be easy. After all, it’s really just a question of eating less and moving more. This will create a calorie deficit that will force your body to use its fat stores for energy. As your body burns fat, your weight will decrease. Simple!
And yet, most people struggle to lose weight, and many even find that they gain weight despite their best efforts. Ninety-five percent of dieters fail to reach their target weight or regain whatever weight they lost within a few months. The world’s population is getting fatter as a result.
Being overweight or obese can have a huge impact on many aspects of your life. Carrying too much body fat is inextricably linked to:
- Heart disease
- Hypertension (high blood pressure)
- Strokes
- Type II diabetes
- Joint pain
- Back pain
- Some cancers
- Respiratory issues, such as sleep apnea
- Reduced quality of life
- Premature death
Unfortunately, a lot of diet and exercise programs aren’t helpful either. They’re either too tough to be sustainable or only designed to be short-term fixes. Weight management requires a long-term approach, and something like a “six-pack in six-weeks” diet or workout plan is not enough.
In this guide, we will share ten proven tips for losing weight and keeping it off. Put these tips into action, and you should find the entire process of losing weight a lot easier.
Tip 1 – Stock your home and office with healthy foods
Losing weight invariably involves dieting, and that means eating less food than usual. Unfortunately, eating less and missing out on some of your favorite foods causes hunger and cravings.
Most dieters can ignore hunger and cravings for a while. They use their willpower to resist the allure of those forbidden foods. But willpower is a limited resource, and when it runs out, you’ll be powerless to resist.
For many dieters, this doesn’t just mean eating a little of those off-diet foods but eating more of them than normal. The restriction is often followed by binging.
One of the best ways to avoid this problem is to make sure you always have healthy foods close to hand. That way, when hunger or cravings strike, you have an alternative to those foods you know you should be avoiding. If you don’t, you could easily find yourself reaching for a candy bar when you should be eating an apple.
Create a stockpile of healthy, low-calorie food at home and work. That way, when hunger strikes, you can satisfy your cravings with foods that won’t derail your diet.
Good examples include:
- Fruit
- Raw veggies
- Beef jerky
- Raw nuts and seeds
- Low-fat yogurt
- Tuna and salmon pouches
- Low-carb/sugar-free protein bars
- Protein shakes
- Sugar-free Jell-O
- Dark chocolate
Tip 2 – Reduce/avoid consuming sugar
If there is one type of food you need to avoid for fast, easier weight loss, it’s sugar. Sugar consumption is at an all-time high, and so too are obesity levels. This is not a coincidence. Eating too much sugar makes weight gain almost impossible to avoid and makes losing weight far harder than it needs to be.
When you eat sugar, it is digested quickly and soon enters your bloodstream. This triggers the release of a hormone called insulin. Insulin ferries this sugar to your muscles and your liver. Once your muscles and liver have all the sugar they can handle, any that remains is turned into and stored as body fat.
While your blood glucose and insulin levels are elevated, your body goes into fat storage mode and won’t burn fat. After all, sugar provides all the energy your body needs; it has no reason to use fat for fuel.
If you eat a lot of sugar, your body is continuously in fat storage mode and never in fat-burning mode. Many foods contain sugar, from your breakfast cereal to processed foods to soda, candy, and sweets. It’s effortless to eat sugar all day long. Sugar is even added to savory processed foods. This makes them more appealing to our sugar-addicted brains!
Giving up sugar isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if you want to lose weight and keep it off. Try and limit your sugar intake to around 25 grams per day – about five teaspoons. To put that in perspective, a can of soda contains 40 grams (1).
Tip 3 – Try a low-carb diet
You can use many different diets to help you lose weight, but low-carb diets are among the best. Your body likes to use carbs for energy, and when you eat plenty of carbs, it has no real reason to burn fat.
But, when you eat fewer carbs, your body must start to rely on an alternative energy source, and that’s fat.
Cutting carbs means eating less bread, rice, pasta, cereal, potatoes, candy, and processed foods and eating more vegetables and protein. You can reduce your carb intake to about 150-200 grams per day or, if you are an all-or-nothing kind of 
person, go the whole hog and try a ketogenic diet, where carb consumption is limited to 50 grams per day or less.
As well as being great for weight loss, eating fewer carbohydrates and more protein and healthy fats will help stabilize your blood glucose and energy levels for fewer cravings and less hunger (2). With lower blood glucose, you prime your body for the fat loss rather than fat storage.
If nothing else, the increased protein consumption that typically accompanies a lower carb diet will make losing weight and keeping it off a whole lot easier. Protein has a high thermal effect, which means it increases your metabolism. It’s also very filling.
Tip 4 – Drink plenty of water
Water contains no calories, very few nutrients except for a few trace minerals, yet it’s a powerful ally when dieting for weight loss. Your body comprises about 60% water, and even modest dehydration can cause hunger, cravings, low energy levels, and even interfere with fat burning.
Many overweight people don’t drink enough water and instead slake their thirst with things like soda, fruit juice, energy drinks, and sweetened coffee beverages. Sugary drinks can add many calories to your daily intake without doing anything for your hunger, and you already know how sugar leads to weight gain while interfering
with fat burning.
Replacing high sugar and high-calorie drinks with water will automatically lower your calorie intake without making you feel hungry. Plus, a well-hydrated body is better equipped for fat burning.
Water is also filling, despite being calorie-free. Drinking water can stop you from feeling hungry, prevent cravings, and give your metabolism a small but meaningful boost. Try drinking a large glass of water before eating; you may find that you don’t eat as much because your stomach is already full of water.
Try to drink 64 fluid ounces of water per day, which is about eight tall glasses. Consider this a minimum, and feel free to drink more. However, if you don’t usually drink many fluids, increase your water intake gradually to avoid uncomfortably overloading your bladder.
Make sure to check out part 2 and 3 of our weight loss tips by clicking below;
References
- Dietary sugars and body weight: systematic review and meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and cohort studies. https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e7492
- The effects of a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet and a low-fat diet on mood, hunger, and other self-reported symptoms.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17228046
