Литагент HarperCollins - The alli Diet Plan - Your Essential Guide to Success with alli

• Don’t sit down when you make a phone call – walk about the house while you talk.

• Cleaning is good: hoovering, mopping and dusting are all excellent activities for burning fat.

• Take a seat on an exercise ball. It will help you sit up straight and work your abdominal muscles.

• Get off the bus one stop early. When you feel ready you can try two stops earlier!

• Cycle rather than driving whenever you can.

• Walk up escalators.

• If you take the lift, get out a floor early or take the stairs from ground level.

• Park further from the shops and walk the rest of the way there. Supermarket car parks can be huge, so get into the habit of parking as far away from the shop entrance as possible.

• Walk the dog! A brisk daily walk will help burn off any extra calories consumed.

• Get gardening – a great way to burn some extra calories.

Cravings can be the downfall of many dieters.

It’s important to learn, therefore, to recognize whether your body is hungry or if you’re experiencing a craving for something. Hunger is an empty feeling in your stomach – a signal that you haven’t eaten anything for several hours. A craving doesn’t mean that your body is hungry; it usually happens when you feel like eating a certain type of food. It can be triggered by stimuli outside the body, such as stress, changes in emotions and seeing or smelling something appetizing.

It would be unrealistic to tell you that you won’t experience cravings, but it is possible to control them and limit the damage they can cause.

• Drink a glass or two of water – sometimes your body is thirsty and not hungry at all.

• If you feel like chocolate, whisk up a cup of reduced-calorie hot chocolate with water or skimmed milk and a shake of cinnamon on top.

• If you’re at home, do something to take your mind off the craving – walking away from the fridge and out of the kitchen is a good start! You could try phoning a friend, doing 10 star jumps or taking up knitting to distract yourself.

Blips. Bumps in the road. Snack-attacks. Whatever you call them, they happen to everyone. The essential factor is how you handle the setback.

If you eat the wrong foods and/or too much of them, don’t be too hard on yourself because that can make things worse. Instead, accept that it’s happened and decide why, so you can aim to avoid the same mistake again.

• After a setback, make your next meal really tasty and within the accepted fat and calorie limits.

• Then start planning an occasion or night out and make a shopping list of the new, smaller clothes you’d like to buy for it to spur yourself on.

When you commit to the alliprogramme, it’s committed to you. It’s here to help you adopt a healthy lifestyle so you can reach your goals.

Visit www. alli.co.uk for online support, useful tools, tips and more recipes to help you stay motivated and on track.

Before you start, here are some final things to remember:

• Don’t rush: alliprovides you with a gradual and steady approach to weight loss. You can use allifor up to six months.

• Smaller portions = a bigger reward. If you commit to a healthy lifestyle, following a reduced calorie, lower-fat diet, allican reward your hard work with 50% more weight loss. So, for every 2 lb you lose by your own efforts, allican help you lose 1 lb more.

• Lower-fat is the way forward: limiting the amount of fat you eat at each meal is very important when you’re taking allicapsules. If you don’t stick to it, you increase your chances of experiencing diet-related treatment effects.

• Get more physically active: Exercise helps to burn calories, so when you’re taking alli, you can help yourself by taking more exercise.

• Remember to read the label and information leaflet that comes with the allipack before you start.

Successful weight loss may seem like a big challenge, but allican be a big help. Importantly, the alliprogramme provides you with useful tools to help you sustain your weight loss and commit to lasting, positive changes to your eating and lifestyle habits.

This is the first step on your journey to a healthier lifestyle. Good luck!

Well done for taking the first steps to a healthier, trimmer you. The information in this chapter will help you learn how to eat a healthier diet, both while you are trying to lose weight and in the longer term.

Many people spend years hopping from one diet to another but are still confused about what or how much to eat. Add to this the pressure of modern living, being short of time and the confidence to cook, as well as being surrounded by tempting and readily accessible food, and it’s little wonder we find it so hard not to put on weight. There isn’t a magic solution, but you can take more control by learning more about what and how much to eat and starting to incorporate more activity into your life.

This chapter explains the background to the diet, giving you guidance about the food groups that will be part of your eating plans.

This chapter has several sections:

• The key to weight-loss successoutlines the principles of energy balance.

• What can I eat?takes you through the food-group system, explaining the importance of each group and providing you with useful tips for your diet.

• Your diet goalprovides a breakdown of the calories and fat that you may have at each meal.

• Your meal blueprintshelps you to plan healthy, balanced meals by giving you a clear guide of what to include each mealtime.

• Food and your mindhelps you to identity why you eat and provides a few tips to keep you motivated.

Successful weight loss is about losing weight and keeping it off. To do this you need to understand how to eat and live healthily, not only while you are in your weight-loss phase, but beyond it, too. You also need to understand your own triggers to eating so that you can recognize when you are hungry, and when you are eating just because you are bored. More on this at the end of the chapter, but first some nutrition basics.

Food and drink provide us with energy, which is measured in kilocalories, normally shortened to calories, or sometimes in joules and kilojoules. Our bodies use energy in a host of different ways: keeping our bodies ticking over – even digesting food needs calories; for maintenance and growth and the repair of our tissues and organs. We gain weight when we consume more energy (calories) than we use up, so in order to lose weight we need to consume fewer calories or use up more.

The healthiest way to lose weight is to use up more calories as well as consuming fewer. This is because:

• becoming more active is great for your health now and in the long term

• if you only cut down on food you run the risk of cutting out vital vitamins and minerals

• being active releases feel-good hormones, which help sustain your efforts and make you feel better

• you will improve your muscle tone

• studies have found that people who increase their activity as part of a diet maintain their weight-loss success for longer than those who only cut back on calories