Diet tips

1. Eat vegetables. 

Not only will you stay skinny, you'll be so healthy!! This was probably the biggest benefit I've had while going on a diet - you eat lots of vegetables. Not only are most of them low in calories, they are so good for you and you'll start to replace all your junk with fresh vegies. A lot of vegetables have a lot of carbs too, but these types of carbs unlike carbs found in white rice and bread make you stay fuller for longer so you are actually less hungry. Crazy right? Healthy skinny and less hungry on a DIET?? Can't be right. Stay away from starchy vegetables like potatoes though, they aren't the most nutritious or low in calories. I've started eating a lot more lettuce, cabbage, tomato and cucumber.

2. Replace certain high calorie foods with alternatives. 

When you are craving something, try and find the lowest calorie option. If you go to the supermarket and actually read labels, you'll be crazily surprised how big a difference just reading a label can make to your body. For example I was craving choc mousse, and the diet nestle mouse I found was 69 calories per tub. The alternative choc mouse form other brands were a crazy 150-200 calories a tub. They both would curb my craving but I took the skinny way out.

3. Avoid sugary drinks. 

A great alternative is to replace soft drinks and sweet drinks with tea. Or replace coke with coke zero or diet coke. The difference in calories is about 100 calories per can and they both taste similar. Seriously crazy.

4. Eat more often but eat smaller portions. 

I am a grazer, I love to eat all the time and during my whole diet I ate just as often as I'd normally eat so I didn't feel like I was missing out at all. Just make sure you eat less. The portions that take away stores serve is way to much for a small girl like me. I can split them in half and eat them over 2 meals and save money. Put half your food aside before you start eating.

5. Swap it don't stop it! 

I stole this clever line off the new health awareness program the government is running, but it's so valid. Don't stop eating it cause it'll just make you go into withdrawal and you'll end up eating more later. If you feel like junk, try and eat less and balance it with healthy food that's low in calories. For example I totally felt like Maccas one night and I thought I was going to break my diet - but I had been eating so healthy that my body was just like nooo give me fat and oil. I found out that the good old maccas hamburger was only about 250 calories and I also found out that getting a tissue and simply blotting some of the excess oil off the patty can save you up to 50 calories. Not like you'd miss the dripping fat anyways. So I blotted it and shoved a whole lot of lettuce in between the buns and had the best junk food fix without spending much of my food budget at all! Compare it to a big mac meal which is about 1100 calories and pretty much my whole daily intake. No thanks I'd rather eat a bunch of healthy food and not go hungry than one Maccas meal and thats it.

6. Try not to eat out or eat foods that don't have a label. 

This is probably the hardest thing to adjust to. If you are used to eating out a lot, this may be a huge change for you. When you don't know what goes in your food, it's hard to stick to your diet. For example, if one tablespoon is 125 calories, it just takes the restaurant or food outlet one tablespoon of ingredients to totally throw you off your diet. Just that little bit of extra oil, or using sub par ingredients can make you fat. A good alternative is to make sure you exercise the day you are eating out - this will give you some calories to work with. Or you can eat less, order vegetables or order an entree. A lot of girls in Japan will not eat out for this very reason. If you walk around the fast food chains and resteraunts (and mind you they have a lot healthier ones then we do) there are very few women. Japanese people are obsessed with staying slim so I'm not surprised.

7. Watch your carbs. 

We've all heard about the no carb diet, but I don't believe that cutting carbs out is a good idea, or that it will even make a difference to your figure. A lot of articles support this, however white refined carbs actually carry a lot of calories per gram then other foods. This is a reason to avoid carbs or at least reduce it. Think of filling your plate or bowl with 1/3 carbs and the rest vegetables. This will radically reduce the number of carbs you eat without really making you any less hungry. Carbs is poor mans food anyways ;).

8. Use tools that make it that much more fun.

This is my climax! I've totally run out of tips from the top of my head and I'm saving this to last. My major reason for being able to stay on a diet (I've never been able to before) is because of this one App I downloaded. It made it fun!! It's called MyFitnessPal and it's the best weight loss app ever. It calculates my daily calorie limit based on my height weight exercise and goal weight and tell me how many calories I can consume everyday. When I add food to my diary, a lot of he popular foods is already inputted by other users and you can just search from it's huge library of foods and add it in really quickly. If you eat something often and it's not on there, you can add it in and it'll add it to the list and remember it for you so next time you add it in you can just look it up. I cannot recommend this enough!! You can also add friends and keep track of progress!! Once you enter in the calories you ate for the day it'll tell you how much weight you will lose! Full motivation. If you want to join me in this diet journey you can add me on MyFitnessPal by using my username: wengir (it was supposed to be wengie but I typoed with my fat fingers and couldn't change it...my bad :/) I've attached some screenshots so you know what it looks like

This is your daily food diary that counts down the amount of calories you can eat.

This is what it looks like when you are adding something, you can just search.

This is an awesome motivating screen that you see when you finish your diary!! (ignore the warning...I'm trying to lose weight faster!)

9. Drink diet tea

Drinking tea before a meal (and after) helps you burn an extra 60-70 calories, and therefore increases your metabolism. There's many articles online that swears about the benefits of green tea, and it's probably the secret to how the Japanese stay so skinny.

Drinking tea before a meal, not only helps you burn more calories, but also fills you up that little bit so you eat a bit less.

I stumbled upon this girl on instagram and she lost a crazy amount of weight, like from obese to friggin stick skinny and she said one of her secrets to her weight loss apart from boot camp was diet tea. So I went crazy trying to search for this diet tea. Not only does Oprah has lost weight from this tea, but so many people sweat by it. So I bought it.

You drink it before your meal and after your meal and at least 6 times a day. It is a type of green tea as well and tastes pretty good, in fact I'm pretty addicted to it now. The secret to it is that it blocks your body from absorbing oil.

After I drink the tea, I check my toilet, ew right, but seriously you can see a layer of oil thats been flushed out. It's so disgusting but if I look skinny who cares right :)??

Also warning if you drink too much you may was to go to the toilet more often - but thats good cos it keeps your intestines clean and your stomach just goes heaps FLAT.