If you’re one of the 80 kajillion people with ‘lose weight’ at the top of their New Year’s resolutions list, chances are you need a little assistance in working your way to a slimmer waistline. For ThisNexter GirlPaint, the website SparkPeople is “one of the BEST, if not the best, places for fitness, health and weight loss resources.” There you can have a diet plan customized just for you - completely free of charge. And, GirlPaint adds, “the food tracker is the best I’ve seen, not to mention the ‘Exercise of the Day’ feature that tells you step-by-step how to properly perform an exercise and shows you a video to ensure you are using proper form.”

GirlPaint’s also a fan of Ladies Home Journal’s Health Guides & Fitness How-To Workouts, another online resource that offers “great, FREE tools to help you get (and stay) healthy, lose weight, track your food intake and much, much more.” Through the site, you’ll find advice on sticking to your diet, personal stories for inspiration, and articles on topics such as the link between hormone replacement therapy and weight gain.

...continued: Weight-loss wonders

One of my favorite product discoveries of the past year is the Get Gorgeous tea from Republic of Tea’s Be Well line. Ever since I started drinking the herb-infused red tea, my skin’s become much clearer, which probably has lots to do with the hormone-balancing red clover and de-stressing chamomile. I haven’t gone a day without a cup of Get Gorgeous in forever, and I’m seriously considering ordering the 250-bag package next from Republic of Tea. ThisNexter evastars, on the other hand, recommends the Be Well line’s Get Lost tea, which blends appetite-suppressing cinnamon and sweet-tooth-taming carob to help curb cravings and promote weight loss. “I don’t know if it will help you lose weight,” says evastars, “but it’s warming and delicious!” And over at the blog Quiet Yoga, Lee recently tested out Republic of Tea’s Get Clean, a detoxing tea featuring liver-stimulating herbs like milk thistle and dandelion root. “I was feeling kind of bloated and heavy and I drank this for 2 days and I think I felt better,” says Lee, giving me hope that my post-Thanksgiving food hangover won’t be as grueling as usual this year.

For those in need of a diet makeover, ThisNext is beginning to form a mini-library of healthy-eating books suited to many a food-focused goal. Whether you’re looking to drop a jeans size or incorporate more organic food into your meals, revamping your routine with the help of a new read can be one of the simplest ways to do good for your body, mind, and even the planet.

Take Jeff Cox’s Organic Cook’s Bible: How to Select and Cook the Best Ingredients on the Market, recommended by our recently interviewed shopcaster Fanny The Fairy. With 250 recipes using more than 150 organic ingredients, the book encourages readers to support Earth-friendly forms of food production and become more connected to what they’re consuming (“I love this book because i think it’s important to know the food you eat,” says Fanny in her shopcast).

With a similar emphasis on exploring organic foods – especially of the locally, sustainably grown variety – Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry’s Grub presents healthy eating as a form of activism. In her review at Fit Fare, Sara Maamouri dubs the book “a fired-up call to action” that teaches readers “exactly what they can do to change their food future,” while at the same time serving as “a reminder that ultimately, food should be a fun, creative part of our lives, and not simply a bland and boring fuel.”

...continued: Healthy reads

I can’t be trusted with a jar of peanut butter. If there’s ever some Skippy or Peter Pan or Smuckers left around the apartment, I somehow end up spooning the stuff straight from the jar once crazy deadlines start hitting. (A while back I even went through a phase of keeping a jar of Jif inside my desk – baaaaaaad idea.) Luckily I’ve discovered the next best thing for when I’m craving peanut buttery goodness: Nature Valley Peanut Butter Crunchy Granola Bars, which are much harder to O.D. on, given their convenient little 180-calorie-per-serving packages.

In fact, practically all the products in the Nature Valley line appear to be the perfect solution for when you need a snacky little pick-me-up but don’t want to resort to junk food. ThisNext member Yumi Chen goes for Nature Valley Healthy Heart Granola Bars, which “have just the right amount of crunch and gooeyness.” Daily Mogs’ blogger, meanwhile, loves Nature Valley’s Sweet and Salty Nut Bars because they’re “more like a candy bar to me which tricks my mind and delights my palate.”

...continued: ThisNext's guide to healthy snackage

Diabetes Mine - a “gold mine of straight talk and encouragement for people living with diabetes” - truly lives up to its tagline. Maintained by “inquisitive, perhaps-just-a-tad overly analytical new diabetic” Amy Tenderich, the blog performs the very valuable service of keeping readers informed with health news, product reviews, and interviews - such as this recent Q & A with diabetes expert and Guide to Healthy Restaurant Eating author Hope Warshaw. An excerpt:

DM: It’s hard to know what to eat with diabetes. What is the first thing you’d tell a person newly diagnosed with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes about eating?

HW: More than likely a person with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes has some weight to trim off. Therefore, I want to help them find some easy ways to accomplish this goal. One of the first things I talk about is not what people eat, but what they drink. Are you downing a Caramel Macchiato every day? Are you guzzling Gatorade? People can drink 1,000 calories in beverages through the course of the day without realizing it, so that’s an A-Number-1 priority. People can have weight melting off them just by changing what they drink.

At her healthy weight-loss blog, Ediet.com’s “master motivator” Julia Griggs Havey posts news and advice to help readers make big strides toward shedding pounds. Here, the Awaken the Diet Within talks about the importance of writing down your weight-loss goals:

“If you have your daily plan written down, with the details of all you want to get done today, including the snacks you will carry with you and your meals chosen for the day, you will be much more inclined to avoid the unhealthy foods and actions that may throw you off track. If you can plan the activities, the errands, and all the tasks you will be doing each day from the time you get up ‘til the time you go to bed, you will be keeping yourself busy on accomplishing what’s on your daily planner, rather than spending time worrying about your weight or other things that may not be productive.”

Carb Attack tracks one blogger’s journey through the 30-in-30 low carb diet challenge, an effort to shed 30 pounds in 30 weeks. Also working to manage her diabetes, Kathryn has sought some help from Dr. Richard K. Bernstein’s book The Diabetes Diet (a low-carb solution to keeping diabetes in check). The results thus far:

“So Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetic Diet seems to be working! If you are diabetic or insulin resistant, I recommend it. It’s extremely low carb, so many people have a hard time staying on it. But I find that the good results I get make me willing to stick with it pretty well so far.”

“If I’m not liplocked to a bottle of Perrier I’m drowning at the bottom of a teapot,” says Fear And Loathing In The Kitchen blogger Tracy (a “navel-gazer self-absorbed enough to believe that her ongoing battle with weight, body image, and food addictions and obsessions makes for interesting reading,” according to her bio). “I have no idea what it’s like to actually feel thirsty.” We know the feeling: Drowning in reminders to get that 64-ounces-a-day, my fingertips are never too far from a 1.5-liter bottle of Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.

Determined to find out whether we really truly require so much hydration, Tracy turned to Dartmouth researcher and kidney specialist Heinz Valtin, M.D. Her discovery:

“According to Valtin, when you start to get low on fluid your body will compensate by bringing fluid back out of your kidneys and by slowing the loss of water through your skin. Thirst begins when the concentration of blood (an accurate indicator of our state of hydration) has risen by less than two percent, whereas most experts would define dehydration as beginning when that concentration has risen by at least five percent - so you can absolutely rely on your thirst to tell you when to have a drink. He also found that coffee, tea etc are perfectly fine to drink and do count toward your fluid intake. And he found no studies at all showing that the magic 8 cups of water are necessary for health.”

Like Carrie Bradshaw, I’m a girl who generally only uses her oven for storage. But I’m much tempted by a baking-required recipe recently discovered via (W)EIGHT (a weight-loss blog, natch). It’s for homemade vegan granola bars, and includes so much wholesome goodness: honey and peanut butter and cinnamon and nutmeg, plus your choice of naturally yummy stuff like coconut, raisins, dried apples, and chopped nuts. I might end up concocting some variety with about a 1,000 calories per bar, but hey.

We love Zara at weight-maintenance blog Yo Heave Ho not just for her fluency in piratespeak, but for her willingness to share new discoveries such as the very adorable, cantaloupe-sized Pure Heart watermelon from Dulcinea Farms. Says Zara:

“I learned that the little individual Dulcinea watermelons are sweeter and easier to manage than the original full-size seedless watermelon I butchered. And they are so darn cute! But the best thing that has come out of this is that when I want something crunchy and/or sweet, mindless munching on watermelon does much less damage than, say, 0reos. I wish I could say I liked watermelon better than 0reos, but who am I kidding here? It’s just a purposeful choice to substitute something healthy and so far, it’s helping.”

How to keep from totally sabotaging your diet when life gets crazy-busy? UK-based health and fitness blog Exercise Pro offers 8 ways to eat healthy when you’re on the move, so you don’t end up reaching for a Big Mac and fries. Strategy #7 focuses on reaching for low-glycemic snacks:

“If you are have the kind of busy life that barely allows the time for a healthy meal you can avoid succumbing to temptation at fast food joints by bringing your own glycemic snack. A banana, peanut butter and honey sandwich on whole grain bread is an excellent example of a low glycemic snack that quells hunger pains and provides you with plenty of energy.”

Even if you’re not an emotional eater, you’ve likely got an “emotional comfort layer” that affects how and what you eat. An emotional comfort layer, explains Helen at Trying To Become Athletic, forms from the positive emotions we associate with eating. And, by reducing what we eat to an amount less than what’s indicated by that layer, we end up feeling “deprived emotionally (although not physically)” and possibly negatively impacting our overall wellbeing. By way of further illuminating the concept of the emotional comfort layer, Helen - a self-described “ex fat kid” who’s working her way to running a 10K” - shares this quote from Remembering Wholeness: A Personal Handbook for Thriving in the 21st Century author Carol Tuttle:

Food is used as a counterfeit energy to compensate for the emotional and spiritual energies of sweetness, comfort, fulfillment, and satisfaction that are lacking in their lives.

Check Helen’s post for links to a couple of Carol’s Mercola.com articles about emotions and eating.

When a blogger shouts, “Coolest Thing EVER,” ThisNext listens. At Onepinkfuzzy, Angie just clued us in to dietitian Joanne Larsen’s online Healthy Body Calculator, a fabulous tool for anyone trying to get his/her weight in check. Just enter some data - weight, height, activity level, etc. - and the site presents you with personalized recommendations on everything from getting more exercise into your schedule to how much calcium you should be taking in daily. The trickiest part is measuring your elbow breadth - a good indicator of your frame size, according to the site - but, hey, you’ve always been secretly curious about the exact width of your elbows, haven’t you?

A post at Delight Vitality first sparked our interest dieting site SparkPeople.com. Now Anonymous Fit Woman has reignited our curiosity, with a post about she’s making the switch from counting points (a la Weight Watchers) to tracking her food on SparkPeople. The post inspired us to explore SparkPeople a bit more, and - like Anonymous Fit Woman - we’re digging how the site offers “a nice little graph of how your food is broken down in fats/carbs/proteins.” It’s a great way to take your weight-loss efforts beyond calorie-counting and into the realm of all-around healthier eating.

At Scale & Perspective, Beth tracks her progress in reaching her to-be-determined goal weight, having already dropped nearly 45 pounds since fall 2004. One of her weight-loss tools is Ultima Replenisher, a sugar-free sports drink made without artificial sweeteners. With just 35 to 40 calories per 20-ounce serving, Ultima delivers complex carbs instead of simple sugars. ThisNext is always psyched to find smart alternatives to sugary sports drinks, especially formulas that beat out all other brands when it comes to electrolyte and mineral content.

Two major rules of successful salad-making:

1. Don’t fatten up your veggies with too much cheese, oily dressings, and other high-calorie add-ins

2. Always keep creative with your ingredients

Thinking outside the lettuce-tomato-cucumber box, Dietgirl offers up one of her favorite Weight Watchers recipes here:

“Grate 4-5 big fat carrots and chop up a wee bunch of coriander (cilantro if you’re American). Throw it all into a bowl with 2 tablespoons of sunflower seeds, 1 tablespoon of pumpkin seeds, a teaspoon of sesame oil, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and a tablespoon of honey. Mix it all up and eat. Serves 4!”

What’s the most efficient way to keep your weight in check? Eat foods with a high nutrient-per-calorie ratio, recommends Dr. Joel Fuhrman at Disease Proof. That means turning to veggies and beans for your protein instead of beefing up on meat - here, Dr. Fuhrman lists some top meat-free protein sources:

-broccoli (10 grams per two cups)

-lentils (18 grams per one cup)

-almonds (10 grams per three ounces)

-chickpeas (15 grams per one cup)

-frozen peas (9 grams per one cup)

Since Tory at From Flabulous to Fabulous has been featured multiple times as a weight-loss success story on WeightWatchers.com, we consider her a valuable source for diet tips and tricks. Here, Tory talks about tweaking Weight Watchers’ Core Plan to fit her food needs and take in the 2,000 calories she needs for her fitness routine. Some of her strategies:

-I will eat more than one bowl of cereal a day. Since I workout in the morning, I’ll eat one before I go workout and one when I return, each with either yogurt or milk.

-I will replace nonfat cheese with lowfat cheese (laughing cow light, light string cheese) and still consider it core because again, I don’t abuse either of those things and it will help me get in the fats I need and the calories. I will only do it once a day. Twice and I’ll count it.

-I will attempt to have at least one protein at every meal.

Sometimes it’s the “don’t”s that teach us the most valuable stuff about weight-loss success. A few highlights from The Amazing Shrinking Mom’s brilliant “How To Get Fat In Ten Easy Steps” list:

- Eat fast-food in the car. Be sure to get the extra-large whatever, because it makes better fiscal sense to spend an extra fifty cents for an extra two thousand calories. Always order fries or the fried side-dish of your choice.

-Never pass up an opportunity to purchase holiday candy during after-holiday sales. If you pace yourself, your Halloween candy will last until Christmas candy goes on sale. Then, you just have to buy enough (on clearance, because who doesn’t like a bargain?) to last until Easter. Eat it without really paying attention, though, because it tastes better that way.

-Do not underestimate the importance of second (and third helpings). Change into elastic-waisted pants, if you need, but do not stop when you feel full. Just eat a little more. And by little, I mean two more slices of pizza. Or three if they’re small.