How To Lose Weight?
Most people who are desperate to lose weight are hoping to see tangible results fast. There are many weight loss programs, diets and even supplements out there that promise to do the trick. While no one can completely write off those methods, there are simpler, scientifically proven ways to lose weight fast.
Anyone who is desperate to lose weight must understand that dropping those extra pounds requires dedication and commitment. Losing and most importantly maintaining weight requires you to give up some really enjoyable habits and take up some new less enjoyable ones.
Proven Ways To Lose Weight Fast
Here are 10 ways to lose weight that actually work!
1. Remove Sugar From Your Diet
Sugars are the primary trigger for the release of insulin in your body. What this means is that when you eat high sugar food your body focuses on the digestion of these sugars instead of fatty deposits. When insulin goes down, body looks to burn up fat.
Insulin also makes you feel hungrier and thus more prone to overeating. So when you eat less sugary foods, you will feel fuller and can actually drop pounds without having to undergo the torture that is hunger.
Cut down sugar, cut down insulin and burn more fat. It’s as simple as that.
Results:
Excess fat is burned up, you consume less calories because you feel less hungry and your body sheds extra water as well. Studies have shown that taking sugar out of your diet, supplemented by regular exercise can actually have you drop up to 5-10 pounds within the first week.
2. Use Honey
Honey has the ability to combat weight gain and burn body fat. Not only that, but it is a great anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-fungal agent. You might be wondering, ‘wait… doesn’t honey have sugar?’. It does, but it is not unhealthy sugar like the refined sugar we use in our daily lives.
When we eat refined sugar we expand our body’s store of vitamins and minerals to digest it. What honey has is these minerals and vitamins in large quantities. These vitamins and minerals not only help digest sugar found in the honey you just consumed but will help in digesting fat and cholesterol that is in your body already.
Results:
Honey is a great agent for fat and cholesterol control. It has many benefits but for it to be useful as a weight loss agent, it needs to act as a replacement to sugar in your diet and not as a supplement. In other words point 1 and 2 together means that you can drop a lot of weight fast.
3. Drink Green Tea
Yes, you’ve all probably heard of this by now. I have even met a few people who have dismissed green tea’s weight loss potential to being a myth. Science tends to disagree. Green tea was and continues to be a great way to lose weight consistently. Sometimes when you’re desperate to lose weight you try to look for complicated answers but it doesn’t have to be like that.
Green tea contains antioxidants called catechins that speed up metabolism and help burn up calories. Regular green tea drinkers are not only slimmer but also fitter.
Results:
Research has shown that green tea drinkers burn up to 70-100 calories more per day than non green tea drinkers. Now 70 calories may not sound like much, but drinking green tea is not a fad. It’s a lifestyle choice that can mean that you are burning 70-100 calories every day for the rest of your life by just choosing to drink green tea.
4. Get Rid Of Salt
Ever feel bloated after a meal? Salt is sodium chloride, and sodium has water retention properties making you feel bloated when consumed too much. The thing with salt is that you don’t need to eliminate it completely from your diet, but make sure that you don’t eat too much of it either.
Chips, canned foods and junk food have a lot of salt, so keeping a close eye on their intake should do the trick.
Results:
Scientists suggest that the optimum intake of salt should be around 2,400 milligrams per day. But most of us eat much more than that. By reducing that intake to 1,500 mg, you could drop 1.25-1.5 pounds of body weight in water within the first day. Maintain that for a week and you can lose up to 3 pounds.
Minimizing salt intake to as low an amount as 1,500 mg has no detrimental effect in the short run. But it can have ill-effects if continued for too long. The best thing to do is to increase your salt intake to 2,000-2,400 mg after a month or so and look for longer term goals after that.
5. Sleep For 30 Minutes More Every Night
Most people will tell you that over sleeping will increase weight. While, that is true in some cases of extreme laziness, the fact is that more and more people around the world are sleeping too little. Studies have shown that by adding 30 minutes of sleep to your routine you can actually lose weight.
Lack of sleep affects the body’s ability to understand hunger. When your body is sleep deprived it produces hormones that will tell the body that you are hungry. In other words, being sleep deprived leads to over snacking. This is something which is quite easily observable; any late night sleeper will tell you just how important snacks are in their lives.
Sleep deprivation will also lead to increase in the release of cortisol, a stress hormone in the body. The body begins to conserve energy and fat is no longer burnt. You have to keep eating to keep your energy levels up since the body fat reserves are no longer in play.
Results:
Most of the observational research carried out on the subject so far has shown that people adding 30 minutes more to their sleeping time are mentally stronger, have lower risk of obesity and lose excess weight. Your craving for snacks will die down; it boosts fat loss and leaves you with more energy to be active in the day (bringing us to our next point).
6. If You’re Really Desperate To Lose Weight, Intense Cardio Is A Must
When you’re really desperate to lose weight, intense cardio for at-least 30-40 minutes every day is an absolute necessity. Nothing burns up calories better than a proper intense cardiovascular exercise regimen.
Intense cardio is best done with low activity intervals, or a recovery period. So short bursts of intense exercise for say 5 minutes followed by 10 minutes of regular / slower activity.
There are many cardio workouts that can do the trick for you. Finding out what works best for you, is up to you. The aim remains to exercise almost all muscle groups and burn as much as 350 calories in your 30-40 minute workout. The three that we recommend would be using the elliptical machine, spinning and kickboxing.
Results
Burning 350 calories, especially when you are on a healthy diet means that your body looks to burn up fatty deposits for energy. 1 pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories. So basically you are looking at dropping 1 pound every 10 days or 0.7 pounds in a week with a half hour workout.
7. Drink Lots Of Water And Always 30 Minutes Before A Meal
Drink 8 glasses or 64 ounces of water every day and make sure you don’t drink during the meal but 30 minutes before it. You have probably heard this many times in your life and there is a reason they say it. The fact is that the body can only digest fat if it has sufficient water. It is also a fact that compared to other beverages you consume to kill your thirst, water will always have a lower calorie count since it has zero calories.
So for example your favorite energy drink carries 100 calories. Water has a calorie count of zero. So when you take out that energy drink from your daily routine and replace it with water, you satisfy your thirst with no extra calories.
Most beverages contain sugar (and we know we don’t like sugar). If not sugar, they contain sodium (which we also know is bad) or other ingredients that you are better without.
Results
Drinking water will help you lose weight in a number of ways as stated above. Just how much depends on a number of factors. When used in conjunction with a good low calorie diet it can do wonders.
Researchers studied two groups of people who were put on the same low calorie diet. One was taking 2 glasses of water every day 30 minutes before each meal (total 8 glasses), while the other was not. The one taking the 8 glasses of water lost 15.5 pounds on average in one month compared to the other one that lost just 11 pounds. And the best thing about this, the weight loss was long term. It was actual fatty deposits that were lost.
8. Make Sure You Take Your Vitamins
There are a number of vitamins that play a part in how your body digests food and stores fat. Vitamin D makes sure your body uses calories as energy rather than storing it as fat. Low Vitamin D means that your body starts storing up sugar as fat in the fatty deposits, something which you don’t want.
Vitamin C and vitamin E are other vitamins that are well known as weight loss agents. There is plenty of research which suggests that vitamin C and vitamin E deficient people are more stubbornly fat. Vitamin B12 has a role to play in the burning of calories as well.
Results
Vitamins are great fat releasing agents but there is no hard scientific evidence that says that they can help you drop weight on their own. Like many other points in this list, taking your vitamins in conjunction with having a healthy diet and doing cardio regularly is the way to go.
9. Whites Are Out
White foods especially baked products are a big no no. These foods are full of bad carbs and play a huge part in your weight problem. Cutting these out can go a long way in helping you lose weight fast.
These foods have carbohydrates that are too easy to digest for the body. Sugar rises in your body and along with it insulin. This in turn leads to you feeling hungry all the time and overeat.
Results
The no white diet will eliminate the bad carbs in your diet, reduce over eating and keep your sugar level in check. Most importantly it will help you drop those extra pounds if properly followed. A strict adherence to ‘no white’ can help you lose 1-2 pounds within a week.
10. Fiber Is Useful In More Ways Than One
Fiber is one of the most important food groups you are most probably not getting enough of. It’s affect on satiety i.e. the feeling of being full is quite well known. Eating a healthy dose of fiber with every meal will ensure that you don’t over eat. Adding special viscous fiber can do wonders in the short run as well as the long run.
It is a fat releasing food and helps the body burn fat faster. There is a reason that the use of fiber is so stressed upon by most dietitians. It works like a charm and more often than not, it will help you lose weight and flatten your tummy.
Results
Many a research has found that the introduction of fiber in the diet can lead to weight loss. By introducing viscous fiber like glucomannan or guar gum into the diet, you may be able to drop 1.5-2 pounds in a week depending on your diet and current weight.
Sometimes when you’re desperate to lose weight, you tend to skip the simplest answers. Following fad diets is never the answer and might actually be detrimental to your health in the long run. By writing this article we hoped to provide you the information and motivation to go for the simple.