How To Shop Till You Drop And Lose Pounds Whilst You Do It

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Enjoy quality time with your close friends to shape your beautiful wardrobe, thighs and bottom too!  Every woman knows how fabulous a shopping expedition can be.  Yet can regular trips to your favourite shops hold the key to successfully shedding the necessary pounds?

Let’s count numbers.  It takes at least 20 minutes if not more to walk down Oxford Street after eyeing up the windows but do you really care exactly how many calories you burn as a result?  You will be having far too much fun to notice surely?  There’s all the department stores en route to visit, a new blouse to try on, winter coats to mull over, the gorgeous trousers to re-try for the millionth time, after all, you’ve got to be sure that your bottom looks small in that outfit right? 

Sound familiar?  I wouldn’t be surprised if a woman normally spends at least 2 snappy hours on her feet scouring the clothing racks in hot pursuit of the next divine outfit that will set her heart on fire.

Shopping may be an unexpected way of burning energy, but when you move your body, hey presto you use up energy.  Every savvy shopper knows that she needs both hands free for a successful shop, which means that not even a single hand can be spared for snacking when trying on clothes.  Perfect.

BENEFITS OF SHOPPING

Boost in mood

Burn calories unexpectedly

Awareness of body shape and clothing size

Can be done solo or with a friend

Window shopping is also a very enjoyable form of exercise, don’t you think?  Your purse will love you, and so will your hips and thighs for the gentle but fun workout.  Make this a regular activity and it will be impossible not to notice any weight that does creep up on you.  After all, you will be trying on clothes every week, which allows you to take control of any major changes in dress sizes straight away.  Remember, a size 10 in Karen Millen is not the same as a 10 in another store.  Different cuts and styles in clothing may require a change in dress size, but an increase from the usual size 10 to a 12 after a holiday of indulgent eating may very well indicate a true weight gain.

At this point you may need a beady eye over your usual intake and exercise regime.  For this scenario see Let's Number Crunch: How To Drop Half A Kilo In A Week.

With only a few months to go before Christmas, it’s easy to be put off by the crowds and lead you to settle for online shopping.  Although this is both effective and time efficient, shopping whilst surfing the internet reaps no rewards in terms of weightloss.  Why not try late night shopping on a Thursday or Friday night when the heaving shops might be a little bit quieter?  This promotes the opportunity for burning calories, whilst also reducing the likelihood of you heading to the shops for returns on purchases that didn’t quite fit ‘right’.

In summary, walking is a fantastic energy burner and you will do plenty of it when you spend a couple of hours on your feet exploring the shops.  You may not burn as many calories when compared to a run or a swim, but it doesn’t matter.  It’s great to mix up the type of activities that you do during the week.

Have fun and don’t forget to draw up a budget before you hit the shops!

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Ginger Greatness: Can It Curb Your Appetite?

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It’s a beautiful thought, but does eating ginger lead to your most wanted figure?  You know, that drop dead gorgeous body that you’ve been pining after?  A skinny you with ginger might be stretching the truth a bit too far, but cooking with ginger is still very pleasurable.  So are you cooking with ginger?  If not, then here are a few reasons to ginger up.

The word ginger immediately makes one think of herbal remedies based on this aromatic root for reducing symptoms of nausea.  Of great interest is the recent study published in Metabolism this year.  In this small study of 10 overweight men, a hot beverage consisting of 2g of ginger powder resulted in greater fullness and reduced feelings of hunger when consumed at breakfast.

It’s not earth shattering evidence but it’s not completely unattractive information either.  If you need to be enticed further, there is some chit chat in Malaysia as published in the British Journal of Nutrition that ginger may be useful in diabetes via its anti hyperglycaemic effect.

In the world of research involving rats, a study in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research in 2011 found that after 6 weeks of a diet consisting of ginger resulted in decreased adiposity or ‘fatness’.  The authors also concluded that ginger may have favourable effects on cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism but this work is excluded to mice only.

If you have found your new love for ginger then jump on board with these fabulous recipes that incorporate this spice.  See Chicken Curry Recipe and Sushila's Paneer Explosion. Ginger may seem spicy, but it actually creates lovely sweet & spicy aromas in dishes when cooked.  You can just as easily enjoy this in a cup of hot tea with breakfast.

Ginger Tea

¼ thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled and sliced into small pieces

½ teaspoon honey or brown sugar

1 tea bag

Directions

In a cup add ginger pieces, honey and tea bag.  Add boiling water and allow to brew for a minute.  Enjoy.

Purple Tip: You may wish to peel and chop your ginger in thumb sized pieces and freeze in re-sealable bags on the day of purchase.  This limits wastage and reduces prep time when you are ready to get your meal going in the evenings!  What a time saver!

Lovely readers what is your favourite way to cook with ginger?  Do comment below, I love hearing from you!

Let’s Number Crunch: How To Drop Half A Kilo In A Week

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 Clothes feeling a tad snug after the holidays?  If a kilo or two has snuck up on you over the holiday period, nip it straight away in the bud!  Get instinctive and reach for the fruit bowl rather than that gooey chocolate baking. 

I admit it, I do offer you many baking recipe ideas for a milk, egg, wheat and soy free diet on my blog, but anyone watching their weight must either enjoy these in what I now call ‘French like portion sizes’ or dismiss these entirely temporarily to get back on track to a lean you.

A loss of half a kilo or 1 pound per week is the recommended goal on an effective weight loss plan. This is realistic, achievable and won’t leave you starving (not too much...).

Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get it right and take ownership of your eating.  There’s no time like the present, let healthy eating grow on you and when you are ready, jump on the purple wheel of success.

Everybody else, get ready to start incorporating EASY and realistic steps.  To lose half a kilo per week, you need to cut back by roughly 500 calories from food or burn the equivalent in energy through exercise every day.  I like to accommodate a combination of the two. 

Here are a few tips to get you going.

Breakfast

If you usually eat toast with butter, not only is this meal smothered in saturated fats, two teaspoons of butter on a slice of toast provides nearly 70 calories (kcal).  If you add jam or honey sadly that’s extra. 

Purple Tip: Skip the butter or a use a thin scraping of margarine for poly-unsaturated fats only and save almost 50 calories.

Are you drinking orange juice for breakfast?  A cup of juice provides roughly 110kcal but the orange itself will set you back only 50-70 kcal.

Purple Tip: Choose to eat your fruit rather than drink it and save almost 60 calories.  As a bonus, you will also be locking in fibre, valuable vitamins and much needed minerals.

Morning Snack

Are you reaching for the biscuit tin?  Stop right there!  A chocolate digestive has at least 80 calories.  Have another with a cup of tea and that’s over 160 kcal.  There's very little fibre or vitamins and although takes only a minute on the lips, these really might end up being a lifetime on the hips.

Purple Tip: For a bootilicious bottom, choose fruit.  At most they only provide 50kcal like a cup of delicious strawberries.  These are what I call essential calories.  You will save up to 110 calories!

Lunch

If you buy lunch, read your labels.  Do you know exactly how many calories there are in your sandwiches?  Choose sandwiches with wholegrain breads and lean meat, chicken or fish.  Better still, make your own.

Purple Tip: Believe it or not, by making your own sandwiches, you will have control over how much added fats and spreads go into them.  By removing visible fats off meat, choosing thin scraping margarine and only meat or cheese and not both you can save anywhere between 100 to 200kcal depending on the sandwich.

Afternoon Snack

It’s 4pm and the chocolate monster is out.  Before you indulge in that chocolate bar, a 50g serving can set you back almost 250 calories!  Madness!

Purple Tip: Yoghurt is a wonderful source of protein and calcium.  Protein promotes satiety and that feeling of ‘fullness’.  A low fat pottle usually only consists of around 100 – 150kcal at the very most.  By choosing yoghurt you will save between 100 -150kcal.

So how are we doing?  It’s not even dinner meal and we’ve already saved at least 400 – 500 calories today.

Dinner

Eat your usual dinner but make sure you have plenty of vegetables to fill up on if you are hungry.

Exercise

Did you know that you can burn almost 500 calories from a 9K run?  This obviously depends on your body weight but running is a fantastic calorie burner.

An intense aerobic class at the gym for an hour could also burn around 500 calories though again this completely depends on the class and how much effort you invest into the class itself.

Don’t forget that walking is still a great fat burner.  The total amount of energy you burn will depend on how long you walk for and your body weight.  Good news, you can build up 10 minute slots of activity through-out the day.  They all count!  

Every time you move your body you are burning energy.

Swimming – if you can swim you’ll be bad not to race to the swimming pool at least once a week.  This really is an amazing total body work-out without the added burden on your joints.  Couple this with strength training such as lunges, squats, burpees, press ups and crunches and you’ll be one fat burning machine. 

Remember, for every kilogram of muscle you gain you’ll increase your metabolic rate and BURN calories even when you are not working out. 

Please don't get bogged down by calories and numbers.  These are only a few tips and suggestions to shave off extra calories or unwanted energy in your diet.  Use this only as a guideline and don’t forget to read your food labels and nutrition tables.  For more information read Be Shopping Savvy: Nutrition Labelling Decoded.

And so lovely readers, it's time for bed, if you have any thoughts or comments, please do share below as I love and do read all of your comments.