New Year's Resolution--Weight Loss

The title of today's post links to an informative article about 10 principles to consider when working toward weight loss or weight maintenance. I thought since we're still in the spirit of keeping resolutions, I'd offer some thoughts on the subject.

Over the years, I've gone through a few periods of weight gain, most notably the freshman 15 (as a result of eating french fries at every meal they offered them--which was most of them!) and twice during my life when illness has caused a long period of inactivity combined with medicine that made me gain weight.

After those times, the principles I used to get the weight off were as follows.

• Exercise. I put it on my schedule--I usually take scheduled aerobics classes (step is my favorite) so I feel obligated to go and don't have to decide whether or not to go. I also like working out with people and having someone tell me what to do.
• Calorie log. This is time-consuming but valuable. I learned a lot about what foods "cost" in terms of calories by looking them all up and totalling the day's amount. I've heard recently that just writing down "1 medium baked potato" or whatever you had to eat, even without the calorie amount, can be helpful.
• Being careful of what you eat. For one month, I gave myself a green star for each day I made good eating choices.
• And the new one this year: strength training. I'm including strength/toning exercises in my workouts twice a week (I do three total), and it's helping with weight and general slim-lookingness, which is a big part of the motivation, isn't it? ;)