A Doctor's Weight Loss Advise We Could All Benefit From.

There's a lot of weight-loss talk going around at this time of year, due to all the New Year's resolutions. If weight loss is one of your targets this year — or at any point in your life — half the battle is finding the right kind of guidance to help you safely and effectively crush your goals. 

We spoke with an expert who has an immense amount of experience coaching people in their weight-loss journey: Dr. Luiza Petre, a weight-management specialist and board-certified cardiologist.

She gave us the inside scoop on actionable ways to lose weight. Here are six detailed pieces of advice you won't want to ignore.

Drink More Water

You've probably heard a million times that drinking more water helps you lose weight, but Dr. Petre explains exactly why that's the case. "Research suggests that drinking eight to 10 glasses of water (eight fluid ounces each) a day can boost metabolism by 24-30 percent and suppress appetite," she explained.

Tracking Your Food - How Accurate Do You Need To Be?

If you're serious about dropping some pounds (and keeping them off!), it's important to take note of what you eat. You may even consider tracking what you're eating either by counting calories or macronutrients, or keeping a food log of some sort. As you do this, you inevitably start to wonder: how accurate do you need to be to see results?

The reality is, when you want to lose weight, tracking your food helps to ensure that you're not unknowingly sneaking in extra calories, which could happen, even if you think you're following the serving size on the nutrition label to a T.

Cupboard-raiders should especially pay attention. "Being accurate is important because if you're a habitual snacker, you could easily be overeating on a daily basis and have no real awareness around it," JC Deen, a fitness coach who helps clients lose weight.

Let's say you wanted to eat a plain bagel (about 250 calories) with some peanut butter (standard serving is 190 calories). If you eyeball the serving size, it's easy to overdo it without measuring it on a kitchen scale. Since peanut butter is so calorically dense, going over a little bit every time means extra calories that add up over the long run and could stall your progress.


Related: What Are Macros? And Should You Count Them For Weight Loss

Thus, a certain level of consistent accuracy is important.

5 Tips To Help Prevent Comfort Eating.

When you're feeling a little down in the dumps, chowing down on a helping of comfort food may seem like a quick fix, but you're only doing your body injustice. Stress eating is a real issue that affects our ability to lose weight and keep it off.

1.     Remember, you're in control. When you feel like you're not in control of what you're eating, you won't be. You're the only person with the power to change this problem. Recognising your propensity to reach for solace in the form or fast food or sweet treats is the first step to taking control back.

2.   Stop snacking mindlessly as you watch TV. Coming out of a slight daze and realising you've inhaled a bag of chips is not the best feeling in the world. If watching TV and snacking go hand in hand in your house, make a point to stop the cycle. If you can't give up snack time while you're by the tube, make it a point to snack on something clean and healthy.  

How Long Does It Take To Lose 10 Pounds?

You’ve probably heard at some point that people should strive to lose excess weight at a rate of one to two pounds a week. But we all know that weight loss doesn't always come easily or consistently. 

With that in mind, we reached out to the people behind the popular weight-loss app Lose It! to get more real-world numbers. According to their data, the average Lose It! users lost 10 pounds in about seven weeks, and 90 percent of their users who lost 10 pounds did it in less than 13 weeks.

It’s definitely good to hear that it takes most people longer than five weeks to drop 10 pounds (you're not alone if the scale seems stuck!), and that it’s also doable within three months or so. But if you’re trying to drop 10 pounds, it’s important to keep this in mind: Everyone moves at their own pace.

Binge Eating - How This One Thing Helped

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled with emotional eating. It started when I was an angsty teenager who was bullied incessantly at school, but it continued well into my adult years. I've experienced many mornings when I wake up feeling immensely guilty for all the binge-eating I did the night before. This is an extremely common battle among many women across the country, and you'll find a variety of different advice online that is supposed to help you stop binging.

We're encouraged to journal how we feel, identify our triggers, and answer cravings when they arise rather than ignore them altogether. In many cases, you'll hear that moderation is the name of the game. My battle against binge-eating had nothing to do with any of that advice, though. The only thing that stopped me from emotional eating was logging every single thing I ate into my phone and putting myself on a strict diet.

8 Ways To Motivate Yourself To Start To Lose Weight.

You know you want to shed pounds and you're pretty clear on the changes you need to make to reach that magic number on the scale. But you also know that getting—and staying—on track can be super-daunting, especially if you're running low in the motivation department.

Fear not, dear grasshopper. We went to the experts for the inside scoop on how to reach your weight-loss goals no matter how unmotivated you are.

Here's a step-by-step guide to get amped.

ESTABLISH WHY YOU WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT