Top 10 Weight Loss Tips: This is Why You Can Succeed!
It might appear really obvious, but one of the most important things a person can do if they are overweight and want to improve their health is to lose some of it!
While it may well be quite true that a person can still feel healthy even if they are overweight, they will feel much fitter and have more energy if they were to reduce their body fat content. That can be done by changing the diet and exercising to scale up the metabolism.
This article provides ten really easy but still highly useful ways in which a person can lose weight effectively.
What is Your Weight Problem?
The problem many people have is that they spend all their time reading about how to lose weight, but instead of going away and doing some of the things they just read about, they go in search of even more ways to lose weight. They spend so much time reading about all of the many ways they could achieve their goal, they get tired and decide to just put it off for another day.
This results with them reading a lot of stuff, but not losing any weight
That's because they're not putting any of what they read into practice. So while I could have gone the whole way and listed maybe 100 really powerful weight loss tips here, I'm just listing the ten most effective.
My ultimate hope here is that you read only these and then take away what you just learned and start putting it into practice.
Tips for Losing Weight
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Drink plenty of water
This might not be top of many people's lists on how to shed weight, but you would be amazed at how powerful this can be. It means you must replace all other forms of refreshment, apart from tea, black coffee, green tea or herbal tea, with plain water.
That means no soda, not even diet soda, no flavored juices, sports drinks or even those tempting bottled of flavored, carbonated water. Fresh fruit juice is maybe allowed with breakfast, but for the rest of the day, it must be plain water.
Why?
Water hydrates the body better than anything else. The body is 70% water and water is what it wants!
It improves digestion and reduces the urge to eat snacks. It suppresses the feeling of hunger between meals. It helps you feel fuller, sooner if you drink a glass just before a meal. It has zero calories, zero additives and zero fat! -
Be More Active
The next thing you'll need to do, especially if you lead a pretty sedentary lifestyle is to be more active during the day. If your job means you are chained to a desk or the seat of a bus or similar for most of the day, there's not much you can do about that.
However, you can do a lot about what you do when you're not at work! If you can walk or cycle to work instead of taking the car, then do it! If you take the elevator up one or two floors in your work building, then take the stairs. And run, don't just waddle up and down them!
Why?
The more exercise you get, even if it's not the kind of exercise you would do in a gym, the more effective your body's metabolism will be at processing the food you eat.
That means as long as you eat right, you will store even less fat. It also means that your muscles will demand more fuel to use as energy to make them do the extra work, with forces your body to give up more of what it would otherwise store as fat. -
Eat Right
There's no way around this, but if you are eating a load of junk food, then you really have to stop it. Don't make pathetic excuses up that you can't cook or you don't have time or whatever.
If you want to get healthy and lose weight and I assume you do or you wouldn't be reading this, then you are going to have to make some seriously strict lifestyle changes. One of the most important of those is to reassess your diet and if it looks bad, then you are going to have to make it look good!
Why?
You are what you eat. Fill your body up with garbage and it will slowly clog up and give up on you. That's right, you will literally eat yourself to an early death. Look at Elvis Presley. They guy had it all but died young because his bloated body just could not take another cheeseburger. Don't copy him. Copy someone who is healthy and eats right.
That often means you are going to have to discover the right diet for you that is healthy and will help your body reduce in size and burn fat and change to it.
Swap your pizza for healthy home cooked meals. If you can't cook, then learn. If you don't have time, then marry someone who can!
OK, maybe that's a little drastic, but you get the idea. Go visit mom a few evenings a week and get her to make you something healthy. If she can't cook, go see granny! Or make friends with your neighbors, join an evening cookery class or whatever, just find a way to eat healthy! -
Think Right
That's not a typo or some spiritual message. It's simply a call to get your head in the right frame of mind to achieve weight loss.
You need to get positive, motivated and believe you can do it. If you don't think you can lose weight, you will never lose any!
You will always find excuses and keep putting things off. How long will you keep doing that? Until you get a nasty wake up call with a visit to the hospital or worse. You might not make it to the hospital!
When you get yourself into the mindset that you can reduce your weight, then you will find yourself feeling motivated to get started doing things that will make it happen. Reading this is a good start. Turn a good start into a productive one by saying to yourself, "I CAN LOSE WEIGHT"
You'll be surprised and amazed at what you can achieve when you actually believe you can do a thing. -
Eat Slowly
When you eat, do you eat really fast and clean the plate in record time? Or do you eat your meals in front of the TV and finish up without even realizing you had eaten it all? Chances are you are eating too fast and this is one sure fire way to put on weight. Try eating more slowly and without distractions, especially of the TV.
Why?
When you eat slower, your digestive system gets a chance to digest all your food more efficiently, meaning more of it goes into providing energy for your body and less of it gets stored as fat. When you are not distracted by the TV, you can actually slow yourself down and take your time over your meal.
You might even find you enjoy your food so much more, because you actually get to taste it! Yep, when you shovel it all down so fast you don't remember doing it, you missed out on really tasting what you just ate.
Another tip is to avoid any fast or upbeat music, even if it's in the background. Fast music acts as a subliminal driver to make you unconsciously eat faster.
That's why fast food restaurants play it in the background. It's to get the customers to eat faster and vacate the table sooner for the next customers! Eat slowly, enjoy your meal and get into shape! -
Brush Your Teeth Early
This is a really simple trick you can pull on yourself to stop you eating late at night. This is the worst time to eat as you end up with a load of food in your stomach overnight and when you sleep, your digestive system is not working very well, so more of that food will get stored as fat. So brush your teeth earlier in the evening instead of right before you go to bed.
Why?
When you do that, you trick your brain into thinking it's time to stop eating. You wouldn't normally eat anything after brushing your teeth right before going to bed, so if you bring that time forward an hour or so, then maybe settle down with a book of let the TV dull your brain a little more before you hit the sack, you are far less likely to get the urge to want to eat a late night snack! -
Stop Watching TV
I'm serious! One of the main reasons for the existence of TV is to fill your head full of commercials to sell you stuff you don't want.
A lot of what gets advertised on TV are junk food and fast food restaurants, several top brands of soda, processed foods sold in packets at the store, candy bars and other sweet treats and just about everything that will make you fat if you eat it. Watching far less, or even no TV will actually help you lose some of those excess pounds.
Why?
If you stop watching TV, you won't get the ads drilling their message to "eat, eat, EAT" into your brain!
Without the advertising brainwashing you get every night from prime time TV commercials, you won't feel so tempted to pick up all those tempting "extras" when you are at the store. If they are not in the house, you won't be able to eat them. So you eat less, eat fewer calories and lose weight! -
Stop Reading Glossy Magazines
This is pretty much a follow on from the last tip. Magazines are full of glossy advertisements too and they can also make you feel tempted to buy foods that you wouldn't ordinarily buy for yourself.
Advertising is all about getting people to buy stuff, right? So if you reduce your exposure to advertisements, you reduce the temptations.
Note: Some ads you just can't escape. Like billboard ads you see while you're driving, or waling down the street, store sign or store window ads, ads on the side of taxis and busses, that kind of thing.
It's funny, but the more you become really and truly aware of the fact that those ads are trying to make you buy stuff, the better you get at ignoring them! -
Get More Fresh Air
One of the major problems many people face these days is lack of fresh air. Sure, if you live in a big city then your air is probably more polluted than it is out of town, but if it's safe for you to go for a walk during the day, then you should do it.
Why?
Natural daylight exposure gives your body things it cannot get indoors. Like sunlight exposure to cause your body to manufacture its own vitamin D. This vitamin has been recently found to aid in maintaining a lower body weight and lack of it is evident in those that are overweight and obese.
Fresh air gives your body more oxygen so it can metabolize faster, leading to better weight control. Natural daylight also causes the body to manufacture more of the feel good hormone, serotonin. Lack of this hormone is linked to depression and weight gain! -
Be Happy
Many medical trials over the years have concluded that people with a happy disposition tend to live longer, healthier lives and are less prone to gain pounds or suffer wide weight fluctuations.
It links to the previous tip on having a positive mindset for losing weight but takes it one step further. So get out those funny movies, get together with friends and share a bunch of jokes.
Why?
Laughter is often called the best medicine because it brings a positive flow of energy through your body. If you like to dismiss this kind of thing as spiritual mumbo jumbo, think again, because many doctors and eminent medical professionals are in agreement that being happy, smiling and laughing a lot improves physical and mental health!
So there are ten ways to not only lose weight but improve your overall health as well. It's not a comprehensive list of things to do, but it's enough to get you started.
So get started, don't go off in search of more because while you will find lots more to learn, you may end up never putting any of it into practice. And that would be a shame and all the time I spent writing this would have been for nothing!