Healthy Ways to Lose Weight

In their desperate attempt to obtain a perfect silhouette, many individuals resort to the strangest and most dangerous methods, such as starving or fixating on unhealthy diets. No such method ever gave long-term, sustainable results, but in many cases, it unbalanced the metabolism and attracted the yoyo effect.

The perfect approach to losing weight healthily is neither the burst of physical exercise, nor restrictive diets, but making slight and steady changes in your life style.

How to lose weight the healthy way

The healthiest ways to lose weight include:

• Regular working out. You don’t have to spend endless hours in the gym, only to abandon the exercise project the next month. Even if you’re a busy person, you can still make time for half an hour of physical exercise or you can simply take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk instead of driving, do some housework instead of hiring a cleaning person.
• Keep yourself active constantly. Give up the sedentary life style, especially if you work in an office all day long. Go out with friends after work, go on trips, play soccer, volleyball or other sports with your friends and family, go shopping on foot or simply go for long walks in the evenings.
• Slowly decrease the calorie intake. Don’t make drastic changes regarding the amount of food you consume daily. Your body likes slow changes better. Moreover, if your body is not fed enough, it will slow down and adjust its metabolism accordingly, making sure to create additional fat reserves in order to survive the new, harsh conditions. Consequently, instead of losing weight when following long-term crash diets, you will only manage to either keep your weight constant or lose weight only during the first days of the diet, or even manage to get fatter than before.
• Focus on quality over quantity. Give up eating junk food, processed foods, or those items containing high amounts of food additives. Even if you cannot afford to buy 100% organic foods, you could afford to buy from the organic butcher only 25% of the portion of meat that you would normally add to your meal. Replace ingredients and cooking techniques with healthier alternatives, e.g.:
  • in stead of frying your meals, try boiling or even better: steaming them,
  • replace processed flour and refined sugar with whole-grain flour and (brown) unrefined sugar.

The key to losing weight in a healthy manner is to avoid subjecting your body to further stress. Focus on healthy nutrition and remember that no one knew the healthy eating rules at birth. You can learn any habit in time, and eating healthily is no exception. Learn:

• which foods are healthy,
• what you should avoid,
• how to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy fats and cholesterol,
• how to distinguish between soluble and insoluble fibers.

Once you learned what’s healthy and what’s not, you can start creating your own healthy diet plan adjusted to your taste and lifestyle.