3 simple rules can help to make your weight loss efforts a success.

In a study, the women who were most successful at losing weight kept track of their food intake in a journal, didn’t skip meals and avoided eating out.

“This study highlights the important strategies for maintaining weight loss over time, including self-monitoring through [food diaries], regular eating patterns and a healthy food environment [by minimizing eating out),” said Dr. Anne N. Thorndike, of Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study.
Thorndike said she was not surprised by the three habits that led to the greatest success. “These findings really mirror what I see in clinical practice,” she said.

Does eating late make you gain weight?

There are those who would say that calories are calories and as long as you don’t consume more than you use then you won’t gain weight.

But the research has shown that it is a bit more complicated than that.

There are optimal times for our body to burn fat and one is at night.

New studies reveal that to burn the most fat, you need to go 12 hours without eating—say, from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. So it’s smart to time your calorie intake accordingly.

You’re most likely to make healthy food choices when you’re not tired.

Choose nutritious foods and don’t eat when it’s dark outside.

Pretty simple.

For optimal nutrient digestion and absorption, eating on a schedule may be the best way to help your body keep off excess weight.

This may be the overlooked factor in the weight loss equation.

“Every organ has a clock,” said study researcher Satchidananda Panda, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. That means there are times that our livers, intestines, muscles and other organs work at peak efficiency, and other times when they are — more or less — sleeping, Panda said.
These metabolic cycles are critical for processes such as cholesterol breakdown, and they should be turned on when we eat and turned off when we don’t, Panda said. When mice or people eat frequently throughout the day and night, it can throw off those normal metabolic cycles, he added.

There always seems to be some new gimmick when it comes to weight loss and Dr. Mark Liponis, author of The Hunter/Farmer Diet Solution is offering up his.

Liponis posits that these two types have different body compositions, and fat storing mechanisms which could benefit from either a hunter or farmer based diet.

“These people are really very different kinds of people, and they need different eating strategies and different diets to lose weight,” Liponis said. “The hunter is the one who is putting on weight more around the middle of the body….The farmer puts on weight more under the skin and in the hips, the thigh area.”

New Year’s resolutions are just around the corner and most of us create a list of changes that would daunt even the most Herculean of wills.

First, if you’re thinking about committing to improving your health in 2012, you’ll have plenty of company. A little over half of the people we surveyed said they’ll resolve to exercise more. More than a third will resolve to lose weight. And 13 percent say they’ll commit to either quitting smoking or reducing how much they smoke

Be realistic with your goals and start with little steps.

A small change can lead to big results.

.