Slim down for summer: 3 tips for long-term weight loss success

1. Pre-plan your eating and read labels

Pre-planning sets you up for daily success. It might seem backwards to think more about all of your meals and snacks ahead of time because it's natural to believe you want to think less about food when you're trying to lose weight.
The biggest lesson for pre-planning is that you'll avoid skipping meals. When you structure your eating, you automatically structure your day for healthy eating. Meal skipping always leads to overeating at the next meal.
While you might not "feel hungry," your body biologically recognizes when you haven't eaten for many hours and compensates with a boost in your appetite that's nearly impossible to ignore the next time you eat. When Bibi and Joann started pre-planning their eating day, the structure helped them stay on track.

While it often looks like an encyclopedia on the back of a package, it's most important to look for two things on the label when you're working on weight loss: calories per portion and how many calories in the package. It's easy to get confused when a package looks like a single serving, but can contain two or more — boosting the number of calories. It's not just snack foods that are tricky. Joann found that whole wheat pita bread might list the serving size as a "half" pita, but it's not cut in half in the package, so it's easy to eat two servings.

2. Be a smart snacker or eliminate snacking altogether

New studies show it's not necessary to snack to maintain good health or lose weight. There's no biological need to fuel all day for most healthy people. For many, eating less often helps them identify true hunger. But a calorie-controlled smart snack or two daily can help boost your energy, avoid deprivation and help keep you on track to limit overeating at the next meal.
Hunger signals can vary, and often a modest snack of around 100-150 nutrient-rich calories can help satisfy true hunger. But even healthy calories add up, so monitoring snack calories is a must-do for weight loss success.

Read the article here:   http://www.today.com/health/slim-down-summer-3-tips-long-term-weight-loss-success-t89401