Famous Nutritionist Joy Bauer Offers 5 Dieting Tips for Success

From Denny: Wow! This little video sure is packed with useful information! And I took notes. :)

Joy Bauer, nutritionist and founder of The Joy Fit Club, featured over at The Today Show, takes live calls, offering advice of how handle the dieting process.

When asked about how to motivate yourself Joy suggested the way to keep your focus is to keep a food journal, jotting down any issues you think you might encounter during the day. Positive self-talk is very important for encouragement and confidence. Give yourself non-food rewards like a pedicure when you reach a small goal like losing five pounds. Save yourself a fun food every day in the late afternoon so you have something to look forward to having. Denying yourself just creates that backlash effect. Portion out about 150 calories of a favorite food like cookies or ice cream and enjoy!

When asked about hitting that dreaded plateau when the weight won't budge off your body Joy suggested shaving off 100 - 200 calories per day of what you have already been doing. When the body gets smaller it requires fewer calories and will not continue to lose weight. Taking up weight training is great for getting off that plateau since building muscle mass and a great cardio will cause you to burn more calories. Another strategy is to close the kitchen at night after dinner since most women tend to continue snacking at night. This will help your body burn calories before you go to bed and your body slows down digestion to go into sleep and repair mode. Try treating yourself to a favorite warm herbal tea to satisfy any mild hunger.

When asked about the grain Quinoa she responded that it is the new superfood full of fiber, magnesium and iron. One cup of quinoa gives us eight grams of protein. It is a dense food full of minerals and protein that many impoverished societies around the world use to survive. It is cooked delicious with some chicken broth and can be used as a side dish like rice. Quinoa is awesome mixed in with salad greens like a pilaf. You can even make it like a breakfast porridge it's that versatile.

When asked about what foods to eat to get glowing skin as we grow older Joy reminded us to focus upon beta-carotin vegetables. That's those orange and dark green veggies like sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach and winter squashes. For great skin be sure to include those Omega fatty acids like you get from salmon and other similar fish along with flax seeds.

When asked about how to diet off belly fat Joy suggested to a woman of average size to keep her calories down to about 1200 - 1500 a day. Eating a lot of non-starchy vegetables, fruits, berries and air popped popcorn are all great to help reduce belly fat. What else should we watch that are dense foods full of calories but healthy for us? Here's a list to keep in moderation: dried fruit, jams, nuts and seeds, nut butters, granola, salad dressing, olive oil and avocado.

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Skinny Foods to Help Us Slim Those Excess Pounds

From Denny: Satisfy your taste buds and curb your appetite is a tall order sometimes. Joy Bauer of the Joy Fit Club and author of "Your Inner Skinny," a nutritionist who helps obese people trim off the excess weight, shares some wise advice.

I really like her low calorie Pumpkin Pudding of combining canned pumpkin puree (not the pumpkin pie canned filling which is loaded with sugar) with vanilla yogurt and some cinnamon - now there's some taste and fiber you can actually enjoy! :)

Other good advice? Start you dinner with a non-starchy vegetable soup. Studies prove you will eat about 20% less of the following dinner after a bowl of soup. Lots of healthy fiber expands to make you full. I love to make soups and one thing is for sure, lots of wonderful spices and garlic make a soup taste great, often all we have for dinner we love it so much!

Cucumbers are another great weight loss veggie because they are 95% water. Combined with lots of balsamic vinegar, a teaspoon of your favorite oil, some tomatoes and a little green onion make for only a 125 calorie snack - a favorite at our house in the hot Louisiana summers when you can't eat much because of the humidity and heat.

Feeling emotional and need to stress down? Go for a hot mug of good green tea. You will have to experiment with various brands of green tea to find out your favorite. Green tea has been studied and proven to help provide some small calorie-burning advantage. Studies generally are small studies and an averaging. You might be one of those people that does not benefit from green tea as a weight loss tool.

Then there are others like myself that it affects greatly to the positive so I stick with it. Also, I spent time living in Taiwan when I was in high school as my father was stationed over there at the time. The Chinese introduced me to green tea and, especially, jasmine tea that was always served in businesses to honored guests. I've been a fan of Chinese teas ever since those days.

Remember: it is very easy to over-brew green tea (unless it is weight loss Wu-Long which can steep until "the cows come home"). Most green tea in teabags should only be dunked for about 20 seconds in almost boiling water. If your water is too hot it will turn a darker green and be intensely bitter. It's that bitterness that people new to green tea experience and get turned off to the product, not realizing they over-brewed in water far too hot for the delicate tea.

Another weight control trick is to use hot pepper sauce which we love in south Louisiana: the well known Tobasco sauce which is a bit more vinegary than we like at our house and another, Louisiana Hot Sauce which is a milder burn and a lot less vinegar pique. Around here everyone puts hot sauce on our morning over easy fried eggs, on hamburgers, you name it, even in tunafish salad - talk about kick up the flavor combined with the mayonnaise! The real trick of using hot sauce is that the explosion of flavor causes you to slow down your eating (and sometimes reach for that glass of water to quench the shock or a glass of milk to kill the fire since milk proteins kill hot pepper heat).

Shrimp cocktail is the skinniest appetizer on a restaurant menu - unless, of course, you come to Louisiana where they will put a roulade sauce on it, packed with calories. Most restaurants across America use a ketchup based only sauce. The best way is to control the calories in the sauce is ask them to bring you the condiments to make your own like we do in Louisiana: ketchup, horseradish sauce, fresh lemon juice, Lea and Perrins Worchestershire sauce and a hot sauce like Tobasco. Now we're talking: real cocktail sauce!

Boiled shrimp without the sauce are only 8 calories each! You do have to watch the salt and iodine levels. Too much salt in our diet can contribute to water weight gain or kidney problems. Too much shellfish with iodine in it like shrimp can contribute to slowing down your thyroid so don't go thinking it's a great idea to load up on boiled shrimp for the calorie level alone.

These are all great ideas for tasty food from a very practical nutritionist:

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