1. Don’t Fall For Trendy New Diets
When it comes to getting rid of weight and keeping it off, getting your body in a good rhythm consisting of regularly scheduled, balanced meals is paramount. It seems like every day there is some new fad diet that claims it can help you drop weight fast.
Whether it be a diet that suggests that you remove all fats, or all carbs or whatever the new trend is, don’t fall for it. Chances are that it is nothing more than a gimmick anyway, and will do nothing but knock you off track.
When considering our diet, don’t take any short cuts. Diets that claim you can lose weight by cutting out calories or significantly reducing portion sizes are not going to help at all, in fact they will be detrimental.
Basing a diet on starving yourself is a recipe for disaster that will inevitably lead you going back for more food, packing on more calories and fat.
2. Use the 80/20 Method
Trying to eat healthy can be extremely difficult especially if it is new to you. Eliminating all of the junk food you eat by going cold turkey isn’t going to work, so don’t try that route.
Believe it or not, if you are someone who regularly eats junk, your body is somewhat addicted to it and you have to treat it as such. For example you couldn’t just take the bottle out of the hands of an alcoholic and expect them to magically become sober.
You do that and they’re going to come back for more. The trick here is to gently wean yourself off of the sweets, and to snack sparingly.
Make sure your diet consists mainly of healthy and nutritious food, with the occasional snack. Stick to the 80/20 rule or if you are really ambitious go for 90/10. This means 80 or 90% of the calories you eat are from healthy foods, the other 1-20% being junk food.
Approaching weight loss in this manner will increase the chances that you stick to this diet immensely.
3. Make Sure To Get Enough Sleep
Sleep is important to weight loss because of the role stress plays on our bodies and overall weight. When we don’t sleep for an adequate amount of time, or just have a bad night’s sleep in general, our bodies become more stressed.
This is because many biological processes and repairs transpire while we are asleep, and if these processes cannot be completed during sleep, they could negatively affect how we function.
In response to our body being stressed, we produce a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is our stress hormone which also promotes the accumulation of fat.
So basically when you don’t get enough sleep, you become more stressed, produce a hormone as a result, which causes additional fat storage.
4. Do Different Exercises
Another big thing we can do to influence weight loss is to vary up our exercise routine. The more we do the same routine, the more our body adapts and adjusts as a result, in theory making the exercise easier as time goes on.
To combat this we can do two things to vary up our routine; one is to do completely different exercises, and the second is to increase the intensity of the exercise or work done throughout.
Doing either of these things will stress the body again to the point where it has to adapt to meet these new needs, and in the process you burn fat and lose weight.
5. Make Smarter Choices When Dining Out
This is one of the options where we can be pretty limited depending on where we are eating. If possible try to be familiar with the types of dishes that the establishment has beforehand so you know what dishes are healthy.
Many places have dishes that exceed even your daily recommended allowance for calories so make sure you are choosing wisely.
6. Bring Snacks on the Go
Another helpful tip when it comes to losing weight is to always keep snacks handy. They can curb an appetite and prevent you from grabbing a greasy meal from a food truck during lunch or a candy bar loaded with sugar from the vending machine.
Granola is always a good option as are nuts, seeds, and dried fruits.
