The bigger your belly is, the higher the risks of health problems your future will carry. That’s the fact you should already know now that you are aiming to lose some weight long-term. If the fast and easy ways they promised you ages ago no longer works, then it’s time you switch to a more challenging yet effective one.
These tips may look easy to do but they’re actually not that simple. Just remember that you’ve been warned already. However, if you’re determined, here are some rules you can follow to achieve successful dieting for long-term fat loss:
Avoid Crash Diets
Crash diets are bad for health and are not the solution to weight loss. It might seem as if you have lost a few pounds, but the moment you give up on the crash diet, everything will bounce back with a vengeance. What’s worse is that once you take a break, you will gain more than what you have lost. It surely is not worth the risk of even trying.
Reduce Your Calories Gradually
If you are looking to lose fat, don’t make huge calorie cuts. This will kick your body into starvation mode, reducing your metabolism, and making it more difficult to burn off the fat. Instead, you should reduce your calories slowly. Make reductions every week or two in order to prevent this metabolic slowdown and allow your body to burn fat at an optimal rate.
This way, your body will be able to adjust slowly without relapsing. Soon enough, you’ll be actively living your day without realizing that you’re already eating on your desired serving, which is obviously way lesser than before. Talk about making pockets healthy, too!
Eat More (Good) Fat
Getting enough of the good fats will help you lose excess body fat, build muscle, and recover faster from your workouts. It also has other myriad health benefits, including being good for your heart, which you should be taking advantage of.
In good fats, you can also take polyunsaturated (especially Omega- 3’s) fats, such as those from fish and nuts (especially almonds), as well as monounsaturated fats, like those from peanut butter, olive oil, egg yolks, and fish oil.
Take More Fruits, More Vegetables, More Fiber
Keeping your weight under control and losing fat can be made much easier by adding a steady stream of fruits and vegetables to your fat loss nutrition program. Fruits and (most) vegetables are high in water and fiber content and low in calories, so they’re ideal nutrient sources for weight loss.
They fill up your stomach, keeping your appetite under control while maintaining a lower level of calorie intake. So, for better fat loss results, try adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet or just have yourself an apple before your meals.
Limit Your Intake Of Carbs
All the media attention of low-carb diets has successfully put most people into Pro low-carb or Anti low-carb camps without a lot of thinking involved. Whichever side you’re on, the bottom line is that reducing your carbohydrate intake when trying to lose fat will help. This is especially true in carbs sources like sugar and starches.
You should focus on consuming non-processed carbs like natural oatmeal and vegetables. It can also help to vary your carb intake in the same way you vary your calorie intake mentioned above.
Eliminate Processed Foods
Stick to natural foods. Forget anything processed. Such foods are only just a bunch of chemicals. You’re putting poison in your body! We can’t stress this enough. Processed foods play a huge role in obesity, as well as many other health problems such as diabetes, and not to mention fat gain.
Increase Your Protein
Taking more protein will increase your metabolism and will help to maintain your muscle mass — both key ingredients in losing fat and keeping it off.
Specific food combinations can help to burn calories by ramping up your metabolism. For this, you have to eat carbs that are rich in fiber. They take longer to digest and you will feel “fuller” for longer periods of time.
Along with carbs that are rich in fiber, take in more protein. Your body burns more calories when you eat protein than when you’re digesting either fats or carbohydrates.
Drink More Water
First of all, our bodies are about 70% water, and you know that we can’t go on for long without it. But what you are not aware of is how much our body can’t function if we consistently don’t have enough.
The body needs a lot of fluids in order to maintain its daily functions efficiently. Why? Well, water helps flush out harmful toxins, as well as prime the body for fat loss. What’s more is that it prevents us from losing focus and getting headaches.
If your body isn’t getting enough water, it does everything it can to hold on to the water it has, making you gain more water weight. However, once you begin taking in enough water, your body starts dropping weight (mostly water weight), possibly 4 or 5 pounds in the first week. Doing so optimizes your bodily functions, allowing it to run more efficiently and start burning stored body fat for energy.
Get More Sleep
Getting enough sleep on a regular basis is crucial to having your body perform optimally. Your body needs at least have 7 to 8 hours of restful sleep each night. It needs this much for it repairs itself and recovers from your workouts while you sleep. Depending on how much tissues need to be fixed, the duration of sleep you’ll need could even be longer than that too.
If you don’t have enough time to sleep, then you can provide yourself with optimal conditions to let you have a sound, calm, and undisturbed slumber. This way, you’ll get quality sleep for rejuvenating yourself in a cellular level.
Without enough sleep, you’re on your way to overtraining, feeling burnt out and sore, and getting sick often. So SLEEP!
Have a Reward Day
For a job well done, you need to give yourself a reward. You don’t need to go crazy about it though. You wouldn’t want to sabotage everything you’ve worked hard to achieve so you need to do this in a moderate manner.
As to whether it’s a meal, for a day, or even half a day, only you can decide. Only you know how far to go with this to keep you on track. Only you know if you’re better off with just a meal because an entire day will send you flying off the progress tracks, turning your reward day into a reward week. Eat what you want, but eat normally. Don’t stuff yourself. Eat what you want until you are full and satisfied.
There are so many other ways aside from what was mentioned above that you can use to make sure that when you decide to have a healthy lifestyle, it’s for good. It will be very hard to maintain your decision but with strong determination and motivation, it is not impossible.
Losing body fats isn’t as easy as it sounds like the moment you started to decide it was time to make that healthy change. It might be for the first few weeks or months, but keeping it, in the long run, might become more challenging.
To make it easier, just always think the sexy and healthy body that you always wanted, make it as your inspiration to motivate yourself in making it a long term.