The food and liquids you ingest make a huge impact on your body composition (aka body fat %) and overall weight.  If you have read any of my nutritional bits before, you know I am not one for “diets”.  I am a firm believer that you have to make the lifestyle changes in your nutritional habits.  This may take a bit longer to reach your goals than an intense diet, but it will ensure that you sustain that weight or body comp once you reach the goals.  What good is it to lose 20 pounds in a month, if 3 later months you will gain it all back?  Intense diets are wrong in so many ways learn to change your eating habits and live at the goal you achieved, rather then visiting it.

Weight loss is all about a caloric deficit.  This basically means that calories in must be a lower number than calories out.  Although you should be consuming a few thousand calories a day, the caloric deficit usually comes down to a few hundred calories. It takes 3,500 calories to loose a pound of weight in your body. I am not talking water weight here, because that will fluctuate day to day.  But if you want to loose a pound a week, you must finish the week having burnt 3,500 calories more then you ate.  That is a 500 calorie deficit a day.  Heres is 5 easy ways to help take some of those calories out of your diet without having to make drastic changes:

Cut out any type of spread or condiments: Mayonnaise, ketchup, jelly and especially butter should be cut out of you diet completely.  Sure you may be buying the low fat kind but it still isn’t that great.  If you look at the label and it says it is 50 calories, you may say to yourself “oh thats nothing”.  What you aren’t looking at is how much of that spread makes up a serving and how much you are actually using.  If the light mayonnaise you use is 50 calories per tablespoon and you use 2 tablespoons of it when you eat a sandwich; there is an extra 100 calories right there.  Start to like yellow mustard, it is super low in calories.

Cut out salad dressings:  You think you are making a wise choice by going with a salad when you are out to dinner, rather then a typical entree.  You may in fact be making a wise choice, until you let them throw a few ounces of ranch or Caesar dressing on it. I would make a general statement not to eat any dressing that is white. This basically puts any type of ranch or blue cheese in that category.  A lot of salad dressings are loaded with calories and can spoil a healthy salad.  Go with balsamic vinaigrette, and ask for it to be on the side.  Balsamic vinegar itself is basically 0 calories so go ahead and eat away.

Water, Water, Water: I realize that you know water is good for you, but I don’t know if you realize just how good it is.  The main idea is to replace soda, juice or any other drinks with water.  Yeah it may get a little boring but many of those fruit juices have a few hundred calories in them and we all know how bad soda is for you.  Besides that, water has show in studies that it can cause a 33% increase in metabolism immediately after drinking it.  There’s a good reason to drink water with every meal.  A rule of thumb is to take your body weight and cut it in half, you should get at least that many ounces per day.  My alternate to water will be listed in tip #4.

Tea over Coffee: I know that coffee is a staple among many Americans, every single day.  Unless you are drinking it black, I advise you try switching to tea for a little while.  The extra creamers and sugar you add is a good amount of calories depending on how much you use.  Teas can be a good source or getting that caffeine, along with many other health benefits it can provide. If it is really hard for you to switch, get some black tea and throw 2 bags in a drink instead of one.  Going back to point #3, if you are having a hard time just drinking water, feel free to have a few teas during the day.  Besides, you’ll look way more sophisticated with a tea in hand over a Coke.

Eat Like A King for Breakfast, A Queen for Lunch, and A Peasant for Dinner:  This basically means, load up during breakfast with a good bit of food.  Breakfast should be your largest meal of the day.  By dinner you should be eating about half of what your typical dinner is.  This will help reduce the overall calories because you wont starve all day, only to eat a 1,000 calorie dinner.

These are 5 tips that can help you drop your caloric intake by a few hundred a day.  Best of all they are not huge changes to make.  When you think about it, you don’t have to physically stop eating anything.  Were talking condiments, salad dressings and creamers.  The condiments are just for a little added flavor and serve really no nutritional purpose.  The dressings can be switched around so that instead of ranch you have oil and vinegar.  Cutting out a drink or two of soda or juice per day is really no big deal.  Try it out for a week or so and see if it is really that horrible.  I guarantee it will be a lot easier to pull this off each day, as opposed to cutting out carbs completely or eliminating a meal.  Stop thinking about the meal you are eating right now, instead think about the overall day. Before you spread that mayonnaise on a sandwich and tell yourself it’s only an extra 70 calories, think. If you do that twice in a day it is 140 calories, if you need to be in a deficit for the day, those few spread will put a damper on you achieving your goal.