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So, did you eat pretty well during the week? Great, but how about this weekend? Fathers Day might be over but if you’re like most, you probably spent today eating…a LOT. Well, now it’s time to work on that gut.

If you want to shed some fat and lose weight, starting today you have to burn more calories than you consume.

Most of us understand that a caloric deficit is what it takes to lose weight. But there’s a catch: Not all calories are created equal. A new study indicates that the key to permanently losing that spare tire for good may be the type of foods you eat.

According to the researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, when people slightly decrease the amount of simple carbohydrates they eat, they stay fuller longer and lose more weight.

What’s a fast and easy way to reduce amount of simple carbs you eat? Like I said yesterday, stop drinking them for one. You’ll also want to avoid processed foods. That means less soda, processed foods like chips and cookies, and no white bread and more complex carbohydrates, such as beans, oatmeal, or whole grains.

How did your Father’s Day stack up to this? Did you drink a lot of carbs and eat a lot of processed foods? If you did, it’s time to take this tip and actually use it.

Of course, having success with low carb diets isn’t exactly a new idea. Low carb diets come and go. But unlike most popular fad diets, the people that took part in this study still consumed 43% of their total daily calories from carbohydrates—as compared to the government recommendation of 45-65%.
 
Low carb diets are healthy and definitely work. Additionally, they actually make it easier for you to resist temptation and say no to cravings. If you replace those carbs with protein, your cravings will subside. That’s because it takes more energy for your body to digest the protein in meat than it does for it to digest carbohydrates or fat. That also means that the more protein you eat, the harder your body has to work to digest it, and the more calories you'll burn in the process.

In fact, according to Men’s Health: “When researchers at Arizona State University compared the benefits of a high-protein diet with those of a high-carbohydrate diet, they found that people who ate a high-protein diet burned more than twice as many calories in the hours following their meal as those eating carbs. Even better, researchers in Denmark found that men who substituted protein for 20 percent of the carbs in their diets were able to boost their metabolisms, increasing the number of calories they burned each day by up to 5 percent.”

Do you need any more evidence to start replacing your carbs with protein? And if you just can’t give up your pasta, try this ZERO-carb noodle a try. It’s high in fiber and low in all the bad stuff and should definitely be part of your weekly menu. I eat this at least twice a week and even my kids love it.