There are countless weight loss articles providing you with tips to avoiding food temptations. Sure, having healthy food choices on hand is one way to fight the urge to reach for an unhealthy snack but… temptation is everywhere! Vending machines, grocery check-outs, lunch rooms, shopping mall food courts, need I continue? Finding something high in fat, sugar, and calories is far easier than we realize.

[An artisty take on Adam and Eve's apple temptation story. If this isn't photoshopped then double kudos to the photographer!]

It seems advertisers have been utilizing images of tasty dishes to persuade people to buy their products forever. However, do I really get week in the knees when I see a picture of a succulent, juicy, well-seasoned burger? Not even close and it sounds like I may not be alone. According to researchers in the Netherlands, food temptation might in fact strengthen one’s self-control. (more…)

Looking at the food court in a local shopping mall today I thought about these two questions:

How many people have calories on their mind?

Do any of them count calories?

I’m gonna go out on the proverbial limb here and say probably none of them.

Harsh? Maybe. But I too was once a frequent visitor of the common food courts eating fattening foods and feeling my clothes getting tighter by the fry. So chalk this up to experience.

After several failed attempts at losing weight, I finally took some responsibility and found an unlikely weapon against fat-> The PENCIL!

[I used to yawn or skip right over any talk about goal setting. But after giving it a go in my fat loss journey, I'm using it everywhere now!]

Keeping a Food Journal

In the beginning, I tried keeping a food journal but it never lasted more than a few days at a time. It was time consuming and an inconvenient exercise to calculate all of those calories ingested over the course of a day. In the end, calories were either forgotten or grossly under-estimated.
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