If you’ve searched high and low for an easy way to shed those stubborn pounds, you’re not alone. 95-percent of diets fail and are unsustainable long-term. So, it’s understandable you’d hunt for a simple, effective way to lose fat and keep it off for good.
So, if dieting isn’t the answer, what is? The answer is to transform your lifestyle if you want to reach a healthy weight and maintain it. And therein lies the challenge. Losing weight is easy if you do the right things, but change can be extremely challenging. So here are five tips to make your weight loss effortless.
Take it Slow
Before we cover some tips to simplify your weight loss journey, you should know If you make too many changes too quickly, the adjustments will be far more challenging to stick with. So take it slow. Replace one unhealthy behavior with one beneficial one each week. That way, the positive changes you make will be sustainable.
The Five Tips
One – It’s Not About Calories
Stanford performed a study that shows calorie counting or calorie restriction won’t help you reduce your body fat. So, don’t obsess over calories.
Counting calories will cause you to focus more on food because you’re weighing measuring, counting, and analyzing every bite of food you take. You can count calories or follow a restricted-calorie eating plan for a little while, but it’s hard to maintain that way of eating long term. So, you’re not changing your lifestyle to promote healthy eating and increase your overall health and wellness.
Two – Change Your Food
If you primarily eat pre-packaged foods, gradually swap one meal at a time to a home-cooked version. Food-industry foods are chock full of chemicals, high in sodium and unhealthy fats, low in essential fiber, and created to activate the pleasure centers in your brain. That way, your brain will make you want to eat more of the food-like product and cause you to crave it more often.
Slowly incorporate fresh fruits and vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, whole-fat dairy products, and healthy oils like olive oil, nut oils, butter, and avocado. You also need plenty of high-quality protein from farm-raised animal products, to nut butter, tofu, or beans and rice.
Remember, gradual changes are essential if you want to stick with your new, positive changes. Give your brain and taste buds time to adapt to the new foods.
Three – Increase Your H20
No doubt you already know you should drink more water, but are you doing it? Water is essential to your weight loss efforts for a plethora of reasons. The primary benefits are:
- It helps you stay full longer
- Gives you energy
- Reduces cravings
- Helps you absorb the nutrients from your food
So, pick up one of those refillable water bottles that are sold everywhere, or keep a gallon of water in your vehicle. That way, you have your H20 supply handy.
Four – Move your Body
Your body is designed to be in motion from sunup to sundown. So, our modern sedentary lifestyle does your body no favors. Because of the lack of movement your daily tasks require, you have to move – on purpose.
Everything but sitting counts as movement. If you sit for work, periodically stand throughout the day. Add a daily stroll into your routine. Take a class that involves movement in the evening instead of watching television or surfing the web.
You’ll feel better, look better, be happier, and lose weight more quickly because your body gets the movement it needs to function at an optimal level.
Five – Try Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is shaping up to be one of the most effective lifestyle changes you can make to shed unwanted body fat. And since it is a lifestyle adjustment and not a diet, it’s sustainable long term.
If you’re not familiar with intermittent fasting, it’s merely a modification to when you eat. There are several protocols you can follow, so you’ll choose what works best for you. You’ll have a window of time where you eat each day, followed by a period where you fast.
The good news is, most of your fasting period can occur while you sleep, so by the time you get up, you’ve put an enormous dent in your fasting hours.
Your Takeaways
So, if you eat beneficial food, drink more water, sit less, try intermittent fasting, and don’t stress about calories, you’ll find those extra pounds seem to fall effortlessly away.
Also, set realistic, do-able goals so you don’t feel overwhelmed or discouraged. When you follow these tips, you can expect to lose approximately two pounds per week. That may not sound like much, but don’t discount the significance of a pound. A pound of body fat takes up a substantial amount of room. But because fat comes off evenly, you don’t start to notice those two pounds per work until they add up.
