary fibre derived from whole wheat including the bran, or outer husk of the wheat seeds. If you are hooked on white bread, it may seem a little strange to eat wholemeal bread at first. The first thing you notice is that you can actually taste it! And it tastes good, believe it or not! Its texture is a fraction courser than white bread, but this is actually a good thing and once you get used to it, to go back to white bread is actually an unpleasant experience. Its then you realize that white bread has no taste whatsoever and its texture is pasty and bland. Wholemeal bread is much better for you as a staple in your diet and you get used to it surprisingly quickly!

The alternative to white, refined pasta is brown pasta, which like wholemeal bread is made from wholemeal flour and contains all the same goodness as wholemeal bread. Again, you’ll find that it tastes of something! Its texture is better than pasty white pasta in any case and you will also get used to it once you make the switch surprisingly fast.

The alternatives to cakes and biscuits? Well, the first instinct is to say that there are none and you should simply avoid these treats altogether if you are serious about weight loss. But I will cover in the next post some alternatives that you can try. You’ll just have to wait until then!

Weight Loss For Beginners

When it comes to Weight Loss For Beginners, there is one fundamental fact that cannot be avoided if you want to lose weight. That is you must burn more calories than you consume. This is a fact that has been known for decades and successfully applied by dieters all over the world.

So why isn’t everyone slim?

Well, the main reason for this is that while plenty of dieters know this simple equation, many more do not and a good proportion of those that do, don’t put it into practice. To begin with, you need to know how many calories you can consume in a day and also how many calories you are likely to burn off in the same time period.

To do this properly, you should consult a professional nutritionist or dietitian who will factor in your physical attributes such as height, weight, body shape and size against your daily lifestyle and activities. It means you have to be honest here, as the only person you will cheat if you are not totally truthful is yourself.

Your lifestyle plays a big part in your ability to not just lose weight, but to prevent weight gain. If you lead a sedentary lifestyle, taking little or no exercise, then your daily allocation of calories is going to be quite low in order for you to actually lose any weight. This, for many people appears far too difficult to stick to and is a major reason why so many people fail to lose weight.

That’s why diet alone is never enough to successfully lose weight as you need the exercise side of the plan to burn off the calories you consume. The more you exercise, the more calories you will burn, meaning the more calories you will be able to consume. Its simple arithmetic that cannot be denied and no matter what a diet claims, it will not work unless you burn more calories than you consume.

So now you know what you need to do, get out there and start doing it!

Weight Loss For Beginners