Makin it real and fellow weight watchers,

I have just a touch of a cold. At the first sign of a cold I take Zicam and Echinaeca, these build up your immune system and I really feel pretty good. Shoveled snow for about an hour today and no problems.

Weight 230 this morning before shoveling.

Since we are giving tips please allow me to do so also. Just so you know I know a lot about losing weight. I used to be a high school and college wresting coach and I taught health classes including Diet and Exercise. Here is a good exercise tip fro burning calories. Go out in the cold and walk, no need for heavy exercise. When you are cold the body uses up calories to produce heat. The night before tournaments we would weight in and if one of my wrestlers wasn't on weight, we'd go out in the cold and walk for about an hour, this was less hard on the body than running around in a sweat suit like so many wrestlers did. We never had any one miss weight.

Another tip is water! Most of us don't drink enough water and it is important to drink a lot of it when we are trying to lose weight. Think of it as flushing out the system. I think that most of my wieght loss is because I am drinking a lot of water durning the day. I read a study the other day saying that in a research project people on a diet lost 14-15 lbs more ,on average, than a control group, when they drank a pint (16 oz) of water before meals. Another tip is that if you want to speed you metabolism up (you do on a diet) drink 16 oz COLD water as soon as you get up. this will kick up the metabolism. I have a hard time with this because I don't like cold stuff when I get up in the morning. Give me HOT COFFEE!

Another thing to remember when you are getting close to your target weight. Often times your weight loss slows down, especially if you are doing any type of exercise. One of the reasons for this is that you are no longer carrying around so much extra weight. Just carrying aorund that weight burns calories. So when you don't have it any more your body doesn't burn as many calories as it did when you started. To counter act this you can do a bit more exercise especially resistance training. This makes your muscles bigger and that helps you burn calories even at rest.

Please forgive me if I sound like I am preaching to you. Once a coach and teacher always a coach and teacher. Except now I'm prettier!