Portion Control Helps Regulate Calorie Intake

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Achieving and maintaining a steady weight becomes easier when you incorporate a healthy diet into your lifestyle. This includes consuming plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and a moderate amount of unsaturated fats, meat, and dairy. While conventional wisdom advises consuming fewer calories and increasing exercise for weight control, emerging research suggests that certain foods and eating patterns make it easier to regulate calorie intake.

By making smarter food choices, like opting for low-calorie, high-volume foods, you can shed those extra pounds. But, by taking full control of your weight, you can find the right balance of food intake, exercise and sleep to keep the weight off. By nourishing your body with the right balance of protein, fiber, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals, you can fulfill your nutritional needs without the risk of rebound weight gain. Making better food choices can also have a positive impact on vital health markers.

Don’t Wait for the New Year to Start Your Journey

Many people set weight loss goals for the new year. Regardless of when you started your journey, tracking your progress lets you see how far you've come and what changes are needed. Benefits of tracking food and exercise habits include:

1) Increased self-awareness – Simply stated, those who are highly self-aware tend to interpret actions, feelings, and thoughts more objectively and track data to make better choices.

2) Monitor your habits – Studies suggest monitoring your habits makes it easier to repeat new behaviors and stay motivated to stick to your goals for living healthy without conceding to cravings.

3) Improve accountability – Improve accountability by keeping track of how you are progressing on your journey towards healthy living. Progress keeps you motivated when pursuing your goals.

4) Reflect on changes needed – Whether your overall goal is to increase your fitness, lose weight, or be more physical activity, being able to reflect on changes needed can be key to your long-term success.

Cardio and Weight Training Help Burn Fat

Calories are the fuel for your body's energy needs, and they come from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. However, if you consume more calories than your body needs, they will be stored as fat. Both aerobics and strength training help burn body fat. A balanced and varied diet is crucial but experts suggest doing a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate cardio each week to maintain weight, and more if you want to lose weight.

Additionally, aim for at least two days per week of weight training. While calorie counting used to be popular, we now know that taking a holistic approach to diet and physical activities is more effective for the long term. The more muscle you have, the better your metabolism functions, which is essential living healthy. Understanding the quality of your diet and finding satisfaction in the foods you eat goes beyond just counting calories. It's important to have a varied diet and exercise routine to ensure that you burn more calories than you consume.