Maintaining the appropriate weight is one of the most important facets of health. There are all kinds of advice when it comes to losing weight which makes losing weight harder than it should be.
Moreover, most of the weight loss advice you will find simply does not work. It is meant to sell products or services that benefit the seller more than they benefit you. The truth is that you don’t have to do a lot of crazy things to lose a significant amount of weight. However, there are some weight loss techniques and strategies that work.
The following are some weight loss tips you should try:
Drink More Water
Most people think that the more water you drink, the heavier you are. Though that is true in a sense, it is false in another.
If you want to lose weight, you will have to drink more water than you were before your weight loss journey. Drinking water has many benefits the least not being that it helps with satiety and prevents you from overeating.
There are other benefits of drinking water such as boosting metabolism which will help burn more calories. You should especially drink about half a liter of water before meals as it will prevent you from eating too much.
Stop Snacking
One of the biggest impediments to losing weight is snacking in between meals. You should stop doing that if you want to lose weight and keep it off.
The more food you consume, the less weight you lose and eating snacks means extra calories. The worst part is that most people snack on unhealthy foods like pastries rather than healthy foods like fruits.
Snacking also messes up with your hunger response and will leave you feeling hungrier than usual. If you want to lose weight, snacking is a habit that you simply have to stop.
Track Your Progress
A great tip to help you with weight loss is to track your progress. You should track as many metrics about your body as possible when losing weight but your weight is most important. Be sure to check out weight scales available here.
There are a variety of ways for you to track your weight. There are apps which will help your weightloss journey or, you can also simply use a weighing scale and note down your observations.
Other metrics to measure may include your waist size and BMI among others. If you have accurate measurements, then you will see how you are improving which will motivate you to lose even more weight.
Intermittent Fasting
Fasting is a word that is often associated with deprivation and suffering. However, fasting is a strategy that can help you lose a lot of weight with less struggle, particularly intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting is a fasting technique that involves alternating between periods of eating and fasting. It may include fasting every other day or having an eight-hour window in the day when you consume all your calories. You can choose whichever format you like.
Intermittent fasting is just as effective as long term calorie restriction according to some studies. There is also the added benefit of less muscle mass loss when you do intermittent fasting.
Reduce Sugar
If there is a single ingredient in modern diets that is detrimental to weight loss, it is sugar. The simple fact is that most people consume entirely too much sugar.
Sugar consumption has been associated with weight gain and obesity for the longest time. The reason is that the extra sugar is not used by the body and instead converted into fat.
Reducing your sugar intake is much easier said than done. There are even foods that are labelled as healthy but contain entirely too much sugar. It is up to you to ensure that you are diligent about eating foods free from sugar.
Sleep
Sleep is absolutely necessary if you are to lose a sufficient amount of weight. Unfortunately, not many people consider sleep to be a crucial element of their weight loss journey.
Sleep is as important to weight loss as a healthy diet and exercise. Many studies show sleep deprivation is a leading cause of obesity.
You should ensure that you are getting a sufficient amount of sleep every night. A good sleep routine will help you do that. You may have to sacrifice other things in your life such as entertainment if you want better sleep.
There are as many tips for weight loss as there are stars in the galaxy. The issue is finding those that work. You can rest assured that the tips outlined above will produce results. You will have to try them if you are to find out how they work for you.
Different Diet Types for Weight Loss
There are many diets available to help you lose weight. While others focus on reducing appetite, others restrict their intake of calories, carbohydrates, or fat.
Given that they all claim to be superior, it could be difficult to choose which ones are valuable to try. The reality is that there is not a single diet that works best for everyone, and what works for you might not work for someone else.
1. The Paleo Diet
The paleo diet recommends eating the same kinds of foods as your ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers before agriculture.
The Western diet, which includes consuming cereals, dairy products, and processed foods, is thought to be responsible for the majority of modern ailments.
While it is unclear whether this diet genuinely provides the same foods your ancestors ate, it is connected to numerous impressive health benefits.
How it Works
The paleo diet discourages processed foods, sugar, dairy, and grains while emphasizing whole foods, lean protein, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds.
The paleo diet, in some of its more adaptable forms, also permits dairy products like cheese and butter and tubers like potatoes and sweet potatoes.
Benefits
Along with helping people lose weight, the diet appears to be successful in lowering blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, blood triglycerides, and other risk factors for heart disease.
The Downside
Whole grains, legumes, and dairy are all prohibited on the paleo diet despite their health benefits.
2. The Vegan Diet
For ethical, environmental, or health reasons, veganism forbids the use of any animal products.
Veganism is also linked to opposition to animal abuse and exploitation.
How it Works
The strictest type of vegetarianism is veganism. It also forbids the use of dairy, eggs, and anything derived from animals, including gelatin, honey, albumin, whey, casein, and several types of vitamin D3.
Benefits
A vegan diet’s extremely low fat and high fiber content may help you feel satiated for longer, which may make it incredibly successful at helping individuals lose weight — frequently without counting calories.
Diets high in plants are associated with a lower risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and early death.
By limiting processed meat, you may also lower your risk of developing Alzheimer’s and of developing heart disease or cancer.
The Downside
Vegan diets fully forgo animal products, so they could be deficient in a number of minerals, such as vitamin B12, vitamin D, iodine, iron, calcium, zinc, and omega-3 fatty acids.
3. Low-Carb Diets
Since decades, low-carb diets have gained popularity, particularly for weight loss.
There are various kinds of low-carb diets, but they all call for keeping daily carbohydrate intake to 20–150 grams.
The fundamental goal of the diet is to make your body rely more on fats for fuel rather than primarily on carbohydrates.
How it Works
Low-carb diets place a strong emphasis on protein and fat, with carbohydrate intake tightly constrained.
When you eat very few carbohydrates, your blood is pushed to your liver, where part of the fatty acids are converted to ketones.
In the absence of carbohydrates, your body can then use fatty acids and ketones as its main energy sources.
Benefits
They appear to be particularly successful at shedding the harmful belly fat that can collect around your organs. With very low-carb diets, people frequently enter a state known as ketosis.
Low-carbohydrate diets have the tendency to decrease your appetite and make you feel less hungry, which results in a natural decrease in calorie intake.
In addition, numerous significant disease risk factors, including blood triglycerides, cholesterol levels, blood sugar, insulin levels, and blood pressure, may benefit from low-carb diets.
The Downside
Not everyone should follow a low-carb diet. Although others feel horrible about them, some feel fantastic.
It’s possible for some people to have higher levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol.
An extremely rare illness known as nondiabetic ketoacidosis can be brought on by very low-carbohydrate diets. If untreated, this illness, which appears to be more prevalent in lactating women, can be fatal.
4. The Dukan Diet
The Dukan diet is a high-protein, low-carb weight loss plan that is broken up into two phases for weight loss and two phases for maintenance.
The amount of weight you need to reduce will determine how long you spend in each phase. Every stage has a unique eating plan.
How it Works
Oat bran is required during the weight loss phases, and eating high-protein foods at any time is encouraged.
The other steps involve adding non-starchy veggies followed by some carbs and fat. As time goes on, there will be less and fewer days where you only eat protein.
Benefits
A greater metabolic rate, a drop in the hunger hormone ghrelin, and an uptick in numerous fullness hormones are a few of them.
There are no documented advantages of the Dukan diet in scientific literature except from weight loss.
The Downside
The Dukan diet has received relatively little reliable study.
The Dukan diet restricts both fat and carbohydrates, which is an unscientific approach to get rid of them.
Furthermore, rapid weight loss brought on by severe calorie restriction frequently results in a large loss of muscle.
It may also force your body to save energy due to the loss of muscle mass and severe calorie restriction, making it incredibly simple to gain the weight back once you’ve lost it.
5. The Ultra-Low-Fat Diet
An ultra-low-fat diet restricts your consumption of fat to < 10% of daily calories. A low-fat diet typically contains 30% of its calories as fat.
How it works
An ultra-low-fat diet has 10% or less calories from fat. The diet consists primarily of plants, with a small amount of animal products.
Benefits
Many risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure and excessive cholesterol, have been shown in studies to be improved by ultra-low-fat diets.
The Downside
Since that fat plays numerous significant roles in your body, the fat restriction may have long-term negative effects. They aid in the synthesis of hormones, cell membranes, and the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins.
6. The Atkins Diet
The most popular low-carb weight loss regimen is the Atkins diet. Its proponents maintain that as long as you stay away from carbohydrates, you can lose weight by eating as much protein and fat as you like.
Low-carb diets are particularly helpful for weight loss since they decrease hunger. You automatically eat fewer calories as a result of this.
How it works
There are four distinct phases to the Atkins diet. You begin with an induction phase where you consume less than 20 grams of carbohydrates each day for the first two weeks.
When you get closer to your desired weight, the other phases involve gradually reintroducing healthy carbs to your diet.
Benefits
The Atkins diet promotes weight loss more quickly than low-fat diets. Low-carb diets also improve blood sugar, “good” HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, and other health markers when compared to other weight reduction regimens.
The Downside
The Atkins diet, like other extremely low-carb diets, is generally safe and healthful but may occasionally result in issues.
7. The HCG Diet
The HCG diet is a drastic weight loss plan designed to help people lose up to 1-2 pounds (0.45-1 kg) every day.
Its supporters assert that it increases metabolism and fat reduction without increasing appetite.
HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) is a hormone present at high levels during early pregnancy.
It notifies a woman’s body that she is pregnant and keeps the production of hormones vital to the growth of the fetus going. Infertility problems have also been treated using it.
How it Works
Three phases make up the diet. You start taking supplements containing HCG during the first stage.
The second phase of treatment involves taking HCG drops, pellets, injections, or sprays combined with an extremely low-calorie diet of only 500 calories per day. A 3-6 week period is recommended for the weight loss phase.
You stop taking HCG during the third phase and gradually increase your food consumption.
Benefits
The HCG diet does result in weight loss, however numerous studies have found that the HCG hormone is not responsible for the weight loss; rather, the ultra-low calorie diet alone is to blame.
HCG was also shown not to decrease hunger.
The Downside
The HCG diet, like the majority of other extremely low-calorie diets, may result in muscle loss, which lowers your capacity to burn calories.
Your body burns fewer calories when you follow such a stringent calorie limit. Your body tries to conserve energy because it believes that it is starving.
Also, the majority of HCG products on the market are frauds that don’t actually contain HCG. The only way to increase this hormone’s blood levels is by injection.
The diet also includes a lot of negative side effects, such as sadness, lethargy, and headaches. The diet is most likely to blame for one case of a lady getting blood clots.
The FDA condemns this regimen, calling it unlawful, risky, and deceptive.
8. The Zone Diet
The Zone Diet is a low-glycemic load diet that recommends keeping protein and fat to 30% each and keeping carbs to 35-45% of daily calories.
It advocates eating only carbs with a low glycemic index (GI).
The estimated amount that a food would boost your blood sugar levels after intake is given by its GI rating.
The Zone Diet was initially created to lower inflammation brought on by diet, promote weight loss, and lower your chance of developing chronic diseases.
How It Works
Each meal should contain a balance of 1/3 protein, 2/3 colorful fruits and vegetables, and a small amount of fat, preferably monounsaturated oil from sources like olive oil, avocado, or almonds.
Also, it restricts high-GI carbohydrates including bananas, rice, and potatoes.
Benefits
There is a lack of consistency in studies on low-GI diets. While some claim that the diet helps people lose weight and suppresses their appetite, others indicate that they lose far less weight than they would with conventional diets.
The major advantage of this diet is a decrease in heart diseases risk factors, such as lower cholesterol and triglycerides.
The Downside
One of the few negatives of this diet is that it limits the use of several good carb sources, such as bananas and potatoes.
9. Intermittent Fasting
Your body alternates between feeding and fasting times. It regulates when you eat them rather than limiting what you can eat. As a result, it might be considered an eating pattern rather than a diet.
The methods of intermittent fasting that are most widely used include:
- The 16/8 method. This entails foregoing breakfast and limiting your daily eating time to eight hours, followed by a 16-hour fast.
- The eat-stop-eat method. Consists of one or two nonconsecutive 24-hour fasts every week.
- The 5:2 diet. It requires you to consume no more than 500–600 calories on two separate days of the week. The following five days do not have any dietary restrictions.
- The Warrior Diet. Eat tiny amounts of raw fruits and vegetables during the day and one substantial meal at night.
How It Works
Because intermittent fasting makes calorie restriction very simple, it is frequently used for weight loss. As long as you do not overcompensate by consuming significantly more during the eating intervals, it may cause you to consume fewer calories overall.
Benefits
Blood lipids, blood sugar, inflammatory indicators, cholesterol levels, and intermittent fasting may all be decreased by intermittent fasting.
The Downside
Even if it is secure for those who are fit and well-fed, intermittent fasting is not appropriate for everyone.