3 Ways to Achieve a Healthy Weight Loss Routine

When it comes to weight loss, eating carrots and kale isn’t going to help you much as you’ll still find yourself ravenous and ready to cave in and devour junk food. Most weight-loss-friendly foods aren’t necessarily veggies or 90-calorie yogurts; instead, they’re items packed with protein, and sometimes even good fat, which is very healthy.

In order to lose weight, you need to feed your body its required nutrients that give you energy: protein, certain healthy fats (such as those found in olive oil or avocados), vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Read about these nutrient-dense foods that will provide you with stamina and strength, and the willpower to avoid their lesser counterparts more often found in chips, pasta, and cake.

Allow Yourself Cheat Meals

This might be contradictory to a lot of what people tell you, but in the bodybuilding world, even the strictest diets allow for “cheat meals.” A cheat meal is where you allow yourself to eat just about anything. Seriously, you can select one meal and eat anything from ice cream and pizza to candy and Oreos or whatever else you might be craving.

What this does is that it throws off your body’s natural cycle. If all you eat is tilapia and broccoli (super “clean” foods) then eventually your body is going to get used to it and it won’t have any need to work harder—aka shed more fat. By adding in extremely “dirty” cheat meals, your body is suddenly faced with lots of fats to burn off and it’s going to go into hyper drive.

When you return to your normal diet the next meal/the next day, your body will still be in that “hyper drive” state and will continue burning. One cheat meal every week or two will help you shed fat in the long run.

Reduce Your Sugar Intake

We all know the sugar isn’t good for you. What a lot of people don’t know is why. When “Fat-Free” became the big trend in the United States, what do you think Americans replaced the fats with to keep food still tasting good? The answer is sugar.

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Sugar spikes your insulin. An insulin spike means your body is going to go into fat storing mode. So the less you can spike your insulin, the better. The easiest way to do this is to stop eating processed foods. Cereal, “healthy” snack bars, Wheat Thins, all that stuff is garbage. Don’t eat it. It’s all loaded with sugar.

A typical diet for losing weight is very high in protein and vegetables. The proytein is there to maintain and build muscle and the veggies are carbohydrates but they are very, very low on the glycemic index—meaning no insulin spike. If you are going to have carbs, have slow digesting carbs like brown rice, sweet potatoes, and quinoa.

Routine

People think that by “not eating” they will get skinny or lose weight – False. What happens if you try to just “not eat as often” is you train your body to not know when it’s going to get food next. So what happens when you do eat is your body tells itself “I don’t know when I’m going to get food again so I better hold on to what I have now.” It then stores what you just ate as fat, for reserve.

Instead, it’s better to eat smaller portions more frequently—every 2 to 3 hours. If you can get in this routine, your body knows that it’s going to get food again soon so it will have no problem burning off what you put in it. This routine over time is what allows bodybuilders and fitness models to eat tons of food but consistently stay low in body fat.

Image courtesy of: womenfitness.net.

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