9 Steps to Effective Weight Loss

1. Be scrupulously honest with yourself! You need to be honest about your willingness to change habits for life. You need to be honest about what you are actually eating. This is where a food diary comes in handy. (see number 5)

2. Realise everything is connected! There is an absolute, incontrovertible connection between your weight and the rest of your life. It is not just about how much you eat. Your relationships, your sleep, your stress, all profoundly affect your hormones, especially cortisol, excess amounts of which can keep you from losing weight. If your stress hormones are high and your sleep is disturbed, you will not replenish serotonin, which can lead to cravings. If cortisol is constantly high, it can cause insulin resistance which is the biggest enemy of fat loss.

Don’t try to lose weight just by attacking your food habits. That’s a start, but it’s not the whole story. Everything is connected: from sunshine to sex to love to job to relationships. The Bowden Motto: Change your life, change your weight.

3. Fat is not the enemy! Numerous recent studies have shown conclusively that the percentage of fat in your diet has virtually no connection to whether or not you get fat. Far more important is the amount of total calories you take in, and especially the total number of calories from carbohydrates. Processed food - and especially sugar - is damaging to your system.

4. Calories are not the whole picture, but they still count! High fibre, low refined carb diets control appetite more effectively than any other kind, but they are not a license to eat anything and everything in all quantities. At some point you need to look at the number of calories you’re consuming.

5. Keep a food diary! Virtually every nutritionist agrees a food diary is the most important tool in your arsenal. Studies have shown that people who have lost weight successfully and kept it off virtually always use this tool. You should too.

6. Eat protein at every meal! Protein raises your metabolic rate and may also, through the action of specific amino acids, cause you to lose fat rather than muscle, thus helping to reshape your body and make you a more effective calorie burner. Take at least three to four ounces at each meal.

7. The more vegetables the better! These foods are fibre rich, and loaded with phytonutrients. High-fibre foods are an essential part of any weight loss strategy.

8. Eat without distractions! Try to train yourself to eat without television or other distractions. Unconscious eating is the enemy of weight loss.

9. Exercise alone is not the best way to take off weight but it’s one of the best ways to keep it off! Few people can lose significant amounts of weight just by exercising. Yet if you don’t exercise, you have a poor chance of keeping weight off. With it, you have a much better chance of your diet being effective.