Control Your Cravings

Sometimes you may be sitting around the house and think that you just want some chocolate, potato chips, or a soda. Surely, some of you are already triggered and walking toward the fridge. Stop and fight those cravings. Many people will slip up and because they slip up will use that as a reason to slip up even more because “I already messed up, I may as well go all the way!”

It may seem impossible to drop some of your favorite foods cold turkey but sometimes it’s just a matter of willpower. If you can last an hour or so you’ll usually find that your craving has gone on its own or that you’ve talked yourself out of it. But there are strategies for when you can’t get rid of a craving.

New Habits

Some of your cravings are due to being a creature of habit. You may be used to watching your favorite television shows with a pint of ice cream with you. You developed those habits, so it’s reasonable to say that you can break them as well. It takes time but your body may actually adjust and begin to crave the healthier foods that you love. For instance, instead of picking up a candy bar, pick up some liquidnutrition supplements.

Emergency Stash

This isn’t an endorsement of an emergency stash of candy or bad foods. It’s an endorsement of an emergency stash of high protein foods, like nuts, and water. Both high protein foods and good old H2O will help you curb hunger in general. Sometimes, if you have some liquidnutrition like a supplement or shake, that will work as well. Curbing hunger will keep your brain from turning on and telling you that you need food (and maybe even convincing you that you need bad food.)

Cut Back on Caffeine

If you’ve had caffeine on an empty stomach, you know exactly how unpleasant it is. You may get nauseous and lightheaded and eat something out of desperation. This desperation will kill a diet in a heartbeat. Caffeine also gives you a terrible crash that triggers your brain to tell you that you need sugar or fat quickly.

Combine Healthy and Unhealthy Foods

Chocolate bananas, caramel apples, and cream cheese on celery all sound wonderful, don’t they? Don’t feel guilty about it. If you feel like you absolutely need to have some baby carrots dipped in ranch dressing, do it from time to time. Don’t overdo it and work on phasing out the unhealthy portion of the snack, but it is quite all right to let it happen from time to time.

Sleep

One of the biggest triggers for fat and sugar is fatigue. Your brain turns on and yells that it needs a quick boost of energy and you’re more than happy to oblige with late night snacks. Instead of doing that - take a nap. You’ll feel refreshed and the craving will likely be gone.

Chew Gum

Gum can help you reduce cravings by giving you a quick taste of sweet and minty flavors as well as making you chew. Any smoker can tell you that sometimes the motion that is associated with your habit is the hardest to break. For smokers the motion is putting their hand to their mouth (hence why some smokers use carrots to quit); for people who have a hard time with foods, the motion they’re used to might be chewing. Either way, being mindful of your strategies can help you defeat cravings.

Ways to Reduce Your Calorie Intake

There’s many, many ways to have a much healthier lifestyle everyone knows: eating healthy, exercise, and liquidnutrition supplements. But there are several other steps that can be taken to adjust your everyday habits and become healthier.

Don’t Eat Out

Not eating out is sometimes the most difficult for some people because, let’s face it, eating out is easy and delicious. However, eating out is costly. Not only is it significantly harder on your wallet to go out, but it is costly to your weight loss goals. Very few restaurants serve truly healthy options and some of the “healthier” options are only healthy in comparison to the other choices on the menu, which usually have more fat, calories, and sugar than the same meals if cooked at home.

Switch to Water

This one is an obvious switch for any soda drinkers. A can of soda can have around 150 calories, massive amounts of sugar, and various chemicals that you likely can’t pronounce. Many “fruit” juices have more calories than a can of soda and some have more sugar and just as many preservatives. Water has zero calories and just two ingredients that everyone can pronounce: oxygen and hydrogen.

Small Meals/Grazing

Grazing, or nibbling on foods throughout the day, has really been demonized by many health-conscious groups. But it’s not how much you’re grazing, it’s what you’re grazing on. Obviously, grazing with cookies and candies is terrible for you. Grazing on celery, baby carrots, cherry tomatoes, and hummus is significantly better for you. However, grazing has the added benefit of encouraging smaller meals and reducing your temptation to eat (or overeat) quick, fatty, and pre-packaged foods.

Keep Track

Don’t be afraid to count your calories. Knowing how many calories you should be eating every day and then keeping track of exactly how much you’ve eaten throughout the day will let you in on some important information. If you notice that one of your meals was 1,000 calories (of your allotted 1,600 calories) then you’ll be much less likely to waste time on it in the future.

Fiber and Protein

Make sure to eat plenty of fiber and protein. Chicken breasts, quinoa, lettuce, lintels, and a ton of other (sometimes surprising) foods fall into this category. These foods tend to fill you up quicker as well as take more time and energy to process, helping your caloric deficit for the day.

Make Food From Scratch

Flour, salt, eggs. You can probably guess what that is (if you can’t, it’s the ingredients in really simple homemade noodles). They’re quick, easy, and delicious to make at home. You may begin to miss your store-bought noodles thiamine mononitrate, but you’ll manage.

Plenty of Fluids

In addition to drinking plenty of water there are other drinks that you can drink to keep yourself healthy and fit. Unsweetened teas (not from a can or carton, but directly from herbs), liquidnutrition drinks, and homemade smoothies can help you stave off hunger throughout the day and give you a serious energy boost.

Keep these in mind throughout your day. They may not do the most separately, but together they can help you be fitter quicker.

Exercises You Can Do in the Office

You’ve been eating right and drinking a liquidnutrition supplement but you haven’t been working out. Maybe you’ve started a new office job and it hasn’t exactly done wonders for your body, making you feel somewhat weak and lethargic. Because of the sedentary nature of the job, you may pack on pounds in addition to the neck, wrist, and back cramps that you may get from using a computer. But the good news is that there are stretches and exercises that you can do to prevent weight gain and stretch your stressed back, wrist, and neck.

Stretches

While you’re sitting at your desk or in your office, there are plenty of stretches you can do. Starting with your head and neck tilt your head toward your shoulder, hold it, and alternate sides. After you feel lose, roll your neck slowly a few times. Then roll your shoulders forward and backward.

To stretch your shoulders and arms bring one arm across your body and press it toward you at the elbow with your other hand. Alternate your arms. Rolling your wrists around in a circle can also alleviate some cramps and joint aches caused by desk work.

To reinvigorate those tired legs you can simply raise your legs up in the air and point your toes outward and then up toward your body. While you’re doing this stretch you can also draw small circles with your pointed toes.

Arms

Arm exercises are somewhat difficult to pull off without anyone knowing since they can’t exactly be hidden under your desk, but there are things that you can do throughout your day to get your blood flowing throughout your upper body and work out your arms and chest. One exercise that is can add some strength to your arms is to grip the arms of your chair and push yourself upward. It won’t give you the full range of motion of a proper tricep dip, but it’s less noticeable than many other arm exercises you can do. Another somewhat difficult to spot exercise is to push yourself away from your desk and pull yourself in. Due to the fact that desks don’t exactly have the best gripping surfaces it will work your hands and forearms as well as your back and biceps.

Core

Everyone is worried about having flat, six-pack abs. While these exercises won’t make you look like Jason Statham or Rihanna any time soon, they can help reduce weight and strengthen your core throughout the day. The following exercises can easily be done without anyone knowing. One core exercise is simply to clench your abs until you can’t any longer and then repeat as often as you can or want to. Another is to sit tall, engage your core, raise your legs until they’re even with your hip, hold them there, and slowly lower them. Finally, another great exercise for your core isn’t an exercise at all. Instead of sitting in an office chair, sit on an exercise ball. This promotes balance and core engagement throughout the day, but can be difficult for some people.

Legs

There are some very simple leg exercises you can do at your desk, some of them can even be done under your desk and not be noticed at all. One of the simplest leg exercises you can do while you’re at the board meeting is to extend both legs, cross one over the other then press the top one down and the bottom one up. After your legs feel tired, repeat in the other direction. Another exercise you can secretly do is to flex and hold your gluteus (butt) muscles. Both of these exercises are easy to do without being noticed at all.

Many of these office workouts can be done throughout the day with little or no thought, keeping you fit while you’re on the job. Don’t worry about bringing the resistance bands to the office today, just grab some liquidnutrition, a healthy lunch, and get ready for the day.

Busy? You Can Stay Healthy

Being busy can absolutely kill any diet. While rushing out the door you may think, “That fast food joint is just two blocks away. I’ll stop there and eat on the way to work.” When you consider liquidnutrition supplements versus a hamburger and French fries your brain my trick yourself into thinking that the burger will fill you up while the shake or smoothie won’t. When people have time to think about it they know that this simply isn’t true but most people may not know exactly how to create a quick and healthy meal in ten or fifteen minutes. Luckily, several types of meals can be finished quickly and easily.

Breakfast

When you think of breakfast, don’t think of cereal, waffles, or pancakes. Those, while easy and quick to make, aren’t easy to eat in the car on the way to work or at your desk. Some of the best desk-friendly breakfast foods, by far, are shakes and smoothies. Oftentimes you can find large bags of frozen fruits (with no sugar or preservatives added) at your local grocer for very cheap. Putting some in a Ziploc bag in the fridge overnight will let you simply throw them into the blender in the morning for a minute-breakfast.

Another great breakfast homemade fast food is the breakfast burrito. This one, like many on this list, will benefit from some preparation beforehand. Whenever you have the time, chop up the peppers, tomatoes, and onions to store in your refrigerator. When you’re ready to make the breakfast burrito it’s then simply a matter of throwing the eggs, meat, cheese, and veggies into a pan, wrapping it up, and running out the door. Don’t forget the hot sauce!

Lunchtime

One of the most beautiful aspects of lunchtime foods for a health nut on the go is that many of them can be cold. Also, anyone can make an acceptable lunch by simply putting ingredients together with no cooking needed. Mixing and matching your ingredients can make a variety of flavorful lunches with little or no effort. One day you can have a wrap filled with greens, basil pesto, mayonnaise, pine nuts, and meat of your choice, your favorite cheese, cucumbers, and tomatoes. If you’re in the mood for a pita the next day, simply replace the pesto and mayo with hummus, add olives and peppers, and put it in a pita pocket. Salad? Replace the sauces with a low-fat salad dressing and take out the bread. Lunch is the best meal for quick solutions. If you want it faster, it’s easy to slice some vegetables the night before (and even prepare the meal itself on the go).

Dinner

Sometimes you won’t need your dinner on the go but you’ll want your dinner quickly after a particularly stressful day. You simply might not have the motivation to slave over a hot stove. Traditional dinners, while rarely quick, usually keep very well if you want leftovers. Many times, with the right equipment, they can also be prepared while you’re doing other things or even while you’re at work. Crock Pots work wonders for making chili and soups while you sleep or work. Meals like gazpacho can be made fairly quickly, stored, and are designed to be eaten cold (so you don’t even have to re-heat it).

There are plenty of ways to eat healthy for every meal, including fantastic liquidnutrition meals that require no preparation at all. Just grab and go!

Getting Over Your Weight Loss Plateau

It’s an unfortunate fact of weight loss that there will be plateaus. Every now and again you’ll hit a point where it feels like your body can’t lose any more weight no matter how healthy you’re eating, how much you’re exercising, whether you’re eating solid or liquidnutrition, or what kind of diet you’re on. There may be a lot of reasons for this plateau, but all of them are easy to overcome with some determination and strategy.

Don’t Give Up

The first thing you’ll need to have when you’re traversing this plateau is a good attitude about it. Not everything pays noticeable dividends all the time. Noticing that you’re not losing weight - but not gaining any back - is a good thing. Keeping in mind that the weight loss isn’t coming, but you have noticed some more firmness in your arms, legs, or stomach is another fantastic way to think.

Keep Track

Every few months it’s important for dieters to take another look at their eating habits. Just because you may have a few months ago, at the start of your weight loss journey, doesn’t mean you should keep your habits the same or even that you haven’t unknowingly fallen back into bad habits. Keep track of what you’re eating, drinking, and doing and see if you can find where things are going wrong, what can be cut out, or what can be added. If it’s that there aren’t certain nutrients coming into your diet then add some reinforcements, like a liquidnutrition supplement, if it’s that you accidentally went back to idly snacking on bad foods, cut it out.

Switch Up Your Foods

Sometimes your portion sizes will creep back up and you’ll find that, instead of 2,000 calories per day, you’re eating 2,100 calories or getting too much of that in fats or carbs. By switching over to low-fat sources of protein, like fish or different cuts of chicken, you will be able to reduce the amount of fat you’re taking in. These will not only allow you to eat more food throughout the day, keeping you feeling fuller; it will help you to eat the right things as well as not get bored with your diet.

Push Yourself Further

If you’ve taken a look at your diet, made the appropriate changes, and even found a better way to eat so that you’re getting all of your nutrients in a filling way at an even lower amount of total calories, then good for you! The next thing that you can do to step up your weight loss is to simply push yourself harder during your exercises.

It’s easy to not want to have people see you fail to lift some weights at the gym or feel embarrassed on the treadmill. The fact is that working your body out to the point that it’s no longer able to lift those weights or run that speed is a good thing. The human body is an incredible, but very lazy, machine. It wants to get the best results with the smallest amount of work possible. Unfortunately, its idea of “best results” are often at odds with yours. While your idea of “best results” is getting a beach body in time for summer, its idea of “best results” is getting the necessary work done with the least amount of energy expense. Getting into a routine with your weights or cardio is going to put your body directly into this place. Putting more weight, more reps, more speed, or more incline onto your regular workout will switch it up for your body and allow you to start dropping pounds once again.