Erin Jack
If you are someone trying to lose weight, you might have heard some crazy advice. From someone suggesting you do something and someone else asking you to do the opposite, you might have had your fair share of it.
Besides diet and exercise, many other factors play a role in determining your weight. Right from your sleep cycle to your stress levels, many things in your daily life, that might seem very normal and insignificant can have an impact on your weight. Internet is flooded with loads of information on weight loss and you might not be able to differentiate what is efficient from what is unsolicited.
Weight Loss or Lifestyle?
Interestingly, most weight loss techniques can also be understood as better lifestyle suggestions. Since your health is the most important thing, you wouldn’t want short-term changes, only to go back to the first square of your journey. When you constantly try to make better choices and adapt to a lifestyle that makes you feel happy and healthy, the rest of it falls in place.
There are uncountable tips for women to lose weight, but not all of them work. Before you choose to follow anything, you have to understand why it is suggested and how it works. If you are aware of how a particular suggestion works and why a specific tip is effective, you are already halfway through adapting to a healthy lifestyle.
Effective weight loss tips (for real):
Stop eating junk food
It is a basic change to cut down your junk. Since they are high in calories and don’t satiate your hunger, you consume high-calorie food within a short gap. It can also increase your risk for obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and more. Junk mostly contains trans or saturated fats, salts, and sugars, so you don’t eat real food when you eat junk food.
Without junk in your stomach, you will have enough space to accommodate calories from healthy options like vegetables, protein, fruits, and more. However, to achieve the best results, you should keep away from junk food as well as you can.
If you are someone who eats a lot of junk but wants to lose weight, you can stick to the one spoon rule. It is not easy to cut down on junk in one go, so if you can start eating one spoonful of any junk food and no more than that. You can gradually reduce your junk cravings this way.
When you stop eating junk, it can do wonders to your waistline and muscle tone. Since junk food is mostly unwanted sugars and fats, it has the most significant impact on your weight. In your journey, learning to not do something harmful is as useful as learning to do something good.
Replace refined carbs with whole grains
Refined carbs, also known as simple carbs or processed carbs have a high glycemic index. In other words, refined cards are processed to lose their nutritious and fibrous parts. They can increase your blood sugar levels and don’t keep your stomach full for longer periods. It can lead to increased body weight and belly fat. Some examples of refined carbs include white rice, white bread, pizza dough, pastries, bagels, and more.
You can replace such refined carbs with whole wheat products like multigrain bread, whole wheat flour, quinoa, oats, and buckwheat. There are many healthier alternatives to replace your refined carbs with. This way, you can consume the same dishes and flavours, but with a difference in the main ingredient. Replace your chapatis with multigrain ones, eat brown bread sandwiches, cook whole wheat pasta, and so on.
Many foods including whole wheat can also work as superfoods, causing you to gain weight. However, this happens in cases of overeating. There are many foods that can help you lose weight but only in moderation. You will have to balance the calories in whole grains with other dishes you consume throughout the day.
Some tips to add whole grains to your diet include eating oats for breakfast, baking your own healthy versions of bread, making rotis or wraps with buckwheat flour, cooking brown rice with Indian curries, adding millets to dosa batter, replacing high-calorie snacks with popcorn, etc.
Resistance training and your workout routine
Adding resistance training to your workout routine builds your muscle and develops endurance. It works for women of all age groups, but women over 50 can gain extra benefits from resistance training. It helps your bodies in burning more fat than usual in the resting phase. It is also known to maintain good bone health, preventing osteoporosis with age.
To get started with resistance training, you can lift weights, use equipment in the gym, and practice body-weight exercises. Exercises like squats, push-ups, pull-ups, and lifts require coordination and movement of many joints at the same time. They are hence effective in weight loss and after-burn after exercise.
It can also play an important role in burning belly fat when you train to focus on your belly area. It is also important that you remember to balance resistance training with cardio. It will increase your heart rate and burn extra calories. You should always opt for help from trainers before you make your workout routine.
If you don’t have enough willpower to follow a workout routine, you can make it fun by doing different activities throughout the week. Swimming, cycling, aerobics, jogging, and yoga can help you lose weight and not just a strict gym workout routine. It is also important for you to be consistent in your training and keep doing it as a lifestyle.
Many people work out, but not all of them are active. Being active also includes moving around throughout the day. Without keeping to a place for hours together, you should keep moving, walking, and stretching no matter what workout you do.
Drink water and practice portion control
Water doesn’t have any calories and by drinking it before meals, you will not eat more food. It also helps you burn more calories as a part of your bodily functions. It is a great way to replace liquid calories with water, so you can reduce your sugar intake too.
Water can suppress your appetite naturally and removes wastes from your body. The amount of water you need to drink may depend on your activity level, age, and health status, but adult women must drink at least 2.5L of water every day. Since water is a necessary factor for your body to burn fat, drinking enough can do more than quenching your thirst.
This alone might not give you any desired results, but pairing it with practices like portion control will help you a long way. If you tend to eat only one type of food in huge amounts in your meals, you must start controlling your portions. You can also use smaller plates if you can’t control the quantity even when you control your portions. You should try to eat protein, healthy fats, vegetables, and whole grains in all of your meals.
Set specific portions of vegetables, proteins, and whole grains on your plate. The complex makeup of our body requires nothing too less or too much from your diet. Follow the 80% rule in which you eat only till you feel 80% full. You should not keep eating till the point of complete satiation.
Have a balanced diet
You can’t live on just proteins or just vegetables, which is why you need a balanced diet. You will have to consume different kinds of healthy foods, which help your body get all the essential nutrients and minerals. Since no single food can contribute to all your dietary needs, you have to consume a wide range of foods and control those portions on your meal plate.
Eating a high-protein breakfast is the first step toward a balanced diet. It can control your cravings and balance your calorie count for the day. Don’t follow any liquid diets since it only adds unnecessary sugars to your diet. When you plan your meals for the day, choose ingredients that are weight loss-friendly. You should, however, remember that no food is a magical weight-loss food. There are just foods that gradually help you in the process.
You can add coffee or tea to your diet since caffeine can boost your metabolism and play a role in your overall weight loss. When it comes to snacks, most people tend to lose control. You should keep healthy snacks available at all times, so you don’t much on junk and sugars. Try to eat fruits, popcorn, dry fruits and seeds, chickpeas and similar foods as a snack. You can also much on carrots, cucumbers, and steamed veggies.
A balanced diet should go in tandem with your other habits like eating fibre-rich foods, no stress eating, body movement, staying hydrated, cutting down sugars, and slow eating. The bottom line of anything that you do to lose weight should be about getting comfortable with a healthy lifestyle and doing it all for yourself.
Practice mindful eating
Mindful eating has nothing to do with your calorie count, carbohydrates, protein, or food quantity. It is about paying attention to your process of eating. It develops your sensual awareness of anything you eat. It is also known to have an effect on your experience and after-effects of eating food.
Mindful eating will help you gain control of your eating habits. It also includes not being judgemental of the food you eat, be it too less or too much, or healthy or junk. You should gradually develop, one meal at a time. After a while, you will observe that you do less binge eating and you will feel better about your food consumption. In total, this promotes weight loss in the healthiest way possible.
As a part of mindful eating, you can eat and chew slowly, eat in silence without electronic distractions, and stop overeating your favourite dishes. It helps you lose emotional and external eating habits by manifesting positive emotions and improving self-control. In a study conducted on individuals who are trying to lose weight, only some of them practised mindful eating and the others didn’t. While everyone lost weight, only those who practised mindful eating lost 1.5kgs more than the others.
Statistically, the effects of mindful eating are rather significant when you are working towards shedding that extra weight. Another advantage is that it is a natural habit that gets easier with practice. You don’t have to follow any complex procedure. All you have to do is be conscious of yourself and your eating habits.
Take probiotics and whey protein
There are many weight loss supplements, each new one taking the world by storm. Truth be said, most of them are backed by limited research. In addition to this, supplements are a risky business since they interact with many internal and external factors. However, some supplements are simple and healthy, just to make sure you are not deficient in essential nutrients and minerals. Probiotics and whey protein can be taken as supplements without any serious risk factors.
Probiotics are live microorganisms in food, also available as supplements. They can boost immunity, help in digestion, maintain heart health, and do more. Several studies suggest that probiotics can help you lose weight and belly fat by influencing your appetite and energy levels. They release short-chain fatty acids and help in increasing fat-regulating proteins. By inhibiting the absorption of fats, probiotics make you excrete more fat with faeces than usual.
Whey protein is made up of a wide range of essential amino acids with a quick absorption rate. Studies suggest that it can make you strong, gain muscle, and lose significant amounts of body fat. Besides being a protein, it is also packed with nutrients with potent benefits for your health. Interestingly, this is one of the best-studied supplements in the world.
Try your own weight loss plan, like intermittent fasting
If you are someone who doesn’t eat breakfast for various reasons, one of them being nocturnal, intermittent fasting might be something that you can do easily. It is about eating in a specific time window. Scientists say there is no right way to do it since you can customise it to how your body works and what you prefer.
There are many ways you can try this. One is 5:2 in which you eat less than 500 calories for 2 consecutive days. In the 16:8 type, you fast for 16 hours and eat in an 8-hour gap window, like between 12:00 pm to 8:00 pm. The whole point of intermittent fasting is to give your body enough time and support to burn the extra fat. Your body gets time a lot of time for metabolism when you don’t send anything inside your body for many hours.
There is no research to prove intermittent fasting is better than other diets, but there is enough evidence to suggest that it is a potential plan to lose weight. It is important to keep your lifestyle changes in mind when you create your intermittent fasting plan. If you think you will fall back to old practices, no plan is a good plan, but if you work hard to gain results and then keep doing it, there is no better plan.
Recent research even recorded low insulin levels and low blood pressure in women who have been practising intermittent fasting. It helps you gradually reduce your appetite and help you eat positively. Since appetite control is a deciding factor for weight loss, intermittent fasting helps you achieve that goal easily if you can still focus on the kind of food you eat and how you eat it.
Be grateful and focus on adapting to a healthy lifestyle
Since losing weight is a lifestyle change, you should be grateful for what you can do. Maintain a gratitude journal, do something to relieve your stress, spend time with nature, and do what makes you happy. By manifesting such energy, you will be more conscious of your choices. You will understand your health and body better than before. All of this can amount to huge changes in your weight loss journey.
A healthy lifestyle is something that doesn’t let you fall back into habits you tried so hard to get away from. When you are trying to make a change in your life, you should make sure you do it strong enough to not go back to the way things were. By choosing healthier options, you should remember that it is going to be a choice for a lifetime and not just for a while till you lose weight.
This is why you should try to understand your body and follow suggestions that you think will work for you. If you want to take extra supplements in your diet, you must consult a health professional since most weight loss supplements on the supply market are not backed by enough scientific evidence. Whatever you do to lose weight, you should make sure it is not toxic for you.
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