If your goal is to lose weight, then a diet might be right for you. Unfortunately, all diets end, either in successful weight loss or in a chocolate cheesecake at two in the morning and then the weight you lost returns and brings friends with it. Permanent weight loss doesn’t involve dieting, since dieting doesn’t work because they’re restrictive and when they end, you return to your previous pattern of eating that put weight on in the first place. Permanent weight loss comes from making lifestyle changes rather than dieting. The lifestyle changes you make include regularly scheduled exercise, healthier eating habits, plenty of hydration and even adequate sleep. Not only will you lose weight, you’ll be healthier.
Changing eating habits isn’t dieting.
Dieting is restrictive. You have to eat specific foods, such as cabbage soup or starve until even the cat starts looking like a tasty morsel. Eating healthier means making small changing in your eating habits to add up to huge calorie savings and more nutrients. You might even be eating more food more frequently when you eat a healthier diet, so you’ll never feel hungry or deprived. Sometimes the changes are small, like using Greek yogurt to top that baked potato instead of sour cream, sometimes they involve the way you cook—-steamed not fried, please. Eating healthier adds more nutrients to your diet so you’ll be healthier, but cuts back on calories so you’ll be thinner.
Start exercising and make weight loss easier.
Exercise does so many great things for your body. It actually lengthens the ends of the DNA, the telomeres to protect chromosomes and prevent cell death, the cause of disease and signs of aging. It also increases circulation to improve the flow of blood to all parts of the body, including the skin, giving you a healthy glow. It has many more health benefits, but for those trying to lose weight, the main benefit is that it burns calories, while also increasing muscle tissue. Muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue does, so in effect, once you develop it, you’ll be boosting your metabolism.
Combine diet and exercise and you have an arsenal against fat.
Losing weight isn’t a challenging concept, even though actually losing it may be a challenge. You simply burn more calories than you consume. Healthy eating lowers your caloric intake, while exercise burns more calories. You’ll be attacking weight loss on all fronts when you combine these two lifestyle changes.
Not only does healthy eating help you lower your caloric intake, it also helps stabilize blood sugar levels, just as regular exercise does. That means you won’t suffer from sugar peaks and valleys that can cause you to consume anything sweet, from a bowl of ice cream to an entire cake.
Getting adequate sleep is also important when you want to lose weight permanently. Adequate sleep means you won’t be grabbing a candy bar to help keep you awake through the next boring business meeting or keep you going just until the kids get in bed.
Regular exercise can lift your spirits. Often people overeat when they’re depressed and exercise can help lift that depression by stimulating the body to create hormones that make you feel good.
You’ll look slimmer even if you never lose a pound when you exercise properly. Exercising tightens and tones the body, which is why a person who exercises may fit into a size 5/6, while someone weighing the same, but who isn’t in shape may have to buy a 9/10.