Tips how to lose weight fastMost effective weight loss tips and methods to lose weight fast and easy

Your friends, your cold, your spending habits–science can blame just about everything for filling our jeans to overflowing. But how much extra poundage are these surprising factors really responsible for? We dug through the research to find out what’s stalling womens weight loss.

The risk: Your Flabby Friends – 2 lbs

Palling around with a tubby crowd could be worse than having Rosie O’Donnell as your diet coach. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the social networks of 12,067 people over 32 years and found that for every 10 pounds a person gained, close friends of the same height gained an average of one to two pounds.

Improve your odds Instead of making plans to go out for drinks and dinner, catch up with your buds as you sweat on side-by-side elliptical machines, play racquetball, or cruise town on your bikes. Don’t take no for an answer!

The risk: Credit Cards – 5 lbs

Your plastic may be affecting more than just your credit score. Visa conducted a study of 100,000 fast-food restaurant transactions and found that people who pay for their food with a credit card spend 30 percent more than those who pay with cash. Opt to swipe and you could end up with a double quarter-pounder with cheese and a large Coke instead of a quarter-pounder with cheese and medium drink. For the average woman, who visits a fast-food restaurant once a week, that adds an extra 17,160 calories, or 4.9 pounds, per year.

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Here’s how to reduce 8,101 (or more!) calories from your home cooked meal plan

The way nutritionists go on about restaurant diet crimes, you’d think the entrance to Bennigan’s would be blocked off by yellow police tape. But, breadbasket assaults aside, the riskiest place for your waistline is actually your own kitchen. That’s where you make daily decisions that affect your weight loss success: choosing between skim milk and whole, reaching for butter or olive oil, stocking up on Oreos or Triscuits. “Cutting calories when cooking at home is the first step to creating healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime,” says Lisa R. Young, R.D., author of The Portion Teller Plan. The following easy tips will help you crack down on fat and calories and serve and protect your figure.

Oil Be Damned

It’s healthier than butter, but it’s still fat. Here’s how to skip the slick stuff or make a little go a long way.

Make it a spritzer Oil in a spray can or mister (we like the Misto Gourmet Olive Oil Sprayer, $10, chefsresource.com) lets you fry foods with a fraction of the calories you’d get from a pour spout. A spritz works great on pasta and roasted vegetables, too. Calories cut: 112

Cook twice For crispy chicken or fish without all the fat of frying, use your oven, says dietician and nutritionist Molly Morgan. Coat a pan with a tablespoon of flavorless canola oil and fry the meat for 10 minutes per side. Blot up extra grease with paper towels, then transfer to the oven and bake on low heat (200 to 250 degrees) for 15 to 20 minutes. Calories cut: 2,767

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As promised in one of the previous posts I am posting the second part of tips how to start cutting your calories.

• Put down the knife. By putting down whatever utensils you’re using between every bite, you can significantly slow down your eating time, leaving your stomach a chance to feel full and reducing the likelihood that you’ll go for seconds. Another technique that can have a similar effect is to take a sip between each bite.
• Choose whole grains over a whole belly. If you switch out all of your refined grain food (white bread, food made with white flour) for whole-grain food (oatmeal, whole-grain cereal, whole-grain pasta, brown rice and barley) you won’t lose additional weight overall. However, you will lose more weight in the belly area, which will make you look thinner.
• Eat less lunch than usual. For example, make your own sandwich and limit the use of margarine or butter and full-fat mayonnaise (store-bought sandwiches often contain both).
• Cut down on alcohol intake
• Finally, don’t be tempted to skip breakfast – or any meal to lose weight. While skipping a meal will reduce your calorie intake for that hour, it will leave you much hungrier later on. Not only are you likely to overeat to compensate, but you’ll often make bad choices to fill the gap: a cereal bar is not as healthy as a bowl of cereal or as filling, leading you to ‘need’ something extra for lunch. Irregular eating habits also disrupt your body’s metabolism, which makes it harder to lose weight in the first place.

We don’t know who coined the phrase “Numbers don’t lie,” but we’ll bet they never counted one or a few 100 calories. And if you’ve ever tried using math to manage the digits on your bathroom scale, you know that most diet equations don’t add up. We wondered whether any of the roughly 338,000 Google hits for “weight loss formula” can actually help you look good in that black latex cat suit this Halloween. Here’s the lowdown on three basics:

Daily Caloric Requirement (DCR)

Translation The math is pretty simple: Eat 500 fewer calories a day than your body requires and you’ll drop a pound a week. But most online calculators (and even the pen-and-paper variety) are only 82 percent accurate (even less so if you’re obese, sick, or an ethnic minority), according to the American Dietetic Association. And, says Mary Hartley, a registered nutritionist for about.com, the results can be flawed because the equation isn’t tailored to the individual and because many people misjudge their fitness level. Plus, if you lose 10 pounds or more, you’ll have to do the math again.

Salvation Let sites like caloriecount.about.com, mayoclinic.com, or mypyramid.gov do the work for you. All factor in activity level and are backed by health pros.

Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)

Translation While DCR calculates calorie input (how much you need to eat), the Resting Metabolic Rate tabulates calorie output (how much you burn doing absolutely nothing). Unfortunately, the ADA says the accuracy of these formulas is 45 to 80 percent (and again, they’re less accurate if you’re obese).

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