Diet Mondays: Personal Diets, an Online Program for Weight Loss

Personal Diets is an online diet program that tailors your diet regime to your lifestyle. It's cost effective and is perfect for those who want a regime they can follow that they don't have to put together themselves:

Custom Diets
PersonalDiets works by providing custom diets to people based on their lifestyle and natural eating habits. While most diet programs have specific dietary restrictions and often set times that you are supposed to eat, PersonalDiets, basis its diets on your natural way of doing things. If you like to snacke, then PersonalDiets will design a program that allows you to snack. If you don’t cook often and eat out a lot, PersonalDiets will create a diet for you that will allow to continue to eat out and still lose weight.

No Exercise Needed
PersonalDiets customizes their diets based on your activity level. If you’re a particularly active person than your diet will reflect your activity level and add the necessary calories for you activity level and desired weight loss goals. However, if you’re a couch potato PersonalDiets creates a personal diet program that will allow you to lose weight and still maintain your couch potato ways. PersonalDiets recommends exercise, since diet and exercise is the fastest and best way to lose weight, but they recognize everyone doesn’t want to or some people can’t exercise, so they allow for that fact in planning your diet regime.

Expected Weight Loss With Personal Diets
Average weight loss on PersonalDiets is 1.5 pounds. Some people lose 2 pounds or more on PersonalDiet plans and others lose less. The recommended amount of weight loss per week is 1.5 pounds since slow weight loss is best over the long term and is less likely to result in you gaining the weight back. If you want to lose more weight per week you can do so as long it does healthily and within safety guidelines.

Track Your Weight Online
You can easily keep track of your progresses by using PersonalDiets online tracking tools. You can record your weight, upload food diaries and track other events pertaining to your weight loss goals. PersonalDiets guarantees its weight loss claims because it is able to track the weight of their clients via their Right-On-Track interactive weight program. They have an 85% success rate for those who follow the Right-On-Track program. PersonalDiets allows physicians and researchers to have access to their real time tracking results.

No Pills or Other Products
Unlike many other diet programs PersonalDiets doesn’t require you to purchase any pills, special meals or other dietary supplements. All their custom diets are based on foods that can be brought from the grocery store or eaten at restaurants. They do recommend the use of a multi-vitamin but don’t offer a special PersonalDiets multi-vitamin that has to be purchased to utilize the program.

Diet Mondays: Incorporate Exercise With the Atkins Diet

I'm sure all of you are familiar with The Atkins Diet by now. If not, here's a primer. What I have noticed however, is that many folks on The Atkins Diet, aren't exercising. Because the diet lends itself to such rapid weight loss, I think folk believe that they don't have to work out. Which, as I've noted on this blog in the past, is not the best decision. So, if you're on The Atkins Diet here are a few tips adding some exercise to the diet:

Go Slow During Induction
During the Induction phase of the Atkins diet you are severely limiting your carbohydrate intake. The change in carbs forces your body to burn fat as its primary source of energy. Since your body is used to using carbs as its primary source of energy exercise during induction can be difficult. The lack of carbs means your body doesn’t have the energy source its used to having to help you burn calories and sustain your energy levels during your workout. This phase of the Atkins diet is known for experiencing side effects such as fatigue, light-headedness and headaches.

Exercise during the induction phase of Atkins can make these systems worse; so keep the exercise to a bare minimum during the first two weeks of the diet. Light walking and other low impact exercise for no more than thirty minutes a day, are your best options for the Induction phase of the Atkins diet.

Add More Exercise as You Add Carbs
The best part of incorporating exercise into the Atkins diet is the more you exercise the more carbohydrates you get to eat. Exercise allows your body to better process the carbohydrates you consume so they don’t have a drastic affect on your blood sugar levels as they do for those who don’t exercise at all or very little.

Dr. Atkins diet plan allows for people who are very active to consume considerable more grams of carbohydrates a day than those who exercise moderately or lead sedentary lives. By Atkins standards a person who is active is described as someone who gets at least 45 minutes a day of vigorous exercise at least five times a week. The extra grams of carbs per day should act as an incentive for you to add more exercise to your diet regime. As you more through the latter stages of the Atkins diet try adding jogging, running, power walking or other high impact workouts to your exercise regime.

Don’t Forget the Weights
While aerobic exercise will make your heart healthy weight training will tone your body, making you look leaner and, as you gain more muscle, burn more fat. Working out with weights will replace the fat you lose with muscles and because you’re more active and in better shape, allow you to consume more carbohydrates on the Atkins diet. You can add weight training to your workouts as you move through the later stages of the Atkins Diet but by Lifetime Maintenance weight training should be a regular part of your routine as it will not only help you lose the weight but will aid in you keeping the weight off.

Diet Mondays: Portion Control -- It Works

One the easiest and least painful ways to get your diet started is to use portion control. So often, in much of diet literature, portion control is overlooked or not discussed seriously. Many “experts” claim that it’s too hard and the everyday individual is loathe to practice it because of its difficulty. The reality is portion control is quite easy and if you follow a few simple steps you can be on your way to a slimmer waistline:

1. Fix your plate the way you normally would. Pile the food on. Don’t worry about whether you’re putting too much on your plate, just follow your normal routine.

2. When you’re done take half the food off your plate and put in a container for later.

3. Eat the half you have left.

4. After you finish eating, wait 10 minutes and if you still feel hungry go and get the food that you put away and take half of that, put it on your plate and eat it.

5. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Try it for a week. After the first couple of days you probably won’t even need that second helping and my guess is, by the end of the week, you may have lost a couple of pounds. Ultimately, portion control is about eating less food so you consume fewer calories. If you’re now eating half of what you normally eat then you’re consuming half the calories and pounds will begin to come off.

Obviously what you eat matters, but if you’re just starting a dieting regime and you feel overwhelmed with all of the health and fitness advice from the “experts” this is a simple way to get the ball rolling. Once you see those early results you will feel motivated to keep it going and make even bigger changes in your diet and lifestyle.