Lose Weight and Keep It Off

Lesson 1

Food Records: The Secret to Successful Weight Loss

You guessed it! This course is going to help you lose weight and keep it off by teaching you healthy, proven techniques for weight loss that you can personalize and begin using immediately. In this first lesson, you'll take a crucial step toward your weight-loss goals by keeping a record of what you eat and drink. You'll explore how easy it is to weigh and measure your food in order to track portion size and calories. Then, you'll learn to distinguish between low-fat and high-fat food preparation methods (a great skill to have when you're eating out). You'll also discover how to use your hands to guesstimate and manage portion sizes when you just don't have the option to weigh and measure your food.

Assess Your Body and Set SMART Goals

You've established a food record to help you keep tabs on what you're eating and drinking. Now it's time to figure out how what you eat relates to your body. In this lesson, you'll discover how body type relates to health and weight management and then use interactive tools to calculate your body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and personal daily calorie intake. With all this information in hand, you'll be ready to develop your own SMART goals for weight loss and weight maintenance—goals that are sensible, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-oriented.

Take Nutrition to the Next Level

Now that you've learned how to develop SMART goals, it's time to delve into the finer details of food composition, meal planning, and meal timing. In this lesson, you'll find out what's in the food you're eating and how to use that information to plan meals and snacks that support your weight-loss goals. You'll also learn how to time meals so that you're less hungry between meals—and have more energy!

Exercise Is King

Time to get motivated to move! In this lesson, you'll learn the differences between cardiorespiratory exercise, strength training, and lifestyle activity. You'll also find out why and how much of each type of exercise supports weight management. You'll learn about some easy ways to make exercise work when you don't have a lot of extra time and then explore the common (but frustrating!) obstacles to exercise. By the end of the lesson, you'll be developing your own SMART exercise goals.

The Importance of Being Hydrated

Water plays a role in countless body functions, including weight loss. Increasing water intake can be an inexpensive, easy way to maximize fat metabolism, slow digestion, and discourage your appetite! This lesson will discuss the role of water in weight management. You'll learn how much water is enough, and discover how to determine how much water you lose during exercise. You'll also uncover tips and tricks for overcoming obstacles to good hydration.

Don't Worry, Be Healthy!

Stress has a variety of negative effects on weight management. The hormones your body releases when you feel stressed wreak havoc on your appetite, encourage the storage of abdominal fat, and ramp up the formation of fat. This lesson will unravel the influences of stress on weight, and you'll discover how to use stress management techniques to minimize or even eliminate the effects of stress. Because eating to self-nurture is a challenge for many people, you'll spend some time examining the connection between food and love and how to self-nurture without sacrificing your weight-management goals.

You Are What You Think

Are your thoughts getting in the way of reaching your SMART goals? In this lesson, you'll discover how emotional eating and the way you think about your body affect your ability to follow through on healthy choices. The lesson will talk about 10 cognitive traps to watch out for and teach you about 10 cognitive tools you can use to overcome unhelpful thought patterns. As you discover more about motives, you'll see how you can put them to work to reach your weight-management goals.

Sleep, Slimness, and You

A good night's sleep is a crucial part of your successful weight-management plan. In this lesson, you'll learn how sleep deprivation interferes with metabolism, encourages cravings, and increases your appetite. You'll problem-solve for ways to get more sleep and discover how you can stay on track with your SMART goals even when you haven't had enough rest.

Eating In, Eating Out

Eating out can make maintaining or losing weight so much more challenging. But, actually, with preparation and some strategies for making healthy food choices, you'll find that eating out doesn't have to wreak havoc with your SMART goals. In this lesson, you'll begin by learning how to stick with your SMART goals when you're eating out. After that, you'll explore how to make preparing food at home easy, quick, and healthy for you and your family. The lesson will wrap things up by discussing techniques you can use to keep your SMART goals in focus, even in social situations.

Take Exercise to the Next Level

Whether you're an exercise newbie or a seasoned athlete, you need to change up your exercise routine from time to time. In this lesson, you'll discover how and why to do just that! You'll see how FITT principles, cross-training, exercise lite, and other techniques can help you develop and improve your workouts. Because your thoughts affect your actions and feelings, too, you'll learn how to become your own cheerleader in ways that make exercise easier, more effective, and fun.

Put It All Together

Do you suspect that your genes are making it hard for you to lose weight? Have you noticed changes in your body as you've grown older, had a baby, or entered perimenopause? In this lesson, you'll learn how genetics and life changes can affect weight management, and you'll discover how to successfully manage your weight during these life stages. You'll also discover when and how to satisfy food cravings without abandoning your SMART weight-management goals—and when and how to enjoy the high-calorie foods you really love!

Stay on Track for a Lifetime

This lesson will discuss methods for determining your personal ideal weight, and you'll explore how to shift from weight loss to weight maintenance once you've achieved it. Maintaining weight can be a lot easier than losing it if you get into the maintenance mindset, so the lesson will talk about the importance of using self-monitoring and self-motivation tools to stay aware and enthusiastic about the choices you're making that influence your weight. You'll learn how to put your assertive communication tools to work in the social situations you're likely to encounter and discover how seeing things differently once you're in the maintenance mindset can make it easier to stick with your SMART weight-management goals. And because scientific research is constantly changing, you'll learn the basics of evaluating research. When the next diet craze hits, you'll be able to determine if it's right for you. By the end of this lesson—and this course—you'll have the know-how to help you enjoy weight loss for a lifetime.