New weight loss trends come and go each year, but in reality, only a few simple rules have really stood the test of time. In most cases, losing weight requires a bit of determination, a proper diet and regular exercise.
Ketogenic eating, green smoothie making, intermittent fasting, there’s so much information out there and most of it is conflicting.
However, the good thing for you is that you only need to know about a few rules for weight loss, rules that you can count on.
Eat Healthy to Lose Weight
Regular exercise helps to burn fat, but it’s the diet that will ultimately make or break the weight loss success. Its a known fact that exercise alone cannot drive significant weight loss compared to dieting alone.
In many ways, it is much easier to simply reduce the amount of calories you eat, rather than trying to burn them off through exercise.
A combination of exercise and healthy eating is best: improve your eating habits to help shift the weight and exercise regularly to help keep the weight off.
Eating healthy involves watching the foods that you eat, not necessarily how much food you eat. Of course, you may want to restrict the amount of foods that you eat, when on a diet, but it is more important to focus on the foods that you do eat.
For instance, if you were to eat fruit instead of chips, you could have more fruit snacks with your meals than you would be able to if you were just to eat junk food.
So familiarize yourself with healthy meals.
Eat Enough Fibre: Fibre is the carbohydrate found in plant foods like vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, legumes, and seeds that your body can’t digest. This means the fibre passes straight through your system without causing your blood sugar to rise, which is important for managing hunger.
Fibre adds bulk to meals (without adding a lot of extra calories to your diet), which can slow down the rate of digestion, aiding in the filling effect — another factor in fighting hunger for hours. Fibre adds bulk to your meals and will help keep you full.
To ensure you reach your daily fibre quota, aim for 2 serves of whole fruit, (preferably with skin), 5 serves of vegetables, 4-6 serves of grains, preferably high fibre or whole grain and 1 serve of nuts and legumes.
Eat More Vegetables:
To reduce fat in your diet, you need to fill your plate with more plant-based food like vegetables (and fruit and legumes). The more colourful, the better.
Feel free to include cabbage, sweet potato, pumpkin, peas, or carrots in your salad.. The idea is establishing a habit around eating vegetables every day.
Quality is Better than Quantity:
The healthiest and nutritious foods like apple, spinach, nuts, etc. have very few ingredients. On the other hand, specially formulated protein bars, gluten free cookies, or similar treats have a long list of ingredients (most unrecognisable). They have more sugar, fat and salt (indicating its highly processed) and a healthy diet cannot be built on these foods alone.
General Diet Tips
In general, aim for the following:
- Reduce your overall calorie consumption
- Eat good fats, such as monounsaturated fats (MUFAs) that are found in avocados, nuts, seeds, soybeans, and chocolate, these prevent the accumulation of belly fat.
- Avoid Trans fats, such as those found in crackers, cookies, or anything made with partially hydrogenated oils, they deposit more fat in the abdomen.
- Aim for more fiber in your diet. Soluble fiber (found in apples, oats, and cherries) lowers insulin levels, which can speed up the burning of visceral belly fat.
Regular exercise is a must for weight loss
If you are looking to lose weight, you should start an exercise plan for yourself.
Exercise is important as it burns off calories. When you burn calories, the amount of calories that your body absorbs decreases.
This is, essentially, what makes it possible for you to lose weight.
Checkout fitness magazines, instructional workout videos or exercises online to find suitable exercise plans/programs.
Find a workout buddy
Find a workout partner or a workout buddy, who will exercise with you, whether your exercise involves visiting a local gym or just going for a walk at a local shopping center. Having a workout partner may help to keep you motivated and it may help to keep exercising and losing weight fun and exciting for you.
“Slim people are very badtameez, kyunki unke paas “tummies” naam ki cheez hi nahi hoti hai.
Vary the exercises
Change the exercises often to reduce boredom and also to prevent your body getting used to the same exercises.
For instance, one day you may want to use a treadmill, the next day you may want to lift weights, and the next day you may want to do an exercise DVD, and so forth.
Track your efforts
Track your progress. If you have a good week, like one where you completed all of your exercises, you may want to think about rewarding yourself. Your reward doesn’t have to include food; it can be something as simple as a sticker or treating yourself to a movie.
Change Your Eating Habits
You must change your meal habits if you’re really serious about losing weight.
It is important that you educate yourself about nutritious diet required for your body. Learn and know what kind of food intake is good or bad for health. Avoid junk and fatty food at all costs. Substitute your diet with healthy and nutritious food like fruits, green veggies etc.
Even the way you eat your food matters. Eat slowly, nicely chewing your food. Have small intakes of food at regular intervals. You can surely cut down on fat by eating right and following a good exercise regime regularly.
Here are some important things to remember:
Don’t Skip breakfast
Studies reveal that eating within an hour of waking up keeps your insulin levels steadier and your LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) levels lower.
Try to eat your breakfast around the same time every day, or as soon as you wake up (especially for weekends).
Protein and high-fiber foods (eggs, peanut butter, fresh fruit & vegetables) are better than refined sugars and complex carbs, as they make you feel full for a longer time.
Sugary cereals, waffles, pancakes, pastries, or instant oatmeal should not ideally be only thing that you eat in the morning, as they contain lots of refined sugars, so balance it with other food rich in protein or fiber.
Use Whole Grains
This is common knowledge but many still haven’t made the move, one of the reasons being the easy access to refined grains compared to whole grains; many also prefer the taste of refined grains.
But studies have revealed that those who ate all whole grains (plus five servings of fruits and vegetables, three servings of low-fat dairy, and two servings of lean meat, fish, or poultry) lost more belly fat compared to another group which ate a similar diet, but with all refined grains.
So you see the difference!
Besides, a diet rich in whole grains stimulates the glucose and insulin response in your body, which helps in the melting of visceral fat (that deep layer of fat underneath the subcutaneous fat).
That’s why its important to avoid “white” grains, commonly used by those from Asian and Latin american counties.
So make these changes right now – use brown wheat bread instead of over-processed white bread, and wild brown rice over white rice.
Visit High Altitude Places
There are some vacations where you tend to gain weight (places like Goa) but then there are places that actually help you to lose weight. And these are high-altitude places like Ladakh, Kumaon, Darjeeling.
Studies suggest that living in high altitudes can suppress hunger by increasing leptin and other hormones involved in appetite control, curbing obesity risk by nearly half. These results suggest that moving to high altitude would protect an overweight person from moving to obesity.
So if you’re not really keen on hitting the gym to lose weight, a better option would be to visit high-altitude places frequently to lose weight. So pack your bags and head to the mountains.
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