10 ways to lose 10 pounds

By Maureen Callahan
Reader's Digest Asia October 1996

Trying to shed a few extra pounds? Don't worry that you'll have to starve yourself or do grueling workouts. Studies show these efforts may shave off the pounds quickly, but they are not the route to long-term weight loss. Surprisingly, the best way to take off weight is by making small, barely noticeable adjustments in the way you eat and live. Here are ten simple strategies that can help melt away your fat forever:

1.Stop Skipping Meals
Slashing one meal per day from your menu seems like a logocal way to peel off a few pounds. For instance, if you stop eating breakfast (typically 500 calories ), you'll cut 3500 calories in seven days, roughly the amount needed to burn off one pound.

Trouble is, what you miss at one meal you often more than make up for at the next. In a recent study James Hill, a professor of nutrition, found that breakfast eaters consumed a diet lower in fat and higher in carbohydrates than breakfast skippers. hill believes that having breakfast may reduce the impulse for snacking on high-calorie, high-fat foods.

Obesity specialist Dr. C. Wayne Callaway says skipping any meal can lower metabolism, which normally speeds up to help digest food. Let's say your body at rest burns 1600 calories daily. If you skip breakfast, you use up 80 fewer calories per day. But if you eat breakfast, your sluggish metabolism revs up to burn those 80 calories. After about 15 months you could burn an extra 35,000 calories, the equivalent of ten pounds.