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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To get the number on the scale to go down, you have to chow down. Between 10 and 30 percent of the calories you use each day get burned by the simple act of digesting your food. Now that’s pretty cool — satisfying your food cravings actually fries calories! But not all foods are created equal. Your body uses more calories to digest protein (about 25 burned for every 100 consumed) than it does to digest fats and carbohydrates (10 to 15 burned for every 100 consumed).

That’s why the Abs Diet concentrates on adding lean, healthy proteins. Eat more of them, in a sensible way, and you’ll torch more calories. Protein is also the nutrient that builds muscle — and the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism and the more calories you’ll burn throughout the day. When you lift and lower weights, you create microscopic tears in your muscles. To mend the tears, your body parachutes in new protein to assess the damage and repair the muscle. Proteins fortify the original cell structure by building new muscle fibers.

This wonder child of the nutrition world also makes you feel fuller faster. But the good news doesn’t stop there. Following an eating plan that emphasizes lean proteins will accelerate weight loss from your midsection first.

The Abs Diet plan is simple: Just stick to the six guidelines below and follow the Abs Diet Quickstart Workout for weight loss success. You can burn a serious hunk of fat — from your belly first — in just a few weeks.

Let the belly flattening begin!

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