Acorns Program

One easy way to manage healthy eating is to choose unprocessed foods instead of processed ones. By doing this, you are eating healthy food, and avoiding added sugar, which just loads up the calories.

This means go for fruits and vegetables. Limit your consumption of processed foods, such as bread, pasta, cake, cookies. When you have a choice, skip the white foods. Pick whole wheat bread, brown rice, and sweet potatoes instead.

Also, some foods might seem healthy, but they are sabotaging your weight loss effort. For example, you might enjoy a glass of orange juice in the mornings. Those 8 ounces of juice contain 21 grams of sugar. You are far better off eating a whole orange, which gives you only 9 grams of sugar, plus some fiber as an added bonus.

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Lots of prepared foods, like salad dressings, tomato sauce and condiments are loaded with added sugar. You do not need those extra calories. Check labels and only buy items with lower sugar content.

If your disability doesn’t prevent you from doing your own food preparation, then learn how to cook using fresh, unprocessed foods. You will be able to control what goes into your food. While cooking from scratch may sound like a lot of work, it doesn’t have to be. Make a double portion and freeze one for another day. Or, do all the prep for several meals and put the cut-up vegetables and meat in freezer bags, one for each meal.

Many diets promise fast results, but they demand drastic changes to how you eat. The sad truth is most people can’t maintain these changes and put the weight right back on when they go off the diet.

To avoid this, make small changes at first and work up to bigger ones. Experiment with healthy foods to find ones you like. For example, go ahead and eat that burger. Just use mustard, lettuce, and tomato instead of mayo and cheese. Many sauces add a lot of fat and sugar, so be careful which ones you use.

And watch portion sizes! Part of the reason so many people struggle with weight is we simply serve our food up in portions that are too big. Try eating less at meals and have a healthy snack in between. 

One dieter’s trick is to drink a lot of water. If you are feeling hungry, drink a full glass of water and wait fifteen or twenty minutes. You will often find your desire to eat has gone away.

But do not try to use diet soda in place of water. The caffeine in diet sodas can dehydrate you. This interferes with your liver’s ability to process fats, which means more of them are stored, rather than burned. And the artificial sweeteners in diet sodas often trigger a craving for more sweets, which just makes resisting temptation so much harder.

The second half of the weight-loss equation is to burn more. Working out burns more calories. It also has many other benefits beyond helping you lose weight, such as increasing your endurance, easing muscle or joint pain, improving your balance, building muscle mass, and expanding your range of motion.

Getting exercise can seem tricky for people with disabilities. The key is to focus on what you can do, rather than what you can’t. Be realistic with the goals you set. Find an exercise you can do and enjoy while you’re doing it. Make sure you can vary it, so you don’t become bored, and it stays challenging.

If at first, you can only do 10 minutes, start with that. Maybe do 2 or 3 sessions a day. Gradually work up to 30 minutes or more.

One of the best ways to lose weight is through weight training. It increases your metabolism, which means you’re burning off more calories, and builds muscle mass. A good goal for this type of exercise is three times a week for 20-30 minutes. It’s important not to lift weights every day, but to rest your muscles in between workouts. Many senior centers have exercise programs that will suit your needs including exercise classes like yoga and Zumba.

In spite of what many advertisements try to tell you, there’s no way around the eat less, burn more formula for weight loss. So don’t waste your money on diet pills or expensive supplements. For one thing, they aren’t likely to work. They also could have dangerous interactions with other medications that you take.

The key to lasting weight loss for disabled people is to make lifestyle changes. Alter how you eat and increase the amount of exercise you get. This is the only way to take the weight off and make sure it stays off. You don’t need to find a weight loss program for disabled people, because now you know how to develop your own.

Just because you have some challenges due to your disability, taking off the extra pounds isn’t impossible. Now that you know how to lose weight with limited mobility, you just need to put some time into getting started with your weight loss plan.