The Diet Zone: The Best Way To Maintain A Healthy Diet And Lose Weight

Here, we've gathered 25 classic tips from our favorite health and nutrition experts. These simple strategies may not be as sexy as the latest fad diet, but they're guaranteed to never go out of style. It'll energize you for the day and keep your diet in check. Have three small bites and put your fork down.

This will dramatically bump your calorie burn. Your metabolism slows down when you sleep so you shift from fat burning to fat storage.

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Adding lean muscle to your body not only tones, it also increases your metabolism. Without it, the appetite hormone ghrelin increases, which could result in weight gain. And schedule at least two three-minute breaks during the day to practice deep-breathing exercises. It will reduce the stress hormone cortisol, whichbuilds fat around your mid-section.

According to a study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics , dieters who eat out for lunch even once a week lose 5 fewer pounds on average. The brain detects a difference between where you are and where you want to be, so when you're specific, your brain throws resources like willpower at it.

Eat vegetables first to naturally have more of them and ultimately eat fewer calories. Take your cue from dieters on the National Weight Control Registry who've lost 66 pounds on average and kept it off: It will help you stay motivated. Mastering the art of maintenance is the key to making sure your goal weight turns into your new normal.

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Being very active goes beyond just burning calories. Exercise also triggers helpful biological systems: Hormones like epinephrine and adiponectin that cut down on your fat stores kick into high gear, actively incinerating flab up to 24 hours after your workout.

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Plus, "When you're more active, you feel better about yourself and you make better food choices and avoid couch-potato behavior," Dr. And as recent research from Stanford University School of Medicine shows, good habits truly reinforce each other. People who focused on changing both diet and exercise habits were significantly more likely to get in their regular workouts and to follow healthy eating plans than those who focused on either diet or exercise separately.

If you don't have time for a full hour of exercise every day, it's fine to break it up into spurts of activity. Doing 10 focused minutes here and there throughout the day is effectively equivalent to one big workout, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.

Tackle this 5-Minute Core Workout to start. You can get the same type of data through your smartphone with such free apps as Endomondo Sports Tracker.

There's an unfortunate side effect of losing weight: You tend to lose lean muscle along with the flab. This can also happen if you always skip the weight training in favor of cardio.

Since muscle burns more than twice as many calories as fat 7 to 10 calories for a pound of muscle compared with 2 or 3 calories for a pound of fat , the more muscle you keep, the higher your metabolism will be. This is important if you are going to maintain your new lean profile: In a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, twice as many people who did regular strength training lost weight and kept it off compared with those who didn't.

You don't have to make like a bodybuilder to get stronger. Sneak simple body-weight moves, like squats, push-ups, lunges and dips, and even strength-building yoga poses think Warrior 2 or Chair pose into your routine a few days a week, whether it's a set of each in the morning before your shower or a pre-dinner circuit. You'll hit all your major muscles in just a short workout.

For instructions on body-weight moves, go to health. A study from Harvard University shows that eating this type of food, which is low on the glycemic index a measure of how quickly certain foods are digested and how much they make your blood sugar spike , can help keep energy levels elevated, so you naturally burn about 20 percent more calories over the course of a day than you would following a low-fat diet. It's not a diet, but rather a balanced, realistic way of eating, which makes it, as Dr.