Diet tweaks

SELF magazine recently wrote about some easy-to-do diet make-overs that can make a big impact on the scale. None are hard, just little tweaks here and there.

Tea
A study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Women showed that women with the highest intake of catechins, antioxidants in tea that may accelerate fat burn, gained less weight over 14 years than those who didn’t drink tea. White and green leaves have the most catechins.

A.M. workouts
Exercising on an empty stomach in the morning improves glucose tolerance, which spurs your body to shed fat, says a study a study in The Journal of Physiology finds..

Eat breakfast
Lifelong early eaters have a waistline about 2 inches smaller than that of breakfast skippers, says the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Breakfast may boost metabolism and may cause you to make less of an enzyme that raises cholesterol.

Slow done
People who took 30 minutes to eat a bowl of ice cream created more fullness hormones than those who ate faster, says a study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Turn off the TV and concentrate on what you are eating.

Make some habits
When mice ate at scheduled times and fasted for 12 hours at night, their liver turned on genes that burned more sugar and fat, say scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Of course, those little mice had someone providing their meals, but it’s worth a shot.

Wonderful water
Research from Virginia Tech says that two cups of water taken before meals helped people lose about 5 pounds more than those who had no water. Water drinkers ate 75 to 90 calories less.

Step on the scale
It’s not necessary to weigh daily, but those who weighed at least weekly lost more weight than those who didn’t, according to research from the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation.