Cornerback6 said:
Stop drinking pop & beer. Of course, this is not easy, but how bad do you want to lose this weight? An individual wo drinks 3 cans of either a day could drop up to 5 lbs. in two weeks just by cutting these alone. It's hard to do, but simple in concept.
Quoted for truth.
Everytime you drink something 'flavored,' particularly beverages that are enhanced with sweeteners, you are drinking something that will alter your insulin, your metabolism, and your mood. It may be dull, and it's easily been the most significant challenge in altering my diet to be more healthy, but I've eliminated Pepsi (which I had had a near dependant-like addiction to), reduced my coffee intake from nearly half a pot to just a single cup in the morning, and now drink my doctor recommended 6 - 8 glasses of water every day, along with more milk and pure juices.
For example, I have a mini-fridge in my office, and used to drink more than a twelve pack of Pepsi per week just in the afternoons at work, which doesn't even count what I'd drink when I get home at about 5:30. At present, since changing my diet two weeks ago, I've got eight cans of Pepsi left out of a twelve pack I bought two weeks ago. I occassionally 'reward' myself with one, but now it's one can every three or four days rather than three cans every day.
If you're serious about changing your diet to something more healthy, and (like me) are probably bringing over a lot of vices in the process (drinking, smoking, caffeine dependancy) you should start at Google and begin reading as much as you can about nutrition and specifically how caffeine and refined sugars affect your metabolism and insulin. A proper diet, whether targeting fat loss or gaining mass, is useless if you don't understand how insulin works in your body; that alone will help you construct a healthy diet that will ward off a half-dozen of the most common diseases that are rampant in the American population today.
I would also encourage prospective dieters to avoid 'diet' drinks like the plague. Read a little about aspartame (NutraSweet -- Diet Coke) and sucralose (Splenda -- Diet Rite) and how these chemically altered sugars affect your body.
My new 'diet' isn't a fad diet or specific low-carb, high-protein, south beach/atkins type thing ... rather it's more of an 'evolutionary' diet. If what I'm eating doesn't occur naturally in the course of nature, e.g. if it didn't exist 10,000 years ago, it's probably not good for me. Essentially, if an ingredient has more than three syllables, I'll be avoiding it.
