How to lose weight the right way, that’s what you’re looking for, right? Because there’s no point in losing weight if it doesn’t make you feel (vital and) healthy. Read on.
It may surprise you that it’s not that extra snack you couldn’t resist that that undermines your weight loss targets. The core of a successful diet is introducing a few healthy habits to your lifestyle, which you can stick to.
These are some very useful tips for being able to start smoothly and lose weight quickly in a healthy way.
How to lose weight the right way? Tip 1: plan your dinner well in advance
Planning is one of the keys to success regarding weight loss. Because it means that you have the right food available at the right moment and you don’t eat the wrong things due to a lack of choices. This way, you also avoid bad last-minute alternatives fast food such as takeout pizza.
The simple habit of planning your dinner in advance, or at least doing so most days of the week, makes sure that no matter what happens during the day, you know what you will eat in the evening. That will really help you lose weight well. Preparing a few healthy meals and storing them in the freezer will help you out on those evenings where you just don’t have the time. For example, making soup and freezing it will offer you a better alternative. Combine it with some grilled chicken or fish and a bowl of salad for a quick and easy yet nutritious meal.
How to lose weight the right way? Tip 2: when eating your own lunch away from home, prepare it the previous evening
Buying lunch means chances are you will be eating double the amount of calories than when you prepare it yourself. This is because you’ll most likely end up with (industrially) prepared food which is packed with sugars and fats. These typically induce that afternoon cravings as well!
A balanced lunch that contains slow sugars (complex carbohydrates) for energy, lean protein to make you feel satiated, and some salad or vegetables, will allow you to make it through the afternoon. A balanced lunch will make your blood sugar levels fluctuate less, which spells the end of afternoon cravings. Another advantage of preparing your lunch the evening beforehand is that you can use any of the leftovers from dinner. This way you waste less and you already know how tasty your such will be. The lunchbox above by the way, contains another one of my secret weapons for healthy weight loss. I’ll reveal what that is in what follows.
How to lose weight the right way? Tip 3: make sure you always have veggies in your home
Each of us should eat more salad and vegetables; You knew that didn’t you? But it is sometimes difficult to plan this perfectly without seeing some of it go bad before you’ve eaten it. The extent to which you can easily buy fresh vegetables and salad on the same day of course depends somewhat on where you live. But nowadays there are also possibilities to order these items online, through a subscription system, and have them delivered at your home every week. This system offers two benefits. You don’t have to plan in shopping for fresh produce and you can easily make them part of dinner every day.
How to lose weight the right way? Tip 4: be strict with yourself for a few days each week
Enjoying tasty food is simply a real pleasure in life. I therefore understand perfectly well that you don’t want to make a trade-off between pleasure and health every time you eat. Sometimes you also eat too much; among other reasons, because some 15 minutes go by between the moment you are satiated and the time this signal reaches your brain and is processed by it. It is unfortunately much easier to spontaneously eat too much than too little.
The simplest way for striking a practical balance between the number of calories you eat and those you burn is enforcing a reasonably strict eating schedule on weekdays for example, and allowing yourself some more freedom in the weekend. This way, you don’t become frustrated because you are never allowed to let go a little. You must find your own balance in this matter, because, like we said before in this article about the best diet in the world: it only works if you can stick to it.
How to lose weight the right way? Tip 5: KEEP MOVING
In an ideal world, you would have a lot of time for sports and you would also enjoy doing it. Real everyday life often keeps you so busy you can’t find the time for exercise, and even when you do you’re too tired to enjoy it.
Furthermore, you may lead a fairly sedentary life at your work. Our metabolism has evolved over many thousands of years to what it is now. For most of that time, people did not practice sedentary professions, because these were rare until somewhere in the 20th century.
This leads to an imbalance between what your body interprets as its needs regarding fat accumulation and the reality of it. You can fight this with a number of limited adjustments. Small trips on foot or by bike instead of by car. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator if it is only 2 or 3 floors, etc… You can also buy a pedometer and set a daily goal for yourself. In other words, if you have no time or you’re not in the mood for participating in intense sports, start incorporating simple and easy tasks.
How to lose weight the right way? Tip 6: feeling less hungry makes it way easier
“I’m a real organic guy when it comes to eating. No garbage or poison on our table at home. Despite this, I weighed just shy of 100 kilos (for a height of 1,75 m) a little more than 2 years ago. I then decided, not just for my own sake, but also for my wife and our 3 wonderful kids, that I had to do something about this. You can read my story – and actually the SkinnyLove story – here on the website. What I want to tell you here is that I have lost 20 kilos within a year and that I feel better than ever before. Do you also want to lose weight well? And you want it to happen at a good pace? Then combine the tips from this article with a SkinnyLove cure.”
Alain Indria, creator of SkinnyLove, lost 20 kilos in 1 year
“Before I forget it. A little while ago I mentioned that I have another secret weapon for weight loss, which was part of the lunchbox in the picture. It’s the crackers. These are Pain des Fleurs crackers. You can read everything about them by clicking on the name Pain des Fleurs.”
LOSING WEIGHT WELL HAS TO DO WITH GRADUALLY CHANGING SMALL THINGS IN YOUR DAILY LIFE WHICH GUIDE YOU IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.
The right way how to lose weight well is not by going on ‘crash diets’ or suddenly doing sport to an extreme degree. Your body loves gradual change regarding food and physical activity. Someone who hasn’t practiced any sports for years should not, for example, suddenly start walking lots of kilometres every day. Not only because the enormous difference in effort will exhaust and demotivate you, but you also face a real risk of hurting yourself and thus, rather quickly, being taken out of action again for weeks.
The same reasoning applies to people who suddenly start starving themselves. A diet that forces you to eat an extremely low amount of calories every day, or that definitively banishes a whole bunch of food products from your life, will possibly also lead to a deficit of the nutrients and vitamins that your body needs.
Energy need and weight loss
Your body uses food as a source of energy. It stores a surplus of energy as body fat. This means that if you eat more than what your body needs to carry out daily activities and maintain itself, you gain weight. In order to lose weight, you must force your body to use the accumulated fat reserves.
The most efficient way of doing this is reducing the number of calories that you eat and/or increasing the number of calories you burn by means of activity. That is why every expert on this subject will go on about diet and exercise if you talk about losing weight.
Small adjustments do help
Small changes can lead to a large difference in weight in due time. One extra cookie per week can lead to 2 extra kilos per
year. Avoid that extra cookie every week and you lose that weight over that same year. It is, for example, also easier to substitute whole milk in your daily breakfast with skimmed or semi-skimmed milk than to stick to a diet that imposes all kinds of strict rules.
You must think in terms of permanent adjustments to your eating habits if you want to lose weight well. People usually aim at weight loss within a period of weeks. But the real target should be set within a period of months and years. Actually for the rest of your life.
Increase your level of physical activity
Someone who is going to move or exercise more, without changing anything to his or her eating habits, will almost certainly lose weight well. Even if you hate fitness or the gym, even light activity – such as a peaceful walk of 20 minutes – will help…. if you do it daily. Every time – you read this correctly: EVERY TIME – you move more than usually WITHOUT EATING EXTRA, you burn calories and fat reserves. Find an activity that you enjoy doing. Something feasible with regard to time, distance and costs. Because only in this way can you make it a permanent part of your routine. Try, for example, if only in the weekend, to park a little further away than usual from the places you go to and to cover the last 10 minutes on foot. Because this on its own is already 20 minutes of movement both ways. Go walking or cycling in the park. EVERY EXTRA STEP HELPS. Take the stairs as often as possible instead of the elevator. If you use public transportation, get out 1 stop earlier and walk the last part. You could even place a home trainer in your living room and peacefully cycle for 20 minutes on it while you watch TV.
Reduce your caloric intake
What is the actual definition of overweight? Doctors apply the BMI. The BMI is a number that is calculated as follows: you divide your weight in kilograms by the square of your height. If you weigh, for example, 62 kilos and you are 1,60 meters tall, your BMI is 24,2 (62 divided by the product of 1,6 x 1,6).
We have built in a useful BMI calculator on our own website. A BMI between 18,5 and 25 is healthy. If your BMI is over 25, you are overweight. If your BMI is over 30, you are obese. Over 40, morbidly obese.
The conclusion from the BMI calculation is simple. If it’s over 25, you’d better lose weight, if only with regard to your health. It is very difficult to decrease your amount of body fat if you eat too much, eat cake, have candy often and/or consume sweet snacks. BUT this doesn’t mean that you should never be allowed to do this again. Forget that extreme approach because no one sticks to it for long.
What you must develop is the habit of considering eating the ‘wrong’ things as a special indulgence instead of as a trivial habit. Therefore don’t go on a crash diet (anything below 1500 calories per day), because this will weaken you, make you feel bad and you will not be able to sustain it. These quick-fix diets lead to the well known yo-yo effect. Quick weight loss, after which you gain the weight again just as quickly, thus ending up in an unpleasant and unhealthy vicious cycle. There is no ‘shortcut’ that leads to healthy and permanent, reasonable loss of weight.
How to lose weight the right way: real tips & tricks
Reducing your food intake by 300-500 calories per week will lead to a systematic weight loss of about 500 grams per week. This is a super realistic approach. Because we’re only talking about 70 calories per day! Remember that chocolate chip cookie mentioned earlier. Such a cookie typically contains between 49 and 200 calories, depending on its size. On average, this is 125 calories for 1 cookie. Another example: a small bit of chocolate candy contains 28 calories. If you eat 3 per day now and reduce this to 1 per day, you have already almost reached your 500 calories reduction per week. It can be that simple.
If you’re now thinking “Yeah, but what is 500 grams per week?”, well…. this is cumulatively more than 20 kilos in a year! Fatty substances contain the most calories of all foods (protein, carbohydrates). A good way of losing weight is thus reducing fatty foods and substituting them with complex carbohydrates.
Read on, because I’ll give you some more easy real tips & tricks on how to lose weight healthily:
- Replace carbonated drinks or fruit juices with still water
- Replace whole milk by half-skimmed or skimmed milk
- Make your own sandwiches for lunch and use very little margarine or butter. Sandwiches that you buy away from home almost always contain more butter or margarine than what you would make.
- Don’t put sugar in your coffee or tea (if needed, add some stevia)
- Don’t have a second serving during your meal. First wait for 15 minutes after your first serving in order to decide if you really want it, because that is how long it takes before your brain can correctly interpret the signal that you are already satiated
- Stop unhealthy and calorie-rich snacks between the meals (candy, cookies, crisps, etc.). Do you want to eat something in between? Buy pumpkin seeds and nibble on them
- Reduce your alcohol consumption. A gin tonic contains 200 calories, a typical beer 113, a heavier beer such as Westmalle trippel 245 and a glass of cava, for example, 77 calories
- Replace your bread with Pain des Fleurs crackers
Last tip on how to lose weight the right way
And finally one more thing. Do not skip any meals. This helps in the very short run, but once the next meal time arrives you are simply hungrier and it becomes extra difficult to eat reasonably. There is a great risk that you will eat too much during the next meal.
Does this help you in your quest on how to lose weight the right way? Read more about SkinnyLove and try it, if only once.