Stop hating yourself because you don't go to the gym! While physical activity is certainly important to health, the best place to start for weight loss is to change your diet. Here are some tips that can help you start losing weight without a minute of training.
Steps
Part 1 of 3: Improving Your Calorie Sources
The most important thing you can do to lose weight is to eat better. The principle of losing weight by changing your diet is always to limit calories, but it doesn't involve drastic portion control or exact calorie counting. The trick is to cut down on foods that are high in calories and give little to your body.
Step 1. Start eating natural, unprocessed foods such as fruits, vegetables, healthy meats and fish
Many of the foods in supermarkets and fast food restaurants are heavily processed to make their preparation cheaper and increase their shelf life. This process often eliminates essential nutrients, and changes the composition of foods, leading to them making you fat.
- Limit your shopping to the outside areas of the supermarket. An easy way to eat better is to shop only in the outer corridors, where fresh foods are stored, and avoid the shelves in the center that contain only preserved and processed products.
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Learn to read labels. Reading the information written on food packaging will help you understand the difference between foods that are good for you and those that enjoy good publicity. Many "healthy" foods are marketed with deliberately misleading claims to persuade consumers to buy them.
- Check the portion size. In some cases, foods are advertised as low in fat or sugar, and the numbers in the nutrition table will be low, but only because the serving size is much smaller than normal.
- Look for foods that are healthy in all their aspects, and not just a single factor. Many foods are high in fiber, but some of them are also extremely high in sugar and other refined carbohydrates. These foods would make you fat even if they are advertised as healthy.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 2 Step 2. Avoid empty calories, such as those found in candy, junk foods, and sodas
Again, these foods have very low nutritional values, and will make you eat a lot of calories even when consumed in small amounts.
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Pay particular attention to refined carbohydrates. They are one of the main culprits of obesity. Anything that contains flour or sugar (glucose, fructose, sucrose) will be stored in your body as fat.
- Refined carbohydrates are also responsible for some changes within the body that slow down metabolism.
- Sugar can be addictive.
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Choose water as your drink. It contains zero calories, aids in digestion, and can also help you expel metabolic-slowing toxins from your system.
- Sugary drinks, such as sodas and fruit juices, contain a lot of carbohydrates and will therefore make you fat.
- Diet sodas, even if they report zero or very low calorie content, contain sweeteners that promote weight gain, and may be toxic.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 3 Step 3. Don't be afraid of healthy fats like those found in olive oil, avocados, nuts and fish
Getting 40% of your calories from healthy sources of fat is acceptable, especially if they replace carbohydrates. This is in contrast to the low-fat diets of the 1980s and 1990s, which largely proved ineffective.
- Beware of low-fat products. Just because something is low in fat doesn't mean it doesn't make you fat. Many low-fat products are high in sugar and other refined carbohydrates that will turn into fat when ingested.
- Avoid trans fats. Trans fats like hydrogenated oils are made by manipulating the chemical structure of natural oils and turning them into something completely alien to the body. These will not only make you fat, but are also responsible for many heart problems.
- Limit saturated fat to no more than 10% of your diet. Recent research has shown that saturated fats such as those found in butter and red meats are not as harmful as previously thought, but most popular nutrition guides suggest they can raise LDL or bad cholesterol levels..
Part 2 of 3: Bolstering Your Willpower
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 4 Step 1. Don't feel deprived of anything
The worst thing for your motivation is feeling like you are depriving yourself of something. This feeling can make you anxious, and this can lead you to eat without thinking.
- Don't go hungry! You would run a lot of health risks by not eating regular meals. Also, if your body is not getting enough nutrition, the body will prepare for what appears to be a period of famine by going into "fasting" mode and conserving more the fats.
- First, add foods to your diet instead of subtracting them and find out what you like. Don't just focus on eliminating the foods that are bad for you. Find some new healthy foods to try and start adding them to your diet. These foods will replace the less healthy ones to create a much healthier diet.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 5 Step 2. If your willpower alone isn't enough to resist the temptation to eat unhealthy foods, don't feel guilty
Just accept that you will have to use creative methods to stick to your diet, even when your willpower fails.
- The desire to eat is central to survival, and throughout much of human history, the main problem has been having enough to eat. Our brains and bodies have not yet adapted to today's abundance of food.
- Salt, sugar, and fats are elements that our body is designed to crave. Again, these are essential nutrients that were once a rarity, so in many ways we are "programmed" to search for them.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 6 Step 3. Make your healthy diet affordable
We face a huge variety of food choices every day, so it will help you to make healthy foods the simplest. Create meal routines and always keep healthy foods on hand.
- Have snacks like nuts, carrots, or fruit ready to satiate hunger, and place them in places more accessible than processed foods (to go one step further, keep only healthy foods in the house!).
- Prepare healthy meals that you can eat "without thinking" when you don't have too many pretensions on the menu, or when you need to prepare something quick and easy. Instead of stocking up on frozen ready meals, keep portions of salads or vegetables on hand.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 7 Step 4. Take note of some information
Periodically measure your waistline, or have your body fat percentage measured. This simple step will help you lose weight.
- Taking note of the progress of your diet can be a great motivator.
- Remember that the weight fluctuates a little every day, so don't be discouraged if the weight on the scale rises unexpectedly.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 8 Step 5. Get enough sleep
Studies have shown that being sleepy can lead to overeating. When you are sleepy, you often let yourself be guided by instinct, and you may find that it is much more difficult to make wise decisions.
Part 3 of 3: Using Mind Tricks on Yourself
It is amazing what can lead us to eat more. In some cases, the plating of food or your location in the house can actually affect how much you eat. Restaurants and food manufacturers use these tricks every time to get you to buy and eat more, so why not use some of these tricks in reverse?
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 9 Step 1. Use smaller plates and taller glasses
Due to the way the brain analyzes visual information, the size of your plate can affect the amount of food you will need to feel full.
- If your plates are much larger than your food, you will think you haven't eaten enough. Using smaller plates will allow you to fill them using less food.
- Small and thin glasses seem to contain more liquid than low and wide ones, even if the volume is the same. Use this optical illusion when drinking sugary sodas that you want to limit.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 10 Step 2. Plan your portions before eating
The tendency of most people is to run out of everything in front of them, even if they already feel full, and food producers know that people will buy and eat more if they are faced with larger packages.
- Don't sit down with a huge packet of potato chips. Put some in a bowl and stop when the bowl is empty.
- Repack mini portions of the snacks you buy in bulk.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 11 Step 3. Put healthy foods closer to you
If you put the foods that are bad for you where they are most difficult to take, it will be much more difficult to eat them without thinking. It may be enough just to remove something from your desk and put it on the other side of the room.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 12 Step 4. Eat with friends who eat less than you
When people eat in social situations, they often mimic the behavior of others to decide how much to eat. If you hang out with people who eat a lot, try changing companies.
- If you can't eat with such people, at least take this trend into account and notice how you are affected by other people's eating habits.
- If you have a tendency to eat more when you are alone, try eating more meals with other people.
Reduce Fat Without Doing Exercise Step 13 Step 5. Focus on what you eat
If you are distracted when you eat, because you are eating in front of the TV or while driving, you will be much less likely to feel full or notice how much you are eating. Pay attention to what you eat and always listen to your body when it tells you that you are full, and you will eat less.
Advice
- If you eat something you shouldn't have eaten, don't let this episode lead you to stop following a diet. Eating healthy is something you need to do on a daily basis, not all or nothing.
- Even small changes can help you lose weight. A reduction of only 100-200 calories per day can lead to a loss of 10-20 kilos in one year!
