7 Tips to losing weight + 7 Reasons
Does this describe you:
You’ve decided that you want to lose some weight and get fitter and healthier? That’s great! However, with so much information out there about how to lose weight you might be confused “why am I not losing weight?”
There may be a few tips to start losing weight in the best possible ways.
Over the years working as a coach, I understand that starting any new health and fitness regime could be a daunting process. To make things easier, I have set up some ultimate weight loss tips, ensuring that you start and stay on the road to success. So, let’s get you on your way to losing weight and achieving long-lasting and maintainable results.
How to get started with losing weight
Establish your reasons
Establishing your reasons for starting this process might seem like an obvious one. However, a lot of people who want to lose weight will quickly forget why this journey is important to them. This results in demotivation and thus the inability to reach your goals.
Writing down your reasons and sticking them somewhere that you see every day serves as powerful motivation. It also serves as a constant reminder of why this journey is important to you and why you should keep going. You might want to lose weight to have more energy, to fit into those jeans, or to look fabulous for a wedding. Being reminded of why you started this journey on a daily basis will help give you that fire and energy that you need to succeed.
Plan and prep
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Planning and preparation are essential when you start losing weight. Knowing what you are doing and when you are doing it is one of the main ingredients for success.
If you have chosen to follow the 8fit meal plan, great! My advice would be to know what recipes you are having though the week, get your shopping list together and prep your food. As you develop new habits, having the right foods available to you at the right time is going to be key.
Banish temptation
Losing weight is about establishing sustainable, healthy habits. A healthy lifestyle is a happy one and you need to realize that no food is out of bounds. It’s about learning how to enjoy food in moderation (or controlled) way. However, to make it easier, it’s important that you get rid of all food-related temptations at the start. You know what they say, “Out of sight, out of mind.”
Clean out your pantry and fridge at home and work, replacing them with healthier alternatives. This will help you stay on track.
Track your emotions
Losing weight is not only about exercising and eating well. For a lot of people, emotional eating is the primary reason they can’t reach their weight loss goals. A great place to begin is to start a diary tracking what you eat, how you feel and when you are tempted to eat. Recognizing, accepting, and working through emotions that trigger emotional eating will help you stay on track. If you need support to practice more mindful eating, reach out to a loved one, friend, nutritionist or health coach.
My best advice? Try and occupy yourself with other things. Do something productive like going for a walk, doing an 8fit workout or reading a book. Establishing new and healthy habits will help banish old ones.
Swap your drinks for water
A simple yet super effective way to get you started on your weight loss journey is swapping all your drinks for water. People often fail to lose weight because they are drinking their calories.
Soda and juice are all loaded with sugar and calories and will not give your brain the signal that you are consuming them. Simply swapping all your drinks with water will make a huge difference to your waistline. Moreover, the benefits of upping your water intake are endless.
Get Active in Your Daily Life
Move as much as you can. Instead of taking the elevator – walk up the stairs. Whenever you can – cycle to work instead of taking your car. Getting more active in your daily life will help you reach your goals without you even realizing.
Enjoy the process and treat your body well
I can’t stress how important this point is to losing weight and establishing a healthy lifestyle. Many of us will try to lose weight, taking extreme measures which will be detrimental to our health and our bodies. As a motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, once said, “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
If you suffer from restriction and boredom, think of this as a new health and fitness journey benefiting your body. By thinking positive, you will be more likely to enjoy it and be in it for the long run. When we restrict ourselves with either food and/or calories our bodies and natural mindset is to think about the things we can’t have and then we end up binge eating. This sets up a horrible cycle of binging and restriction as we go around in circles. Instead, think of food as a way of nourishing your body and exercise to get it stronger and fitter.
Remember, nothing is off limits. Just enjoy your favorite foods in a controlled way and get back on track. Ultimately, this is what makes the difference to a short-term fad diet to a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.
Why Am I Not Losing Weight? 7 Reasons Revealed
“Why am I not losing weight?” is a common question heard around gyms and health clubs everywhere. There may be some reasons why as shared here but it’s easy to get back on track with your fitness and weight loss goals.
Working out Too Much
You’ve started a new workout routine and you’re getting the hang of it. It’s exciting to get in tune with your body through physical activity and getting feedback by feeling better after. It’s also great to see some increases in strength and even some lean muscle.
If you’ve been enjoying it, and seeing some positives, it might make sense in your mind to start working out longer and harder. If three days a week have felt great, then why not five? Why not seven straight days of strength training and cardio?
If one hour of a workout has been great, why not just do two? Or three? This would be a sure way to lose more weight and get fitter.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way and you’re better off allowing your body to rest. When you workout too much, you can make things taxing on your central nervous system. You put your body into a situation where it’s constantly being stressed and releasing stress hormones. When you don’t allow proper rest and recovery this can throw your whole body out of whack.
Overtraining can lead to injuries, muscle tears and strains. It also can weaken your immune system and make you more prone to sickness. You want to avoid this overtraining syndrome to be able to keep losing weight.[1]
When you’re stress hormones are up it’s more difficult to lose weight as your body wants to preserve what it has. So allow yourself time to rest and recover to improve your fitness and your weight loss.
Not Getting Enough Sleep
This is going to piggyback off point number one. If you are not getting adequate sleep, you can create this same overtraining syndrome in your body.
If you are not sleeping enough, your body starts to think there is some sort of trauma happening, or else why wouldn’t you be asleep?
This can also lead to higher stress hormones levels and over time they can get pretty nasty. They can lead to a lot of inflammation in the body and may be at the core of a lot of bad diseases. Along with that, this stress hormones also make weight loss very difficult and your metabolism also starts to slow.[2]
You can imagine if you combine overtraining and a lack of sleep; you can pretty much kiss losing weight goodbye.
Make it a point to get at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. This means creating a good wind down routine, sticking with it, and starting it at the same time each night.
Look to cut out blue light from electronics that can disrupt sleep and avoid alcohol and caffeine later in the day.
Keep your room as dark as possible and a touch on the cool side to promote better rest and rejuvenation. With your body full rested and repaired you set the stage for better weight loss and improved fitness.
Not Eating Enough
This may seem confusing as if you’re eating less, surly you should be losing weight? This all comes back to metabolism and again, that stress hormone issue.
Think of your body fat as a back up fuel source. When times of stress or trauma hit, it can be broken down and used as energy by your body.
When you restrict too many calories, your body thinks there’s another form of trauma, or maybe a drought, happening since you’re not feeding yourself. Body fat storage can be your bodies way of contingency plan.
When you don’t eat enough, your metabolism slows right down as your body doesn’t want to waste what it has. Everything becomes about conservation at this point and losing weight is not going to be top on your bodies priority list.
Add to this overtraining in the gym and it can really stall your weight loss. Your body will be fighting against you to hold on to what it has. This is where injuries and sickness can also happen as your body may be trying to slow things down as much as possible.
Allow yourself to be fed and nourished. Your body needs consistent fuel in order to function properly and lose weight.
Not Building Muscle
We’re not talking giant bodybuilder muscle here, but good lean muscle as this can be part of what helps you to lose weight.
First off, just the act of having to build the muscle through strength training is going to take a full body effort. This burns a lot of calories which will help in weight loss.
Also, the style of training that helps to build muscle — a high-intensity style — is going to put your body into a better state hormonally. Your body will be able to burn calories long after your workout is done.[3] Your metabolism will now be higher and losing weight will be more achievable.
Along with this, just having more muscle increases your ability to burn calories. Lean muscle is metabolically active even at rest so when you have more muscle you’ll be burning more calories even if you’re sitting still.
Not Eating Enough Protein
You probably hear about protein all the time and its main goal is not just to build muscle.
Protein is important for so many different functions in the body; from building hormones and the structure, function, and regulation of tissues and organs in the body.
Protein also has a thermogenic effect, meaning that it takes calories just to eat and digest it.
Have you heard of the “meat sweats”? This is that thermogenic function in action as it takes a lot of energy for the body to digest and absorb protein. This act of muscle protein synthesis can be a big calorie burner in the body.[4]
The next benefit it provides is that just eating protein through the day can also boost your metabolism by 80 to 100 calories a day. This has another good effect as it makes you eat several hundred calories less a day from other food sources.
Protein helps to fill you up and keep you full. You’ll be less hungry at various points in the day and can take in less overall calories helping you to lose more weight.
Protein can also be good at holding off cravings and can keep blood sugar more stable. This way, you won’t get those big peaks and drops that can lead you to craving more carbs and possibly gaining more weight.
It’s a good idea to get a good serving of protein at breakfast as this can help you lose weight. You’ll stay full through the morning and less likely to turn to that mid-morning snack or cravings for sugar.
Eating Too Much
If you’ve been serious about losing weight, you’re probably more aware of your food portions and calorie intake. The whole calorie counting issue is a bit of complicated area and it’s not as simple as calories in calories out and not all calories are created equal. 100 calories of walnuts is going to act different in your body than 100 calories of a Coke.
But it’s still important to be aware of how much you’re eating as it may surprise you the amount of calories you’re taking in and not knowing.
The first big thing, for losing weight, is to stop drinking your calories. This means cutting soft drinks, juices, sports drinks, specialty coffees etc. This are fast acting calories that don’t fill you up and can make you hungrier. You’ve taken in hundred of calories without really knowing as there’s no solid structure of protein and fiber to help keep you full.
Since these drinks are all sugar, they can spike your blood sugar leading to a crash. This crash phase is where you tend to crave more of those fast-acting carbs in the form of simple sugars or refined carbs. This is going to make weight loss difficult so do yourself a favor and switch those drinks to water.
You can try to track your calories for a few days just to get an idea of where you stand. From here, you’ll know how you need to restructure things.
Take almonds for example, they are a great healthy snack and having a small handful can be great. But say you do this multiple times over the day. Just one cup of almonds has around 530 calories which may be more than you were planning to take in.
You don’t have to be a slave to tracking food and calories but get a general idea where you’re at and adjust as needed.
Eating Too Many Carbs
You may be sick of hearing about everything to do with carbs but when it comes to you not losing weight, you need to be aware of them.
If you’ve been having issues losing weight, or have blood sugar issues such as type 2 diabetes, you may want to go lower carb.
This is something you want to talk over with your doctor, but the majority of the carbohydrates we’re exposed to are not needed at all.
Things like white bread, white rice, white flour and white sugar etc. are providing you no nutrition and are very high glycemic. This keeps your blood sugar elevated and makes it harder to lose weight.
Keeping things lower carb can have positive effects on triglyceride levels and cholesterol along with controlling blood sugar and losing weight.[5]
Carbs based around your workout can still be great for energy but look to the best choices. Aim for things like steel cut oats, wild rice, sweet potatoes and quinoa.