Yes, you can lose weight and keep it off.

And yes, it can be done without thinking you’ll have to be hungry for the rest of your life or subsist on meals of steamed broccoli, plain chicken breasts and salads with fat free dressing.  Yuck!  Living like that is no fun.

How can losing the weight and keeping it off be done?

Here’s my 28 best tips for long term weight loss:

1)       Remove the word “diet” from your vocabulary. Losing the weight and keeping it off means changing your lifestyle instead of dieting to lose the extra weight and then going back to old habits, resulting in constant yo-yo dieting.  Replace the word “diet” with the word “healthy.”

2)       Eat when you are hungry; not when you are bored, sad, happy, etc. Find non-food ways to deal with emotions and instead of stuffing your face with food to deal with them.  Yes, chocolate gives you a natural high but that great feeling won’t last if you gobble down 3 Hershey bars in 10 minutes.  Find activites such as painting or woodworking or knitting that keep your hands busy so you can’t stuff your face with food when you’re not hungry.

3)       Think slow and steady when it comes to losing weight. Experts agree that 1-2 pounds a week gives a person the best chance of keeping it off.  That means no “crash dieting.”  The weight didn’t pile on overnight so don’t expect it to come off overnight.

4)       Write down what you eat. Yeah, I know writing down what you’re putting in your mouth is a pain in the arse.  But, it helps you remember what you’ve eaten throughout the day and makes you accountable to yourself.  You don’t need a fancy food journal.  A small inexpensive notebook, a piece of scrap paper or even the back of an envelope will work just fine.

5)       Eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables every day. Fresh fruits and vegetables are high in nutrients and fiber and are low in calories.  Make them a part of your everyday food consumption.  But eat a balances diet.  Also have lean protein, low fat dairy and whole grains, plus work a treat in every once in a while.

6)       Eat high fiber foods.  There are lots of delicious healthy whole grain breads available and don’t forget about popcorn. It’s high in fiber and delicious (just avoid drenching it in buckets of butter).

7)       Adopt the motto of “everything in moderation.” That means you’ll never completely ban a food from your eating plan.  Why?  Doesn’t being told you can’t have something make you really really want it?  It’s like telling your toddler not to touch something.  It almost guarantees they are going to make an effort to touch it anyway.

8)       Learn what your “trigger” foods are and don’t keep them in the house. By “trigger” foods I mean ones that you can’t stop eating and don’t stop eating until the entire package/container is gone.  Mine is kettle potato chips.  I don’t stop until the bag is gone even if I’m feeling stuffed.  My husband’s are Milk Duds and Mounds Bars.  One of my friend’s is Peanut M&M’s.  When any of us really want those foods we either buy a single size portion or take it to a party/family gathering where other people will help eat it.

9)       Stop thinking you have to look like Twiggy to be healthy. Experts say that losing 10 percent of your body weight can make a significant positive difference in your health (lowering cholesterol, blood pressure, pressure on your knees, and your risk of diabetes).  I’ll use myself as an example.  After losing 25 pounds (10 percent of my body weight which means that yes I’m a big girl and still have more to lose) my fasting blood sugar went down 20 points, my blood pressure went from borderline high to normal, and my cholesterol went down a little (not a lot but I was lucky and it was in the normal range even before I lost weight).

10)   Have regular checkups at the doctor.  That helps you keep being healthy as the focus of your weight loss and can help pinpoint factors that might be hindering your weight loss efforts.  For me, I found out my thyroid was sluggish after a simple blood test my doctor recommended when I said I was always tired was having an extremely difficult time losing any weight.

11)   Aim for 8 hours of sleep a night.  More and more research is pointing out how our modern day lifestyle of cheating ourselves of enough sleep is also creating more risk for being overweight.  Give your body what it needs and get enough sleep.

12)   Don’t skip breakfast. Our metabolism gets sluggish when we sleep.  Help get it going in the morning by eating something even if it’s just a banana or a container of yogurt.

13)   Exercise regularly.  The American Heart Association recommends that “all healthy adults between the ages of 18-65 should be getting at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity activity five days a week.”

14)   Eat more than 3 times a day. Instead, have 5-6 smaller meals and don’t go more than 2-3 hours without eating a little something to keep your blood sugar stable and your metabolism humming.  Can skipping meals wreck your metabolism?  I think so.  I have a friend who only ate 1 meal a day for years because he was a truck driver and didn’t want to take time to eat until he stopped his rig for the evening.  He’s now retired but he readily admits he still can only eat one meal a day otherwise he gains weight.  He doesn’t pig out in the evening either.  He eats what I consider a normal size meal.  Don’t let that happen to you.

15)   Drink lots of low to zero calorie liquid, 8-10 glasses a day.  Water is best but if you can’t stand the taste of plain water then use flavor enhancers like True Lemon, True Lime, True Orange or Crystal Light.

16)   Eat most of your calories instead of drinking them. I love Starbucks and my vehicle pretty much knows how to get there without me having to steer it.  But some of the choices there (and at any coffee shop that makes specialty beverages) can have as many or more calories than an entire meal.  Instead of having whole milk in a latte, opt for skim or soy or almond and skip the whipped cream on top (although I admit to indulging in it once in a while as a special treat).  Those two  options can cut hundreds of calories from one latte.

17)   Stock your fridge and pantry with healthy choices. Lean protein, fresh and frozen fruit, fresh and frozen vegetables, whole grains, and low fat dairy are the best things to keep handy, along with single serve bags of healthy nuts like almonds and walnuts.   The problem for some people (myself included) is that a lot of healthy foods aren’t always quick and easy to prepare or handy for a quick snack.  Case in point: it’s much easier to grab a handful of chips to snack on than to cut up vegetables to eat.  Cut up vegetables when you bring them home from the store and put them where you can see them instead of hiding them in the crisper.  For the quickest lean protein, buy fish.  It’s a natural “fast food” because it cooks up in just a few minutes (shrimp literally takes 3-4 minutes to cook).

18)   Love yourself. Negative chatter inside our heads can be our biggest enemy when it comes to weight loss.  It’s mine.  That negative voice inside my head loves to tell me “it’s too hard,” “go ahead and eat that whole pie cuz you can always go back on your diet tomorrow,” “you’ll always be a fat pig,” “you’re crazy if you think you can really lose that weight,” and “you don’t deserve to be healthy and happy.”  Tell that voice to shut up (100 times a day if necessary) and instead start giving yourself positive messages such as “I’m worth it,” and “I deserve to take time to take care of myself.”

19)   Stop thinking you’re “bad” when you eat something less than healthy. There are very few people (actually I don’t know of any) who always make healthy choices and who never overindulge.  The key is to not use it as an excuse to keep on overeating and overindulging.  Have that treat.  Enjoy it.  Then focus on going back to eating healthy again.  I’ve read over and over again that the 80/20 rule works for food as well.  If you eat healthy 80 percent of the time, you’ll be okay.  That may sounds like you can pig out every day but if you are eating 1,500 calories a day that means having 300 calories in treats which could mean 1 teaspoon of butter on a white dinner roll and a small dish of ice cream; not the entire bread basket or the entire container of ice cream.

20)   Try modeling. No, not the kind of modeling that involves walking down a runway but modeling the behaviors of someone you know who is a normal weight and is healthy.  Watch how they eat and what their everyday life is like.  Then imitate them.  My friend is normal weight and never tells herself she can’t have a certain food.  But, she always stops eating when she is full – no matter how tasty the food on her plate is; and will push away an expensive dessert after just one bite if it’s not super delicious because she will not spend calories on food she doesn’t love.  Plus she has an active lifestyle, which brings me to the next tip.

21)    Adopt a healthy lifestyle. Most healthy and normal weight people are not couch potatoes.  Activity is a normal part of their everyday lives.  They enjoy hobbies and activities that are require physical exertion such as: gardening, woodworking, hiking, bicycling, tennis, sailing, kayaking, swimming, jogging, water skiing, downhill skiing, snowshoeing, bowling and putting lots of miles on their legs while strolling along the beach, taking in some culture at a local museum, or spending the day doing some power shopping.  They don’t spend the entire weekend plunked in front of the television eating junk food.

22)   Make eating an activity that is not combined with others i.e. watching television, while driving, etc. It means being aware of what you are eating.  How many of us have opened a bag of chips while watching television only to stick our hand in the bag, find it empty, and wonder where they all went – knowing full well that we were the only person sticking our hand in the bag and munching away?

23)   Eat less fast food and share or take home half of restaurant entrees. I think a big part of our society’s weight problems today are that we have no idea what a normal portion is because they have grown so much over the years (as have our waistlines).  Try cooking more of your own meals too because then you have control over ingredients (you’d be surprised at how much butter restaurants slather on food they serve you).  Don’t have a lot of time to cook?  Get a slow cooker and give it a workout.  Meals can be put together in just a few minutes in the morning.  Then at night you can walk in the door to a hot meal.

24)   Get support from other people.  Find someone to talk to about the struggles you face and to also share your successes with.  It can be a family member, close friend, or even online discussions with others.  There’s the old saying that “It takes a village to raise a child.”  I think the same thing applies to losing weight and keeping it off.  Don’t think it’s bad to need emotional and physical support.  Take advantage of help from wherever you can get it.

25)   Remove the negative from your life. This can be the hard to do but if people in your life are negative towards you and they won’t stop even after you talk to them about it then it’s time to be strong and cut them out of your life (for example the friend who is always saying “why bother trying to lose weight – you’ve never been successful the last 99 times you tried.”).  Surround yourself with positive and encouraging people. You deserve it.

26)   Manage your stress. Too much stress is bad for us in a lot of ways.  Besides the obvious negative of making us crabby, wound tighter than a drum, and ready to blow like Mount St. Helena at any moment; it can contribute to weakening of our immune system, is bad for our heart, and lead us to overeating as a way of dealing with stress.  Find ways to relax.  Practice relaxation techniques such as relaxation breathing, give yoga a try, or give biofeedback a whirl.

27)   Stop obsessing about every morsel of food you put into your mouth and stop feeling guilty for eating something you enjoy.  If you really want to have a piece of chocolate cake, then eat a small piece and enjoy the heck out of it.  Then go back to eating healthy and exercising.  That doesn’t mean you should eat the entire cake or have cake every day.  Remember to enjoy the foods you love “in moderation.”

That brings me to may last tip for long term weight loss.

28) Know that the choice is yours and that losing weight, maintaining weight or gaining weight is about choices you make. Work on making choices that help you with your goals.   That also means being accountable for your choices.  Nobody makes you have that extra piece of cheesecake.  The choices are yours.  Make the ones that are best for you.  Remember YOU ARE WORTH IT!