by Karr Veluz-Perez

Summer’s here and it’s time to flaunt those curves. Before you try to fit in your summer outfits, we’d like to help you out with a few weight management tips. We agree: launching plans of keeping a healthy body is indeed hard. But it is also necessary and easily doable. You only need to keep tab on your eating habits and lifestyle.

Start small.

As a Chinese philosopher famously said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” No matter how Herculean you think losing weight may be, just remember that you don’t need to do so overnight.

Try cutting small portions of your food one meal a day. Tomorrow, try two meals a day, until you eventually reduce all your meal servings. Start one step at a time. In time, you’ll get the weight that’s right for you.

Eat better.

Losing weight doesn’t mean not eating. Our body needs food to nourish itself and to enable us to do our everyday activities. To achieve a healthy body, we should adopt a healthy eating attitude characterized by:

* Variety. As much as you can, represent all the food groups in your every meal. Make sure your plate has more grains, dark green and orange vegetables, calcium-rich food, and fresh fruits; a lean portion of meat and other proteins; and less of oils and fats.

* Nutritional Content. Minimize eating food that are rich in saturated fats like red meat, poultry, and tropical oil, and trans fats like margarine, cookies, and fries. Get enough of potassium, fiber, vitamins A and C, calcium, and iron from fruits and vegetables and other foods like raisins, whole grain bread, liver, and cashew nuts.

* Right Pace. Some people skip meals thinking that doing so would help them lose weight. On the contrary, skipping meals only makes you even hungrier, thus making you eat more than you should. Also, try eating less amounts of food in a slower pace on more frequent intervals during the day. Doing so not only helps you carefully choose the food you eat. Diet studies even suggest that eating slower translates to fewer calorie intake.

Be active.

Starting on a healthier eating habit takes care of your body from now onwards. But what about the fat you’ve already accumulated in the past months or years? Exercise helps you take away all that. As you eat to fuel your body, exercise helps you burn all the excess calories to get you into shape.

Getting physically active doesn’t always mean hauling yourself off to gym. As we said, start small. Take a brisk 20- to 30-minute walk everyday from the transportation terminal to your office. You can also try taking the stairs instead of the lift. If you love dancing, you can enroll yourself in a dance class. Not only will it burn a lot of calories, but it also won’t feel like exercising at all.

As you progress on your exercise regimen, you can start taking on more serious activities such as enrolling in a gym, or taking on sports like swimming, karate, mountain climbing, and the like.