Many people that struggle with overweight or obesity will try all sorts of diets throughout their lives, often with limited success. While for some people it’s much harder to lose weight than others due to genetics, for most losing weight is absolutely possible if enough dedication and self-control is exercised.
Below are a few tips that can help you get started on your way to losing weight.
It’s Almost All About Diet
While regular exercise is great for your health and to tone your body, if weight loss is your goal, you should be focusing most of your efforts on changing your diet. Even if you exercise an hour per day, if you eat unhealthy, fattening foods, you more than likely still won’t manage to lose much weight.
Cut Out the Crap
As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, your diet is key if you want to lose weight. While you may want to consult with a dietician to give you advice on what you exactly should eat, in general it’s relatively straightforward. If you currently regularly eat fast food, drink soft drinks, consume sugary snacks and eat lots of refined grains, just cutting all of these out of your diet will likely already make you lose a lot of weight.
You basically want to stay away from anything that contains sugar (or high fructose corn syrup), high amounts of carbohydrates, vegetable and other processed oils, is deep fried or is severely processed. This leaves you with vegetables, lean meats, fish and a moderate amount of fruit.
Eat a Breakfast High in Protein
A high protein breakfast helps kickstart your metabolism so your body starts burning calories straight away and also helps you keep feeling full longer so you don’t get hungry throughout the morning and get the urge to start snacking on unhealthy foods.
Check Nutrition Labels
The label “low fat” doesn’t mean that it will help you lose weight, on the contrary, most low fat products are horrible for weight loss because they tend to contain a lot of added sugars. Most low fat products try to cover up their bland taste by adding sugar or high fructose corn syrup. That way they can keep sporting the low fat label while not losing customers because their low fat product has no taste.
Stay Away From Alcohol
If you want to lose weight but tend to drink a few liters of alcoholic beverages every weekend you’ll have to give up this habit. Most alcoholic drinks are very high in sugar and will make you gain weight. Especially stay away from any mixed drinks that contain soft drinks or fruit juices. Water, some tea (preferably green) and coffee (in moderation and without sugar) should be just about the only types of beverages you drink when you are trying to lose weight.
It’s Not a Diet But a Lifestyle
If you really want to lose weight and not regain it, you’re not looking for any sort of diet, but a change in lifestyle. If you go on a diet for a few months, lose weight and then go back to your old lifestyle of eating unhealthy, you’ll regain the weight you lost in no time.
That’s why fad diets don’t work long term. You can stay on a bananas only diet for a few weeks and potentially lose a bunch of weight, but you’ll probably not going to eat only bananas for the rest of your life right? Making a conscious decision to change your lifestyle is the only way to lose weight and stay slim.
Zane Schwarzlose is a writer at A Beautiful Smile at Lake Pointe, a Sugar Land dental office. Zane is glad he’s never had to lose weight.