Dealing with Cravings

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When it comes to dealing with Cravings Jillian has some great tips:

Don’t skip meals. You should be eating three square meals a day, plus one snack, and spacing your meals throughout the day so that you don’t go longer than four hours without eating. This will keep your blood sugar levels and hunger hormones stable.

Drink tons of water. When you feel as if you’re starving, pour yourself a huge glass of water or grab a bottle of seltzer — it will help quell the urge to snack.

Sleep! Two hormones, leptin and ghrelin, regulate our appetite, and both are directly affected by how much sleep we get. These hormones work in a kind of “checks and balances” system to control feelings of hunger and fullness. Getting eight hours of shut-eye each night helps the hormones work properly, which in turn will help curb your appetite.

Examine your hunger. The next time you feel hungry between meals, consider the last time you ate. If it was less than three to four hours earlier, your stomach isn’t growling, and you’re not weak or tired, you’re probably emotionally unsatisfied in some way rather than genuinely physically hungry.

Think about what, besides eating, soothes you. Steer yourself toward positive feelings of self-worth and you’ll choose activities and behaviors that inherently contradict self-loathing and self-destructiveness.

Don’t panic. You can and will lose weight. Even if you’re eating a little more than the meal plan calorie allowance, you can still lose — it just might take a little longer. Exercise is also crucial. Working out harder and more often will help burn the extra calories you might take in if you have a bad day.

Do not beat yourself up! Sometimes we slip up, and that’s okay — healthy living is not an all-or-nothing proposition. I’m here for you, and I know you can do this. Believe in yourself and try to incorporate my suggestions into your life, and let’s see how you do.

Enjoy Foods You Love Without Cheating

Here’s a big mistake people make when they set out to lose weight: They say to themselves, “Okay, I’m on a diet, so I’m never eating [insert tempting high-calorie food here] again.” And then, inevitably, they slip up and binge on that food. They beat themselves up about it, write off their entire healthy-living experiment as a failure, and give up.

Sound familiar?

Living a healthy life is all about balance. You have to learn how to walk a line between self-denial and self-indulgence. It’s the middle ground between the two that offers the best foundation on which to build your new life. Denying yourself little pleasures such as the occasional glass of wine or chocolate truffle will only make you feel deprived, frustrated, and ultimately hopeless about maintaining your discipline. A temptation is a lot less powerful if it isn’t totally forbidden. This is where moderation comes in.

I will never be able to give up all the edible goodies life has to offer, but by practicing moderation I’ve found a solution to my weaknesses that I can live with every day. There’s room for all foods, no matter how “bad” they are; it’s just a matter of being conscious and careful of how often you eat them and how much. It’s fine to have a piece of cake now and then — just not every day, and not the whole cake.

I can already hear what you’re thinking: “If I eat a little bit, I’ll want it all.” We all have at least one food that we truly can’t eat a little of without going overboard. Mine is ice cream. If you know that a particular food has that kind of trigger effect on you, try choosing an alternative. I will often have a few bites of organic dark chocolate instead of ice cream so that my sweet tooth will be satisfied but I won’t end up with an empty ice cream carton in my hands. If your weakness is potato chips, try having some air-popped popcorn as a snack instead. Trust me — in time you can adapt so that small amounts of “cheat” foods will not set you off on a binge.

Jillian’s New Shred It With Weights DVD is coming in in less than two weeks. For more information read here.

Jillian Michaels Getting Humped by Her Dog can be viewed on her facebook video page

Free Checkups

Don’t let money be the reason you don’t get checked out. Jillian mentioned these resources lately on her Facebook page. She said, “We’ve posted the url for the free medical clinics again on the JM.com homepage and done some additional research on some national resources you may wish to check out as well: US Dept of Health & Human Services: http://findahealthcenter.hrsa.gov/Search_HCC_byAddr.aspx; National Association of Free Clinics…: http://www.freeclinics.us/; National nonprofit dental care org: http://dentistryfromtheheart.org/. We’re preparing a blog with multiple helpful resource links to post on the free and member sites.