Easy Ways to Lose Weight.

Kris 5

*If you’re here to learn about the potential benefits of drinking butter, visit our Drinking Butter article.

Everybody always searches for methods on how to lose fat quick; so they try the newest magazine diet they read about, do a couple new exercises to tone that are supposed to magically melt the fat away, or buy into some advertisement for a piece of equipment that works wonders. We’ve all seen it, and those that have followed it, quickly shake their head afterwards due to the poor results. Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: you can’t lose fat quick. However, you can certainly make it easier to lose weight (fat!, we don’t want muscle to waste). Instead of searching for impossibly fast solutions to lose weight, focus your attention on the easy ways to lose weight.

Most of the time we search for fast ways to do things because we know they require hard work, and we wind up wanting to minimize the length of time required to do that hard work. However, when applying this to losing weight, it’s not entirely up to us to determine. We can aid the body and give it the necessary ingredients to lose fat optimally, but we can’t have it run into overdrive and lose fat in ways that are beyond our natural abilities (no matter what magic pills or diets claim). Therefore, a more successful method involves applying easy ways to lose weight instead. This way, you can still help your body lose fat optimally, but at the pace it can, while making the process easy on yourself. Less of a bother for you, more of a success in the end, right?

Let’s list some of the easy ways to lose weight:

1) Cut out the beverages – if we forget about counting calories and skip the process of figuring out how many calories we need to maintain weight, the least we can do is lower our carbohydrate intake. We can start by cutting out the most unnecessary calories. What most people don’t realize is that they can kick start their way to decent weight loss just by eliminating all the sugars they take in per day from the beverages they consume. For example, if you focus on drinking water and cut out all your other drinks (including juices), you should get a heavy enough drop in total calories per day that over time you’ll lose weight. Matter of fact, substitute these drinks with green tea, make a jug of it, and add some to your water bottles throughout the day so that you can get the taste of green tea and its benefits without constantly worrying about re-brewing it.

2) Lower carbs per day - Outside of the drinks mentioned above, this is another very simple addition that can make a ton of difference. Most of the food we eat is loaded with carbs, and by the time we’re through and satisfied, we’ve gone over our limit of calories per day and put on weight over time. To fix this, you don’t have to count calories, but you can definitely cut out some carbs in one of two ways:

a) Less carbs with each meal – instead of eating that cookie at the end of your meal, drink some more water (preferred) or have a few almonds (acceptable). Instead of fried chicken, eat grilled. More vegetables, less potatoes. Breaded Tilapia? Don’t, get the regular. Want to eat chips? Have the baked version (let’s be real, they taste better anyway).

b) No carbs 6 hours prior to bed time – no, having carbs at night does not make you fat (we discuss this in our Carbs At Night article). The point of doing this is to lower your overall carbohydrate intake, which means lower your overall caloric count for the day so you are under the required amount needed to stay at the weight you already are. If we’re under, we lose weight (easy, no?). Cutting out carbs like this pretty much ensures that your meals will not be calorie dense and you don’t overeat for the day. This means eating protein and some fats for the remainder of your evening – good selections: cottage cheese, peanut butter (without bread obviously), any type of nuts (dry almonds you can buy in pound bags like at Costco are a good idea – but others are fine as long as they are unsalted), cheese, boiled eggs (perhaps the most ideal food imaginable), grilled chicken, salmon/turkey burger, vegetables are allowed to keep you full because they contain tons of fiber (which doesn’t count against you), and some require more calories to digest than they actually contain (broccoli).

Another reason we chose to lower carbs is because carbs make you retain water, which means they can bloat you and make you hold more water weight. This translates to, obviously, looking like you have more pounds on you than you do. We definitely don’t want that.

3) Handle the small stuff – do you need mayo on that sandwich? Not really, it’s not going to make that big of a difference taste wise, but it sure will calorie wise (same with butter). Cut off the crusts on bread when making a sandwich. Let your snack be a banana instead of an energy bar (they perform the same function, yet the latter is loaded with sugars).

4) Low fat food can help – don’t mistake low fat for meaning it’s calorie candy. Eating low fat is not all it’s cracked up to be and often isn’t a low calorie food. Nonetheless, if you’re smart about it and understand that article, it’s certainly a good way to cut calories in many instances, especially if it’s the other option for a food you’re buying regardless.

5) Vegetables are king – I mentioned this a little bit earlier on, but they truly are a wonder and a very easy way to lose weight. The more vegetables you eat instead of other things (even slow digesting carbs like potatoes), the better off you’ll be because the less calories you’ll consume from that particular meal. They stuff you and make you full, but the calorie count on them is practically nonexistent. Can’t go wrong there!

6) Smaller meals, but more often – you might’ve heard of the craze about how you can eat smaller meals throughout the day and it’ll boost your metabolism. Well, that’s actually been proven false. A real reason you should do this, however, is because it makes sure you don’t overeat on any particular meal and you are always relatively satisfied, making you less ready to go grab the wrong snack.

7) Drink more water – this is a different point about water, separate from the one mentioned in point 1. If you drink more water, you’ll not only feel more full (meaning, eat less), but you’ll also be flushing water out of your body (meaning, less water weight).

These are easy ways to lose weight because they are…well, easy to put into action. Small stuff, big reward. Remember how that turtle won the race? Well, the same applies to fat loss, so if you want real results without real hard work, start applying these around the kitchen and I bet that weight will start dropping. Good luck!