Finding tips to lose weight is not difficult! In fact there are so many tips, so much advice, that it can be hard to find a consistent way forward. One of the best tips I ever came across was something I found by accident, and it works a treat, so I will tell you about it later in this article.

First, remember that old fashioned advice comes in many forms and some of them are little gems, using smaller plates for example. How about eating more slowly? Plus of course there is the evergreen of watching how many calories you eat.

Sure you have heard these tips before but the reason they have stuck around for so long may be simply because they work. You can use any or all of them on a long term basis, and all of them allow you to keep on eating the same types of food you ate before.

Exercise is sure to be included in any list of tips to lose weight. The more exercise you do, the more calories you burn, but you need to be careful which type of exercise you do. If you build too much muscle without getting rid of the fat, the muscle may develop *under* the fat, which will not get you the body shape that you want.

In my case it was when I took up running, I found a plan which included a lot of walking, because it’s less jarring on the body. Running may cause injury to joints that aren’t used to it, so in fact the simplest exercise can often be the best. Walking still burns a high amount of calories. So why not include it in your daily schedule?

A simple half hour walk, at a pace which doesn’t leave you panting, may burn a couple of hundred calories, which is great. What I discovered though, was that it helps if you think of those calories in terms of actual food that you might be tempted to eat. For example, I knew the walking was burning about 200 calories, and I also knew that a chocolate bar would add all those calories right back on, plus maybe a few more! It changed my mental outlook hugely, and of all the tips to lose weight, this one has stuck.

To develop the point, it meant that if I ate the chocolate bar, I knew I would have to do another half hour walk to ‘pay’ for it, or from another angle it was wasting a half hour walk I had already done. It meant that I was now viewing the chocolate as something that spoilt my hard work, so I was less inclined to eat it. Yes, I still eat chocolate occasionally, and love it, but even now I view each bar as a big pile of calories that needs to be accounted for.

I found that concept by accident after taking action with short walks, just going to show that reading tips to lose weight is nothing like as effective as actually acting on them! 

Tags: tips to lose weight, lose weight