Lose the Last 10 Pounds!

Thanks to Kate over at http://www.missgotwings.blogspot.com/ I read a great article today on http://www.msn.com/ called Lose the Last 10 Pounds! Although there wasn't anything amazingly profound in there that I hadn't heard before...there were a lot of great pointers that made me feel encouraged again that I CAN do this! I know reading a whole article takes time...so I thought I'd just post a few of the points they made that I thought were the most helpful:

You've cleaned up your diet, sweated off countless calories, and watched pounds melt away. But now the scale has come to a screeching halt. What gives? It's an unfortunate law of weight loss: The last 10 pounds are harder to shed than the first 30. That's because the slimmer you become, the fewer calories you burn just going about your day. For every pound you lose, your metabolism slows by up to 20 calories a day. But we do have some good news: Easy tweaks to the good habits you've already established can push you past your plateau and help you reach your final weight loss goal.

1. Cardio melts calories, but to keep seeing results, ramp up your intensity, too. "Interval training can trigger a boost in metabolism so you burn more fat during low- and moderate-intensity activity, and even at rest." Alternate between a moderate effort that makes you slightly breathless and a vigorous pace that makes speaking more than a couple of words difficult. In a 30-minute interval workout, you'll burn 20 percent more calories than if you maintained a steady pace—and you'll keep burning more fat afterward.

2. It's one of the dirtiest tricks your body can play: The more you exercise, the less you're inclined to stand, walk around, twiddle your thumbs, and generally burn calories during the 23 hours you're not working out. Standing for an hour more a day will burn 100 more calories than if you were sitting

3. Get a more time-efficient workout and burn a third more calories by doing strength and cardio in one shot. Cardio blasts calories immediately, while strength-training increases metabolism over time, so combining the two gives you the ultimate bang for your buck. At home, do one minute of jumping jacks or easy rope jumping between every strength exercise.

4. Eating less meat is a proven way to lighten up on the scale.

5. An apple a day could keep the pounds away. Diners who had an apple 15 minutes before an all-you-can-eat pasta lunch ate 187 fewer calories than those who skipped the snack. At 65 calories per cup, the apple fills you up.

6. Dieters who jotted down what they ate lost twice as much weight as those who didn't keep a record.