1. Eating healthy
Hey, you decided to lose weight, maybe change your life? Looking for a solution to a problem you have it’s a big step towards improving your life. Most people, however, don’t take action. Reading this blog post would give you enough solutions. What you need to do is to apply what you know. Small steps are a good way to start something without overwhelming you and making you give up.
Ask yourself why you want to lose weight. The answers should motivate you enough to take action. Don’t think it will be easy, don’t think it will be fast. Just focus on actually taking these small steps almost every day and the results will come.
When you form a new habit, it will get easier to take action. That’s why the key is to be consistent, so you can build the habit. In the beginning thought, you will need to push yourself to take action. Once you build a good healthy habit, try not to lose it.
Below you will explore the 7 ways you can start taking action. Some of them are easier than others, you may want to start implementing 2-3 of them at the same time. You know best how much time and effort you can give to implement new healthy habits. But be honest when figuring out the free time you have. We have much more time and energy than we think.
Obviously one of the most important aspects of maintaining a healthy percentage of fat in the body is by eating healthy.
Minimize the carbohydrates intake in your diet. If you overdo the carbs, your blood sugar levels can get too high. This causes your body to make more insulin, which tells your cells to save the extra glucose as fat. High carb diets also can cause excess water retention.
Carbohydrates are a good source of energy. Don’t cut out carbs completely, but don’t eat more than you need.
Good diet for weight loss:
The Mediterranean diet.
includes: vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fish, nuts, lentils, olive oil
Research has consistently shown that the Mediterranean diet is effective in reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases and overall mortality.
Also: Take more probiotics. Some of the health benefits of probiotics are:
- Help your body digest food.
- Keep bad bacteria from getting out of control and making you sick.
- Create vitamins.
- Help support the cells that line your gut to prevent bad bacteria that you may have consumed (through food or drinks) from entering your blood.
- Breakdown and absorb medications.
- Take more high fibre rich foods. Some benefits of high fibre food:
- Normalizes bowel movements. Dietary fibre increases the weight and size of your stool and softens it.
- Helps maintain bowel health.
- Lowers cholesterol levels.
- Helps control blood sugar levels.
- Aids in achieving a healthy weight.
- Helps you live longer.
2. Cut processed foods
Heavily processed foods often include unhealthy levels of added sugar, sodium and fat. These ingredients make the food we eat taste better, but too much of them leads to serious health issues like obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Unhealthy processed food can affect your mental health in a bad way.
Sugar and processed foods can lead to inflammation throughout the body and brain, which may contribute to mood disorders, including anxiety and depression.
People who consumed the highest amount of ultra-processed foods, more than 20% of their daily caloric intake, had a 28% faster cognitive decline, in particular in memory and executive function.
3. Strength training
Resistance training helps with excess fat loss by increasing both after-burn after exercise, and by increasing muscle size, thereby increasing the number of calories we burn at rest.
Strength training can help you manage or lose weight, and it can increase your metabolism to help you burn more calories. Enhance your quality of life. It may enhance your quality of life and improve your ability to do everyday activities. Strength training can also protect your joints from injury.
There’s many mental health benefits we get from strength training:
Improves Mood. Strengthens Mind-Body Connection. Lowers Stress and Anxiety. Boosts Brain Health. Improves Relationship with Your Body.
Some of the weight training exercises you can do are:
-Squats, Chest Press, Deadlift, Leg Press, Overhead Press, Biceps Arm Curl, Triceps Pushdown, Seated Cable Row.4. Cold showers
4. Cold shower
A study found that cold-water immersion at 14℃ increased metabolism by 350%. Metabolism is the process by which your body converts what you eat and drink into energy, so a higher metabolism roughly equals more energy burned.
I personally feel really energized after a cold shower. It wakes me up. Sometimes when you take a warm/hot shower afterwards you feel a bit tired, especially if you were tired before taking a shower, it will increase it.
Note: It may make you laugh or at least smile.
Although, you can’t lose much fat by just taking cold showers, it is definitely beneficial and it can improve muscle recovery after training, which makes them perfect to take after your workout.
Some of the benefits are:
- calm itchy skin.
- help you wake up in the morning.
- increase your circulation.
- help reduce muscle soreness after intense workouts.
- may help boost weight loss.
- give your skin and hair a healthy glow.
5. Modify your lifestyle
Instead of just losing weight, it’s better to focus on changing your habits overall. You can do everything right and lose weight, however if you want to maintain your weight for a long period, you will need to change your lifestyle choices and make them your new way of living. You can replace the bad habits with good ones. For example, instead of eating chips when watching a movie, just pick some fruit instead. Small changes in your lifestyle can have a huge difference on your health and body weight. Losing weight for a period of time is better than nothing, but is always better to actually change our lifestyle and maintain the healthy body weight we want for as much as possible.
Focus on being healthy overall, not only losing weight. If you smoke and drink, there’s a small chance that your eating choices would be good ones. To change your lifestyle it may take many years, however you can start making changes with small steps and attacking the bad habits one by one. Once you get motivated by accomplishing goals and winning, actually seeing the results, you will get motivated to continue towards getting healthier and improving your life overall.
6. Intermittent fasting
If you want to try something new and you have a busy schedule, intermittent fasting is the perfect way to save time from eating during the day and it’s something that you may like in the long-term, definitely worth trying.
Once you get his or her go-ahead, the actual practice is simple. You can pick a daily approach, which restricts daily eating to one six- to eight-hour period each day. For instance, you may choose to try 16/8 fasting: eating for eight hours and fasting for 16.
Some of the benefits include:
- Improved weight loss.
- Reduced risk of cancer.
- Optimized hormone levels.
- Improved cholesterol levels.
- Improved body composition.
- Better blood sugar regulation.
- Reduced risk of heart diseases.
- Improved fat burning.
7. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
A HIIT workout consists of short bouts of intense work lasting anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds, followed immediately by a period of active recovery of the same length or longer. This cycle of hard work and recovery is repeated anywhere from 3 to 10 times, depending on the workout.
High-intensity interval training enables your body to burn calories without burning yourself out. The results of these workouts lend itself to muscle gain rather than muscle loss while simultaneously burning fat. Calories can continue to burn for up to 24 hours after completing one HIIT workout.
Benefits of HIIT training:
- HIIT can burn a lot of calories in a short amount of time.
- Your metabolic rate is higher for hours after HIIT exercise.
- HIIT can help you lose fat.
- You might gain muscle using HIIT.
- HIIT can improve oxygen consumption.
- HIIT can reduce heart rate and blood pressure.
- HIIT can reduce blood sugar.
Conclusion:
There’s many ways to lose weight. Most people know what they have to do, to actually lose weight. Sometimes the information is enough, we know how to do it, we lack motivation. The motivation will come once you see results. In the beginning you may need to just go and train without motivation, but with discipline. What could help is looking at your future self in the long-term, imagine how good you will feel when you lose weight and start feeling proud of yourself, not just because you lose weight and you look better, but because you put in the work and you showed to yourself that you can trust yourself.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
-Aldous Huxley
It’s not rare to see people actually go towards bigger goals once they know they can trust themselves to achieve them. You will gain confidence in other areas of your life. The way you look maybe was your biggest motivation to lose weight, however you will benefit with much more than just looking better. You may start your self-improvement journey and we don’t know how far it will take you
The journey is never ending. There’s always gonna be growth, improvement, adversity; you just gotta take it all in and do what’s right, continue to grow, continue to live in the moment.
-Antonio brown
Start with small steps, if necessary. The key is to actually start, you may start with 20min a day and increase with time, but you have to start.
Take action and show yourself you can do it.
