Do or diet
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101 Things To Do Before You Diet
Want to feel, look and be slimmer without a diet in sight? Award-winning fashion and beauty journalist Mimi Spencer\'s new book 101 Things To Do Before You Diet believes you can. This is not a diet book, but a book which reveals how to free yourself from the tyranny of thin and develop positive relationships with your jeans, with your butter dish, with your world. Style guru Mimi offers immediate solutions to make the most of what you\'ve got in 11 chapters, which we\'ve handily distilled.
101 Things To Do Before You Diet, £12.99 published by Doubleday is out now.
Believe that you are beautiful
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Woman in bathrobe: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
You are already gorgeous. You just don\'t know it yet. To truly absorb this fundamental fact, you may well need to reset your Fat Goggles and recognise that carrying an few extra pounds is not a cardinal sin, no matter what the more pernicious quarters of the media would have you believe.
Stop worshipping thin and love the skin you\'re in
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Woman\'s body: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
While there\'s nothing sinister or odd about wanting to feel fit and healthy and look great in a pair of shorts, there is danger in persuading yourself that all the troubles of your world could be eliminated if only you slimmed down. So stop putting all your hopes and dreams into one skinny little packet. Recognise that being thin is not the same as having a good body. Know that thin can be thick (it won\'t make you bright - in fact, starving your body of essential nutrients is plain dumb). Once you\'ve gained perspective, you\'ll probably lose weight. Life\'s weird like that.
Eat a decent breakfast
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Woman eating breakfast: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
Unpredictable, unfulfilling or omitted meals make you hang on to fat stores in anticipation of the next period of food scarcity (whether it arrives or not). Thus, most of the guff you find in diet regimes will, by the laws of your very own body, backfire. In a five-year study of almost 7,000 men and women, researchers at Addenbrooke\'s Hospital in Cambridge found that those who ate the biggest breakfasts put on the least weight over a set period, despite consuming more food overall each day than those who ate sparingly in the mornings.
The following things are not food, so don\'t put them in your mouth:
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Woman eating a snack: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
‘Hand-held snacks\', ‘snacks on the go\' and ‘snack kits\'. If you can pick it, dip it, pop it - do yourself a favour. Drop it. Similarly, if you have to unpeel three layers of advertising to get at the nosh, it\'s probably not worth the bother.
Drink more soup
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Woman drinking soup: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
This is a stunningly simple way to eat less and still get a warm, full feeling in your bones. Soup, according to research from Penn State University, is a great appetite suppressant because it consists of a hunger-busting combination of liquids and solids; simply eat it before a meal (in the traditional way) and you can lower your overall calorie intake by up to 20 per cent compared to a meal without soup.
Eat heat
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Woman eating chilli: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
Avoid bland and snack instead on fiery pickles, hot chillis and strong flavours that your brain will remember. As you nibble on these passionate snacks, amuse yourself with the news that researchers at Laval University in Canada have recently found that eating hot peppers can speed up your metabolism, cool your cravings and lower your calorie intake. Apparently, capsaicin - a compound found in jalapeño and cayenne peppers - \"temporarily stimulates your body to release more stress hormones, which speeds up your metabolism and causes you to burn more calories\".
If you\'re feeling peckish, brush your teeth
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Woman brushing teeth: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
Works every time. If you brush your teeth after a meal, some folk - including Matthew McConaughey, apparently - believe that a new taste in the mouth sends a signal to the brain that you are full. It will also please your dentist.
Order one pudding, two forks
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Dessert: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
Twice the fun, half the calories.
Choose fit clothes not fat clothes
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Women in dresses: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
Never wear a shapeless sweater in the hope it will hide a multitude of sins; it won\'t. What you need are properly fitted clothes, tight to the torso, fitted to your figure. This is the most flattering and slimming silhouette for any body shape, and you will benefit from it in an instant.
Tape a picture of `bad Britney\' to your fridge
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Woman next to refrigerator: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
The idea here is to know your foe and keep it at bay using a combination of vigilance and exquisite sangfroid. We all need regular nudges and prompt to remind us of the game plan, recognising that saying \"No!\" to the pie has an immediate cost (no pie!) but little immediate effect. The benefit will come, with luck and a fair wind, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Figure out that friends can be fat magnets
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Friends eating and drinking: 101 Things To Do Before You Diet: diet tips and weight loss advice
It\'s not that girlfriends mean to make you eat and shop with such cavalier abandon. It\'s just that you doing it condones them doing it, which means you do it, and so the happy, fatty carousel goes round and round.
