Weight Loss Trick Using Bathroom Scale For Daily Weigh Ins May Help You Slim Fast

After chowing down on endless appetizers, entrees, and desserts, and eating the Christmas dinner leftovers, it’s no surprise losing weight ranks high on our New Year’s resolution list. Diet pills, juice cleanses, and gym memberships will take precedence in the New Year among weight loss hopefuls, but there is a 10-second weight loss trick you can do at home to shed the pounds. According to a recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE the more you weigh yourself, the more weight you will lose.

Most weight loss programs do not encourage daily weigh-ins because they can cause dieters to hate their body for no reason. Jillian Michaels, a health and wellness expert, believes weighing yourself daily will not help you stay on track and can actually become a daily torture ritual.

“I recommend that people weigh themselves once a week, at the same time every week. Weighing yourself every day can have a negative impact on you,” she wrote on her website.

Since regular self-weighing has been associated with successful weight loss and maintenance, Elina Helander and co-authors from Tampere University of Technology in Finland sought to examine the link between time differences of weight measurements and the corresponding weight changes through self-weight data. A total of 2,838 weight measurements (up to a years worth of weigh-ins) from 40 overweight individuals (with a body mass index of 25 and over) who indicated that weight loss was a personal goal or concern were analyzed in the study. These individuals were attending a health-promoting program.

The findings revealed weight loss was related to how often individuals weighed themselves. The average time that participants could go between weighing without gaining weight was 5.8 days, or about a weekly weigh-in. Participants who went more than a week without weighing themselves were more likely to gain weight. However, this observational study cannot prove causation because these findings may be attributed to the fact that less serious dieters weigh themselves less or that dieters who stop losing weight stop weighing themselves.

"The more often you weigh yourself, the more weight you lose," Helander said in the press release. Self-weighing frequency and body satisfaction were not found to correlate in a weight loss trial, but increased self-weighing frequency was associated with greater weight loss. Frequent self-weighing is not recommended for all individuals. For some, it can be associated with negative outcomes such as an increase in body dissatisfaction or decreased self-esteem during slow progress or falling short of weight loss goals. Overall, weighing yourself at least once a week may help you lose weight while weighing yourself every day may help you stay on track.

A similar 2005 study published in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine found daily weighing may be better for weight loss and weight control than weekly or less frequent weighing. The participants who weighed themselves every day lost about 12 pounds over the course of two years, while those who weighed themselves every week lost only 6 pounds. Those who never weighed on their own gained about 4 pounds.

Weight naturally fluctuates throughout the week, and most people weigh the least on Wednesday. This concept is known as the weight loss cycle. Typically, everyone loses weight on weekdays and gains weight on weekends. However, what separates the slim from the heavy is how much they lose during the weekdays.

"The bottom line is: If you want to lose weight, its best to weigh yourself every day. But if you weigh yourself only once a week, do it on Wednesday because that will give you the most accurate reading,” said Dr. Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by Design: Mind Eating Solutions for Everyday Life.

By Lizette Borelli

Source: http://www.medicaldaily.com/weight-loss-trick-using-bathroom-scale-daily-weigh-ins-may-help-you-slim-fast-315370

Canning Fire Roasted Tomatoes Using A Hot Water Bath

Wash jars. Then place in boiling water until needed.

Cut tomatoes in half and place in shallow roasting pan.

Completed quarts of fire roasted tomatoes.

Sharing Our Canning Experience

First of all I want to point out that my canning expertise is in making jam which is a lot easier than canning tomatoes due to the higher acid content of most fruits. During my recent visit to Minneapolis, my daughter and I were experimenting with trying to can fire roasted tomatoes without using a pressure canner. We are not experts in tomato canning and, in fact, spent much of the day cleaning tomatoes off the walls after a pyrex baking dish exploded in mid air! So take this post as more of a story than a tried and true recipe!

Fire Roasted Tomatoes - The Problems we were Trying to Solve

My daughter loves to cook with fire roasted tomatoes. However, they are quite expensive if you use a lot of them so when we found a big sale on Roma tomatoes at the farmers market on Sunday, we naturally wanted to try to make them ourselves. When we searched for a fire roasted canning recipe, they all involved roasting them first in olive oil. I think this pushed the tomatoes, which are already borderline low acid, to less optimum acidity level necessitating the use of a pressure canner. So the problems we were trying to solve were:

* We wanted a "fire roasted tomato" with its skin, instead of a peeled tomato.

* We wanted to use a water bath canning technique since we didnt have a pressure canner.

Our Approach

Instead of roasting the tomatoes in oil, we just put them in a pan with a little water and sea salt. After baking them at high heat, we broiled them to get that fire roasted look and taste. In order not to die of botulism, we added lemon juice to every jar to make the tomatoes more acidic. Then we put them in a hot water bath for a long time. Heres our recipe.

***

Fire Roasted Tomatoes

[makes 6 quarts of tomatoes]

About 20 pounds of Roma tomatoes

6 quart glass canning jars with rims and new lids

12 tablespoons fresh or bottled lemon juice

2 cups water or more

Salt

Preheat oven to 500 degrees F.

Wash the jars in soapy water. You can use a dishwasher with a sanitizer cycle if you have one. Once washed, submerge the jars in boiling water. You can use the water bath canner or another pot.

Boil the lids and rims in a small pot and leave in boiling water until needed.

Wash tomatoes. Cut off the tops and cut in half lengthwise. Place them in a large, shallow roasting pan. You will have to do this in several batches. Sprinkle about 1/2 cup of water over the tomatoes and a few pinches of salt. This will make some bubbly tomato juice that you will use to fill your jars to the top.

Bake the tomatoes at 500 degrees F for 15 minutes and then move to the broiler until they start to blacken.

Remove from broiler and fill the jars with roasted tomatoes.

Put 2 tablespoons of lemon juice over the tomatoes in each jar.

Fill each jar to 1/2 inch from the top with the juices from the roasting pan.

Run a plastic knife around the edges to remove any air bubbles in the jars.

Wipe the tops of the jars clean with a paper towel.

Place lids on the jars and screw on the rims (snug but not too tight).

Boil in a hot water bath covered with 1 to 2 inches of water.

Process for 45 minutes (some experts say 85 minutes when packing them with their own juices but that seems excessive to me) and even longer if you are at high altitude.

Lift the jars out of the hot water bath with a jar lifter (my favorite tool for canning).

Place jars on a towel and let them remain untouched until they cool. (this may take a while, maybe overnight).

Once cooled, press down on the lid to see if it sealed. If it moves up and down, it is not sealed. You can refrigerate the jar and use it within the next week.

Lessons Learned

* We were surprised how few jars 20 pounds of tomatoes made. Canning your own tomatoes makes a lot more sense if you start with "free" home-grown tomatoes. If you dont, Im not sure its worth it when you can buy organic fire roasted diced tomatoes from Muir Glen for about the same price.

* DO NOT broil tomatoes in a pyrex baking dish. With the baking and broiling and handling, you may have an "exploding pyrex" incident like we did. If you have never washed 5 pounds of hot tomatoes off of an entire kitchen, trust me, its not how you want to spend your Sunday!

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