5 Easy Ways to Jumpstart Your Diet

There is a saying I love: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” The first time I heard that, I had to pause a moment and repeat it to myself to capture the profundity of the statement. Every mistake in my past…gone. My future…bright as I desire it to be.

We’re on Day 2 of the 21 Days to a Happier You and as I mentioned when kicking off this series, there are only 3 things that truly impact the ability to create happiness in your life. The first is the relationship with yourself. How you perceive your worth in this world. How proud you are of yourself in this moment and how great you believe you will become. For this reason, I began this series with something you may not have been expecting: Food.

In 1826, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826: “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” Which translates to, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” This is where we later got the more popular American phrase, “You are what you eat.” Getting our nutrition right is important for a number of reasons, one of which is the stress we place on our body when we aren’t feeding it the nutrition it requires, which in turn creates additional stress that impacts how we look, feel and sleep.

It is estimated the U.S. weight loss market has reached $80 billion. We may not know how to lose weight in the US but we certainly have figured out how to spend money attempting to do so. A little more than 15 years ago, I lost weight using a book called Weigh Down.

I don’t even know if that book is sold much now but the premise was you could eat what you wanted but only when you were hungry and to stop when you were 80-percent full. I still subscribe to this all these years later and it works for me because I enjoy carbs, sweets and all the other things current diets tell us to cut out.

You can go on a cookie diet, a high-protein diet, a high fiber diet, any kind of diet will work. What doesn’t work is inconsistency. Failure on any diet is almost always due to user error. It doesn’t matter what diet you choose, if getting weight off has been a challenge for you, and it’s keeping you from enjoying the life you were meant to live, remember that today is the first day of the rest of your life and you can begin anew.

Don’t relish in your failures of the past, if you don’t have the energy you need to efficiently work toward your goals each day, change your diet. If you are having a hard time sleeping at night, change your diet. To effectively improve every aspect of your life, this is more important than you may think.

You don’t have to be skinny to be happy. You don’t have to lose 20 pounds or get to your ideal weight to be happy. But you do have to know you’re on your way and you do have to signal to your body you’re making a permanent change for the better and command it to begin operating optimally.

Yesterday, I promised you a few tips to help jumpstart your weight loss that are right at your fingertips and will not cost you a penny. Here are the first 5 things I did to jumpstart my diet more than 15 years ago (weight I’ve never gained back to this day):

1) Add more water to your diet. You have likely heard you should drink 8 glasses a day. That is a one size fits all and may not help with weight loss. The amount you really should be drinking is your body weight divided in half in ounces. So if you weigh 150lbs, you should be drinking 75oz of water which is a little less than 9 cups a day. I weigh 120lbs, so I drink no less than 60oz a day.

2) Stop eating within 3 hours of bedtime. This will help you sleep well at night as your body will be able to rest rather than keeping busy digesting and you will store less fat (you can Google the reasons why this is as it’s pretty well documented).

3) Sleep no less than 7 hours a day (8 hours is ideal). Your body, especially your mind, functions more optimally with sleep. You are able to make better decisions, be more patient with people around you and most importantly, be patient with yourself. You are also less likely to overeat.

4) Add 1-2 apples a day. It not only keeps the doctor away because of the high vitamin content but the fiber and water in the apple keeps your digestive system flowing better. Fiber is imperative so if you’re not getting at least 20 grams a day, adding that will also help tremendously.

5) Wait until you’re hungry to eat. And make sure you’re hungry and not thirsty. Alot of times we mistake our body’s request for water to be hunger. When you’re hungry, drink 8-oz of water. If 10 minutes later you’re still hungry, then it’s time to eat. And even more important than eating only when you’re hungry is to stop eating when you’re 80% full. The reason for this is it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to signal to your brain that you’re full. By the time it does that, you’ve already overeaten and your body is storing the excess food as fat.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about becoming more active and how you can squeeze an effective workout into any schedule (even if you have 5 children you’re home schooling). Don’t wait until January 1st to make a New Year’s Resolution. Add these 5 simple things and you’ll see and feel a difference immediately.

You may only lose 1lb a week with these changes but if you are patient, that amounts to 52lbs by this time next year and the entire time you’re working toward your ultimate goal, you’re giving your body the added gift of supplying what it needs so it can help you achieve your greatest hopes and dreams.

Until tomorrow…make it a great day!

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Fawn Weaver

Founder at Happy Wives Club

Fawn Weaver is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of Happy Wives Club: One Woman's Worldwide Search for the Secrets of a Great Marriage, adopting the same name as the Club she founded in 2010. The Happy Wives Club community has grown to include more than 1 million women in over 110 countries around the world. She’s an investor in real estate, tech sector and lifestyle brands. When she’s not writing or working, she's happily doting over her husband of twelve years, Keith (and sometimes manages to do all three simultaneously).