3 New Tips to Help You Lose Weight This Year

Sure, weight loss boils down to a matter of calories in and calories out. But a few subtle and surprising diet changes could greatly increase your pound-shedding potential.

Heather K. Jones, nutrition expert and author of Good Housekeeping's Drop 5 Pounds: The Small Changes, Big Results Diet, recommends these three unusual waist-slimming tactics: Tempt your taste buds with vegetable juice, have a vegetarian lunch once a week, and get a regular seafood fix.

The Fat-Fighting Fare
Here's how these small adjustments can offer big boosts in your overall weight loss results, according to Jones:

• Sip vegetable juice every day. No need to demonize juice for its calorie count. Research suggests vegetable juice may help control your appetite. In a study, people following the DASH diet lost four times as much weight in 12 weeks when they drank an 8-ounce glass of low-sodium vegetable juice each day, compared with those who ditched juice. Choose natural vegetable juice with no salt or sugar added.
• Have a meatless lunch. Research suggests this simple act could knock off 5 pounds or more in a year if you do it once a week, writes Jones. In a study, people who ate mushroom-based lunches instead of beef-based ones ate 30 fewer grams of fat the rest of the day and felt equally satisfied. (Experiment with these hearty Pecan and Mushroom Burgers.)
• Seek protein from the sea. A study suggests you can lose more weight on a reduced-calorie diet that includes fish rather than on a seafood-free weight loss plan. Fish packs fewer calories per ounce than beef, pork, and most skin-on poultry. And the omega-3 fats that fish contains may help stimulate fat burning in cells, researchers claim. (Try making these easy Oven-Poached Salmon Fillets.)

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