The secret to Christmas weight loss is to bring your own snacks to the office, or wherever you hang out every day, instead of eating all the rich things brought in by your friends and coworkers. Fudge, cookies, cheese, pies, brownies, dips, chips and more are usual workplace fare from right now until the first of the new year. You may even be looking forward to that special goody brought in by the best cook you work with, even though you know is is fattening as all get out. Well, what would happen if you had a healthy snack ready when your friend Maggie brings in her killer bean dip with that contains 10 grams of fat per scoop? You would be ready to resist the temptation to pig out on something that is extremely unhealthy and you would be on your way to Christmas weight loss and winning that battle for years to come.

We have a bunch of healthy recipes that you can make that will help you fill up and resist the fattening foods. On that link you will find all kinds of snacks, desserts, trail mixes, energy bars, cookies and more. The trick is, when you eat foods that are more nutritious than the sugary foods offered around the Christmas holidays, you body is getting the fuel that it needs. When you a filled up on the proper fuel, you then won’t crave he junk that is bad for you.

Try it. Eat only healthy foods, and plenty of them, around this time of year and see if you don’t have some weight loss around the holidays. You will be glad you ate healthy when everyone else is going on a diet on January 2nd and you are already way ahead of the game.

Many people with all that extra fat around their stomach do a lot to hide it. They wear bigger clothes, or clothes that emphasize other parts of their body so their large stomach won’t be noticed. While it is unhealthy to carry around excess body fat, it is exceptionally dangerous to  have excess abdominal fat! Studies have shown that excessive abdominal fat in particular can be a major indicator of heart disease.

Find out more about the dangers of too much abdominal fat and how to help reduce it…

If you have been doing this for a while and have reached a plateau in your weight loss efforts, pump up the intensity by doing interval exercises a few times a week. Interval training combines short periods of working fast or intensely followed by another period where the workout is slower. Yes, it is exercise, but it is fun and it actually livens up your body and mind.

These workouts should not last longer than twenty minutes when you are starting out, but should also be no shorter than ten minutes. One of the easiest ways to do this is to walk or jog a flight of stairs. Going up is the intense portion of the workout, going down is easier. If you enjoy swimming, but are not getting the workout you used to, try free-styling for one lap and backstroking the next. The backstroke can be slow and easy. Regardless of what you choose, make sure the fast or harder portion of the workout is intense. This will help you burn the maximum number of calories in the shortest period of time.

There are a multitude of ways to lose weight and exercise in the process so you will be healthy when those extra pounds are gone and to help insulate you from those pounds ever returning.

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Vacation time also happens in the summer and many people such as yourself go to beach resort areas all over the world, or wear shorts when they go hiking in the mountains and like to look a little better and not carry as much weight around. The key to losing the weight you want in preparation for summer beach weather or taking a summer vacation is to exercise, eat highly nutritious foods and find a suitable weight loss program if you can’t lose weight through your own dieting and exercise.

If you check out our diet plan archives page you can see the many weight loss programs we’ve reviewed here on Weight Loss Diet Plans and from there you can read about the good diets and the not so good diets. But for starters, here are the top most recommended diets we write bout and feature on our blog, for quick reference for your summer weight loss plan.

FBF Diet Plan – The FBF diet is also know by its full name as the Fat Burning Furnace diet and is based on the principle that if you eat the right kind of foods during the right time of day and get moderate amounts of exercise, you body will naturally burn more calories because of increased metabolism and that in turn will help you to lose the weight you want.

FBF Weight Loss – This is exactly the same thing as the Fat Burning Furnace, but many people refer to it, and search for it by sing the term FBF weight loss. Learn how getting your entire muscle system involved will help you lose weight a lot easier.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots – This is one of the most popular weight loss programs available on the internet today and sold somewhere around 500,000 copies in 2008 so you know it must be a popular and effective way to lose weight. One of the highlights of this weight loss program is that it comes with an online diet generator where you just put in what you like to eat and it sets you up with an eating plan for all week. It couldn’t be more simple.

The Truth About Abs – Many people want to get a flat stomach or want to get those six pack ripped abs you see on the cover of fitness magazines and they usually try some sort of abs workout machine or do 500 crunches and day and then they’re bummed out when nothing happens. The truth is, most of these machines are ripoffs because you can’t really spot reduce fat from any specific part of your body, you have to lose it all over your body.

There are exercises you can do to get great abs, but unless you are eating right and get the fat off of what’s on top of your abs, they will never show through that layer of fat. The Truth About Abs explains the myths about abs exercise and shows you how to eat, how to exercise and how to do cardio so you will eventually have great looking abs.

That wraps it up for how to get ready for summer weight loss, so get out, get some exercise and start the diet that’s right for you from the ones we reviewed above.

We will show examples of a bad belly fat diet followed by a diet that helps you reduce belly fat and lose up to nine pounds a week. A typical, traditionally healthy breakfast contains low-fat yogurt and a banana. However, the banana has 14 grams of sugar and the yogurt has 31 grams, three times the amount of sugar the Belly Fat Cure recommends in a day. Smoothies are great low-fat meal replacements as an alternative to sugary cereals or prepackaged oatmeal. The downside is that a standard smoothie has 84 grams of sugar. This causes insulin levels to spike and prevents us from achieving our weight loss goals.

The 100-calorie snack packs seem like a great alternative to candy, but due to the amount of preservatives in them they have ten grams of sugar. For dinner, there’s grilled chicken breast with barbeque sauce. While the chicken is a low-fat meal, the sauce has 17 grams of sugar per serving. If you add fat-free chocolate milk to it, you also add 54 grams of sugar. This totals more than 200 grams of sugar in a day. For a Belly Fat Cure menu, start the day with a vegetable omelet with cheese, coffee with cream and a natural sugar substitute for meal with zero grams of sugar.

Have a panini chicken sandwich with bacon, cheese and pickles for a satisfying lunch with zero grams of sugar, but plenty of fat with the cheese, chicken and bacon. For a snack, have individual cheese balls. They also have no sugar. For dinner, keep the grilled chicken, but replace the barbeque sauce with pasta and vegetables. Add a glass of wine or unsweetened ice tea and 86% dark chocolate for dessert, and you have a meal with only 5 grams of sugar. That’s 195 grams less than the “healthy” meals. The Belly Fat Cure shows you how to choose foods that help lower insulin levels and lose weight. But because of the author’s obvious lack of belief in fat reduction (cheese and bacon on your checken sandwich) we can’t recommend this diet.

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The program is individualized once people join the weight loss center, and they are given one-on-one counseling and supervision to help them along the way. The great thing about this diet is that medical conditions are taken into account, and a food program is designed based on regular food, allowing everyone to get what they need.

The Slim4Life diet does have supplements that go along with the nutritional foods that are suggested to people. The program allows for a 1,500 calorie diet for most people depending on their age, health, and how much weight they need to lose. The diet itself is designed to be high in vitamins and minerals and low in fat, carbs, and sodium. This particular program even offers a plan for vegetarians because some consider meat is a critical part of the basic diet for everyone involved unless they are a vegetarian.

Come back for the continuation of our review on Slim4Life.

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As far as we see it here at Weight Loss Diet Plans, it depends very much on how you modify your favorite foods so they still taste good, but have less calories. The rage today is to cut the sugar calories out of food by substituting an artificial sweetener for sugar. That’s nothing but bad news there. It is much better for you to put the real thing in your body instead of an artificial chemical soup.

Healthy Decadence also has a book to go with the show, allowing everyone to get the recipes that they want and the advice that they need on the go, and offering a new way to learn how Devin does everything that she does. You can take any food and make it healthy and tasty according to Devin Alexander, which is why she wrote the book and does the show. Her only goal is to share her love of cooking and food with others, and let them in on the secret that they can have what they want, as long as they are careful. Just make sure you know what you are really eating.

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Devin lost 55 pounds over 15 years ago and has maintained it ever since by simply making slight alterations in her food to cut the fat and calories without cutting out all of the good stuff. While you can lose weight by eating a diet such as this, you may not be getting the nutrition your body really needs. Double chocolate brownies may taste good, but are the the best kind of food that your body really needs?

Healthy Decadence is a new adventure for Devin, who started with a cookbook in 2006 titled Fast Food Fix, giving healthy versions of fast food favorites for people who struggled with diets and healthy eating because of these tempting pit-stops. She wrote the Biggest Loser Cookbook that same year, which was her second book. She has also been a food editor, culinary advisor, and written many other articles on food and healthy eating. She is the owner and executive chef of a restaurant in L.A. known as Café Renee Catering, and used to be an assistant teacher at the Westlake Culinary Institute.

Come back tomorrow to learn more about what’s called the Healthy Decadence way of eating.

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Cook Yourself Thin requires a low monthly membership fee for those who want access to all of the tools and recipes that they offer, and rightly so. The fees start at $17.99 per month, but goes down if you choose a quarterly membership or a six-month membership and pay up front. It’s your call, but any of the options will get you the inside scoop on what this website has to offer.

The site gives clients an exercise database and a food database, allowing them to track activity and foods consumed to maximize their results with the program. You can easily learn how many calories you burned during your workout and get a great recipe for a healthy dinner all in one place with this website.

There is an entire section for setting goals on the website, allowing you to set goals for how much weight you want to lose and modify your plan if you want to lose more or less along the way. Ultimately, the Cook Yourself Thin website is a great program to help anyone learn about weight loss, create and track goals and successes, and to interact with other people who are going through the same experience.

It’s not about losing weight so much with Cook Yourself Thin. That is the ultimate outcome, of course, but it tends to be more about living a healthy life and making good decisions about food and exercise, which is the big focus in the diet world right now. A diet is great, but a lifestyle change is even better because it is permanent. Basically, it goes along with the whole ‘teach a man to fish’ philosophy. If you give people healthy food, they’ll be thin for a while. You teach them how to create healthy food and life choices, and they’ll be healthy and thin forever.

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Here are the top 10 diet and weight loss plans for the new year, and some information on them, as they are appearing in Google Insights right now:

Taco Bell Diet – I wonder if the conscience of the fast food giants are finally getting to them. It seems as if all the major fast food restaurants are getting in on the act. We don’t buy it though. These companies have never served nutritious food and we can hardy believe they will do it now. It’s just about the marketing, nothing else. This is the latest diet fad joke.

Drive Thru Diet – This is just another name for the gimmicky Taco Bell Diet. Give me a break.

Flat Belly Diet – This diet book was written by the Editor In Chief of Prevention Magazine and contains customized meal plans a cookbook and even shopping lists.

Special K Diet – What? You’re going to lose weight by eating cereal? Another gimmick weight loss diet. Where’s the nutrition in this diet? Yes, you can probably lose weight if you eat cereal, but you  can also lose weight if you starve yourself.

Fat Belly Diet – Watch the diets and exercise machines that tell you that you can lose fat in a specific part of your body. To lose belly fat, you have to lose fat all over your body and it will eventually go away from your stomach.

Weight Watchers – Of course, weight watchers is one of the most well known and popular diets in existence today. Millions have used their methods and it has worked for some and not for others. Be warned though, it is expensive to be on the Weight Watchers program.

Biggest Loser Diet – This is the diet and exercise program made famous by the hit NBC reality TV program and if you have ever watched the show, you know that it works for people that need to lose a lot of weight. Don’t forget though, the coaches on Biggest Loser, Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper, work their losers extremely hard. It’s great to have a personal coach.

South Beach Diet – Another diet book that has turned into a sensation. What was once just a book is now food, exercise programs, many more books, supplements and more. Some love this program, but it is complicated in that you have to keep track of everything you eat.

Diet Plans – Happy New Year! What’s your diet plan for this year. We cover more than one hundred on our site. Please take the time to read about them.

Cleanse Diet – There are lots of cleansing diets on the market,  such as colon cleansers, detox diets and more. Some are completely unnecessary and some work well. However a diet of mostly fresh fruits and vegetables will give you most all of the cleansing and detox you need.

Now that you had a chance to briefly read about some of the more popular diets people are searching for today, read about the top 2 diets we recommend most here at Weight Loss Diet Plans. And if you want to work on your abs and get a killer 6 pack, you own it to yourself to find out the Truth About Abs.