How To Lose Weight Naturally

Have you found yourself looking up the cost of liposuction, CoolSculpting, laser fat removal, and other kinds of surgeries in your spare time?

It’s nice to have a quick fix, right? Well before you break into your retirement account to splurge on a weight loss surgery there are a number of ways to help you drop the pounds naturally.

When it comes to how to lose weight naturally it can take time, but it is also the safest, most effective means of losing weight and keeping it off. Because while lipo can suck those frustrating fat cells out of your body, it isn’t a long term fix.

If you don’t change how you eat or intake calories you’ll just end up putting the weight back on. But what exactly can you do to help chip away your unwanted weight? Here are a few tips, tricks, and suggestions for losing weight, boosting your metabolism, and shredding the calories, all without turning to expensive surgery or other procedures. 

Drink Water (And Lots Of It)

Empty calories kill a diet. If you’re cracking open a few cans of soda every day you’re adding potentially a thousand calories to your daily diet. Imagine how much weight you can drop by simply removing soda and other calorie-rich drinks from your diet.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can go and swap diet soda in for regular. Yes, diet soda doesn’t have the calories, but it forces your body to retain not only water but it drags down your metabolism (not to mention the fake sugar isn’t all that great for you), so ditch all forms of soda and sugar drinks. 

Instead, you need to be drinking at least eight servings of 8-ounce glasses of water every day. If you have trouble keeping track of this you can use a 64-ounce water container and have this with you throughout the day.

You want to at least drink this much every day, although doubling it is great as well. Drinking water will help boost your metabolism and also prevent you from retaining water weight (because your body constantly has it coming in it will find no reason to retain it). 

Eat Protein Instead of Fats And Carbs

Yes, there are plenty of diets out there that center around fats. However, with these kinds of diets you’re actually tricking your body into burning off more fat because you’re depriving it of carbs.

These kinds of diets can help you drop more water weight initially but boosting your fat intake isn’t great for your heart or cardiovascular system. Instead, the healthier way to go about losing weight is to consume more protein and less fats and carbs.

Why?

Because there are fewer calories per gram of protein than calories per gram of carbohydrates or fat. According to the Cleveland Clinic,one gram of fat contains nine calories while one gram of protein contains four calories. This means you could, theoretically eat twice as much protein as fat and still cut down on your calorie intake.

Thankfully protein helps you feel fuller (and stay fuller longer). So by switching away from fatty diets and focusing on lean protein meals you’ll begin to drop weight naturally. 

Drink Coffee

If you’re like most people your day doesn’t start until you’ve got that fresh cup of Joe steaming in your hand. So this is a good thing. At least as long as you don’t start adding in sugar and fat. Coffee itself is great for boosting your metabolism, but it doesn’t do you much good if you’re adding 300 calories from sugar and cream into the coffee. 

Does this mean you need to drink black coffee?

Essentially yes. It will take some time to get used to it. Moving from anything that’s especially sweet to bitter takes time to get used to. However, after a few weeks your body will adjust. And if you need a bit of sweetness consider adding cinnamon. Cinnamon is a wonderful spice in that it also helps boost your metabolism.

So by combining black coffee and cinnamon you’ll get a double-whammy. If that doesn’t do it for you consider adding nutmeg or clove. Cinnamon is by far the best, but by avoiding sugar you’ll do yourself a favor. And this also means not adding in honey. Honey might be produced by bees, but it is still loaded with calories. 

Just how much does drinking black, caffeinated coffee help (it needs to be caffeinated, so turn down that decaf)? According to the Department of Human Nutrition at Wageningen Agricultural Universityin The Netherlands, up to 11 percent. 

Ditch the Refined Carbs

There are two kinds of carbs, and while you should cut down on both, one you realistically need to avoid all together. Refined carbs are made up of simple sugars. With refined carbs almost all of the nutrients have been stripped away, leaving you with only empty calories.

Complex carbs, on the other hand, still have all the fiber and desired benefits. Complex carbs include brown rice, 100% whole wheat bread, whole wheat pasta, and other similar food items. Refined carbs, on the other hand, are sugary snacks (such as candy), white flour bread, white pasta, white rice, and so on. 

Refined carbs not only have been stripped away of the desired nutrients but it is easier to eat more of them as the body breaks them down and processes the carbs faster.

This is why you can eat a large amount of pasta or breakfast cereal in one sitting (the added sugar found in breakfast cereals will aid in this as well (according to the International Life Sciences Institute and Tufts University, 2003).

Drink Green Tea

Drinking tea has a number of benefits.

Many of these are similar to that of coffee with the caffeine found in the green tea. However, green tea goes above and beyond this as the tea is bursting with antioxidants, which helps prevent free radicals from attacking inside your body.

In fact, drinking green tea has been found to boost your energy usage by four percent following consumption of the tea while also helping you to burn up to 17 percent more calories as well (American Society for Clinical Nutrition, 2008). 

Of course, much like coffee, you need to avoid adding in any kind of sweetener or other unnecessary calories you might otherwise put into the beverage. 

Lifestyle Changes

There are a number of things you might be doing that lead to potential problems with your personal health and ability to burn calories. For starters, there is alcohol. Alcohol consumption is one of the worst things you can do for your diet.

Drinking alcohol, especially to excess, has a number of negative side effects that will cause your body problems. For starters, it squashes your metabolism.

You’ll drastically cut down the number of calories you burn. It also cuts down your ability to repair your body, so if you just lifted weights earlier in the day your body will not be able to repair itself. This is because you have more alcohol flowing inside of your blood, which cuts down the nutrients delivered to your damaged muscle fiber. 

Beyond this, alcohol makes you feel hungry. As you’ve likely experienced you will want to consume food. These are additional calories you eat beyond what you drink.

So, when you consider the fact that you’re likely drinking well over a thousand calories in one sitting you’ll be adding on several thousand more with the food you eat. A single night of drinking can completely undermine well over a week of dieting and exercising.

So, if you want to see any real, long term results, you’ll need to avoid drinking alcohol.  In a similar way, smoking can reduce your metabolism. It cuts down the amount of oxygen in your body while destroying a number of the internal organs as well.

In order to maximize your ability to burn calories you need to have a strong oxygen flow, which improves your blood flow. Smoking reduces both. 

Slow Down Your Eating

Over eating often starts with how fast you eat. It takes your body some time to break down food and to send a signal back to your brain, telling you that you’re full. If you eat quickly you won’t receive the signal until you have well over eaten.

Have you ever been eating and then, all of a sudden out of nowhere you feel beyond full?

Maybe you do this during the holidays or simply when you’re on your own, eating snack food or a pizza or something. This happens because you were eating so quickly your body did not have time to tell your brain to stop eating.

So by the time your brain received the signal you had already eaten beyond what you should have. You can avoid all of these issues by simply slowing down. 

There are a number of ways you can slow down. If you’re eating with someone make sure to not just listen to the conversation. Partake in it. And after every bite, put your utensil down on the plate. This will force you to slow down your meal.

You can also drink water during your meal. The additional fluid in your stomach will take up space, slow down the process of eating, and help cut down the amount you are eating. 

Reduce Your Plate Size

Sometimes you need to play tricks on yourself to reduce the amount you eat. First, you want to eat off of a plate instead of a bowl. Because a bowl is deeper it doesn’t look like you’re eating as much.

The surface area you’re seeing is far less than what you see on a plate, so by using a plate you’ll trick yourself into thinking you’re eating more when you really aren’t. 

Next, you’ll want to invest in smaller plates. When you have a smaller plate you will not eat as much. You will put less on the plate, which means in order to eat more you’ll be forced to go back for a second helping. This gives you time to tell yourself that you don’t need to go for the second helping and save yourself some calories (Biomed Central, 2017). 

Workout With Weights

Beyond boosting your metabolism, cutting out drinking alcohol and improving how you intake your calories, you will need to exercise in order to burn off more calories. If you were to look at the number of calories you burn during a given workout, you would burn more calories with high intensity cardio.

However, that doesn’t tell the entire story. With weight lifting you not only burn calories during the workout but you continue to burn calories after the workout.

This is because your body needs to repair the damaged muscle tissue, which can take several days to fully do. This means that while you stopped burning calories the moment you finished your cardio workout, you will continue to burn calories after weight training, which includes while you sleep. So, if you want to get the most out of how many calories you burn, you will always want to include forms of resistance training in your routine (Huffington Post, 2017). 

Conclusion

Losing weight doesn’t need to be as difficult as many make it out to be. Yes, it does take some work and yes, it does likely take some adjusting to your current lifestyle.

However, with that said, by following even a few of these suggestions you’ll find yourself not only cutting back on the calories you consume but you’ll boost the calories you burn doing the exact same exercises.

Of course, you need to be working on throughout the week as well, but most of your weight loss does stem from the kitchen.

If you’ve struggled with weight loss in the past, or simply haven’t known how to go about naturally losing weight without starving yourself and spending hours at the gym every day, these are suggestions you can easily incorporate into your daily routine. And the more you bring into your life on a day to day basis the better your results will be. 

-Terry Asher

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How To Lose Weight Naturally

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When it comes to how to lose weight naturally it can take time, but it is also the safest, most effective means of losing weight and keeping it off.

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Terry Asher

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Gym Junkies

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