Lots of people try to lose weight, but very few are successful at it, or maintaining it in the long-term. It’s largely because they insist on doing it the hardest possible way – a diet/meal plan. Unfortunately, that also happens to be the most common way. That’s actually at odds with what works for long-term behaviour change. The more seamlessly something fits into your existing lifestyle and preferences, the easier it will be to do and maintain in the long term.

8 Women Who Successfully Lost Weight After Menopause | Prevention

Original source: here.

            In this article, I’ll show you the easy ways to lose body fat.

The Hard Way

Why is a diet so difficult to stick to? Imagine this scenario:

Your current day looks like this:

  • Breakfast: muffin and coffee.
  • Lunch: sandwich with lettuce, tomato, deli slices, and dressing. You drink juice along with it.
  • Dinner: bowl of pasta with chicken, in creamy sauce. You drink a glass of wine with it. For dessert you have cookies.
  • In between meals, you snack on nuts (almonds, cashews, walnuts, etc.)

 

You read about how great a new diet is, so you completely change to that diet. Here’s what it looks like now:

  • Breakfast: baked asparagus, bacon and eggs. You drink water, coffee or tea.
  • Lunch: chicken salad with balsamic vinegar dressing. You drink water. You don’t have dessert.
  • Dinner: salmon steak with quinoa. You drink water, and you don’t have dessert.

 

Sure, the latter diet might be healthier, but it brings with it a lot of logistical problems, like:

  • The preparation time is significantly higher.
  • Are you cooking for yourself, or is someone cooking for you? If someone is cooking for you, do they need to eat the same things as you? Or do they now need to start preparing 2 or more different menus?
  • What about when you have to eat out? What will you do then?
  • What if you’re travelling? Can you stick to the new menu?
  • What if you’re entertaining guests? Will they have to eat what you eat?

Basically, the new way is not just nutritionally different, but also logistically different. No wonder people can’t stick to their diets in the long term.

 

The Wrong Way

Not only is the hard way, well… hard, most of the time, it’s also wrong. You see, diet gurus try to distract you from what really matters when it comes to fat loss. And that’s only 2 things:

  1. Calories
  2. Protein

That’s it. Everything else doesn’t matter. Yet, they focus on the differences between their approach and other approaches. That’s to deceive you from what really matters – the similarities. For instance:

 

  • Intermittent fasting reduces the number of hours you have to eat… thereby reducing calories.
  • Keto, Atkins and Bernstein reduce the number of carbs you eat… thereby reducing calories.
  • Pritikin and Ornish reduce the amount of dietary fat you eat… thereby reducing calories.
  • Portion control reduces the size of each meal… thereby reducing calories.

 

Are you starting to notice a pattern? Why do they do that? Do they really believe what they’re preaching – that some insignificant detail not only is the key to fat loss, but is also superior to other approaches? I don’t know any of these people personally, so I don’t know what’s in their minds, but I do know this – if you were to write a book on fat loss, and the only information is “eat less calories. Doesn’t matter how. Also, eat more protein”, it would be a very short, disappointing book. Because of that, you have to focus on some extremely minor detail that doesn’t even matter. Then, spend 200-300 pages talking about how that is the best way to lose body fat. Use some bad science or pseudoscience in the book to “prove” your point. And there we go – we have a dietary approach followed by millions… with results equally as bad as every other approach.

Man, I’m cynical.

So if the most common way is both the hard way and the wrong way, what’s the easy way to do it? Keep reading.

 

The REAL Reasons You Can’t Lose Weight

In my weight loss presentations, I repeatedly state that people don’t lose weight because they’re on the wrong diet. Every diet is the right diet, if you can stick to it. And that’s the big “if.”

So why can’t people stick to their diets? A few major reasons are:

  • Emotional eating
  • Stress eating
  • Lack of planning
  • Cravings
  • Eating out frequently
  • Large portions
  • Dislike cooking
  • Other people at home do the grocery shopping
  • It’s time to eat
  • Fear of going hungry

 

When you understand the real reasons people can’t stick to diets, along with the only 2 nutritional factors that matter, the approach is both simpler and more effective.

 

The Easy Ways to Lose Weight

Here are some easy ways to address the above challenges:

Emotional Eating

Here are 2 simple techniques to address emotional eating:

  1. Before you sit down, state the emotion that you’re feeling. Very often, we confuse emotional hunger with physical hunger. Once you realize that you’re feeling an emotion and not a physical sensation (hunger), you’re able to dissociate those 2 feelings.
  2. The hunger-fullness scale. Before you sit down to eat, rate your hunger and fullness on a -10 to a +10 scale. Ratings of -10 to -1 mean that you’re hungry. Ratings of +1 to +10 mean that you’re full. These ratings help you differentiate between emotional hunger and physical hunger. If you rated yourself in the pluses, then don’t eat yet. After all, it means that you’re not hungry yet. Keep waiting until you’re in the minuses.

Stress Eating

Very often we eat not because we’re hungry, but to self-soothe. It might help your stress levels, but not your waistline.

I’ve written about stress management extensively in my workplace wellness book and in my stress management article, but here are 2 simple techniques to use:

  1. If you’re stressed, identify the stressor. Sometimes, stress is just diffuse. You feel stressed and anxious, even though you can’t quite put your finger on it. The “not knowing” is more stressful than whatever the situation is.

So really think about it, and articulate precisely what’s stressing you out. What exactly about that specific situation is stressful?

For example, if you’re caring for elderly parents, then you might identify the stressor is not being able to care well enough for them.

Simply identifying the stressor makes you less stressed. Rather than feeling big and scary, you’ve now “boxed it in.” Now that the stress has a “form” or “shape”, you can do something about it.

  1. Now that your stress has a “shape”, make a plan to solve the problem. The plan could be a very simple, one-sentence plan. But just knowing what to do about it reduces the stress even more.

 

For instance, let’s say your stressor is financial problems. You’ve identified that. Now, make a plan on how to either get more money, or spend less. Do you need to negotiate a higher salary? Work more hours? Get a higher-paying job? Do you need to skip the coffee? Do you need to sell something? Do you need to start a side business? Can you move to a city with a lower cost of living?

Just the act of making a plan that you believe you can follow will reduce your stress even more. And step-by-step working that plan helps chip away at the stress. Making small, measurable progress is very helpful.

Lack of Planning

Very often, when it’s time to eat, we think what we want. Usually, if we wait until we’re hungry to eat, we’re going to make the tastiest choice. Unfortunately the tastiest choice is rarely the healthiest choice.

However, if you’ve made the decision of what to eat earlier in the day, you don’t need to make that decision later in the day.

So here’s the easy way to lose weight if a lack of planning is your problem: take 30-60 seconds either at the beginning of the day, or end of the previous day to write down what you’ll eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The power of this is thinking ahead of time about what options are available. Very often, we have an idealistic view of how the day is going to go. But if we think about where we’re going to be at mealtimes, and what food options are available, you’re much more likely to make better choices. It just takes 30-60 seconds to think about it, and write it down.

Another benefit to planning is that often, we go on the perfect diet, and we follow it strictly, until our first “cheat meal.” A cheat meal is only a cheat meal if it’s unplanned. But if you schedule a cheat meal into your anticipated meals for the day, it’s no longer a cheat meal. It’s just part of the plan. It might not be the healthiest part of the plan, but it was part of the plan. If you can anticipate it, you can mitigate it, using any of the strategies that I talk about in my article on the top 20 cheat meal strategies.

Cravings

There are many reasons we get cravings, so a specific strategy would need to be tailored to your situation, but here are some tips to manage them:

  • If you’re craving something out of true hunger, you have to look at what you did/didn’t do in the previous 1-2 meals. Maybe you simply didn’t eat enough at those meals.
  • If you’re not craving something out of hunger, just out of pure deliciousness, simply don’t bring it home. That’s my relationship with chocolate. I love it. I’ll eat it even if I’m not hungry (bonus points for Lindt. Honourable mentions to Godiva, Ferrero Rocher and Ghirardelli). And that’s why I don’t keep it at home.
  • If someone you live with buys whatever you’re usually craving, ask them to hide it. My wife can have a single piece of chocolate, and stop. I can’t. So on the extremely rare occasion that chocolate makes it into our home (namely, our in-laws giving it to us, and me not wanting to hurt their feelings by declining), I ask my wife to hide the chocolate, so I don’t know where it is. The hassle of looking for the chocolate isn’t worth it to me, so out of sight, out of mind.

Eating Out Frequently

Lots of our clients either entertain guests, or have business lunches/dinners, so this is often at odds with traditional dieting advice. But knowing that calories are king, there are a bunch of simple, creative solutions that allow you to eat out very frequently, yet still maintain a good body/health. Here are some ideas:

  1. Instead of ordering a main course, just order an appetizer. They’re usually smaller, and have fewer calories.
  2. Order the main course, and split it with someone.
  3. Order whatever you want, and before you even start eating, ask for a to-go/takeaway box, and put a portion of your meal into that box, so you can split it across more than 1 meal.
  4. Eat whatever you want, and skip the next 1-2 meals.
  5. Eat whatever you want, and eat less at the next 1-2 meals.

Large Portions

There are also multiple, simple solutions to large portions. Some of the solutions from previous sections apply here as well. But here are some additional suggestions:

  1. Eat slower. It takes 15-20 minutes for the fullness signal to go from the stomach to the brain. If you eat quickly, you will have put away more calories in those 15-20 minutes than if you eat slowly. You’ll see some generic advice on the internet like “chew every bite 31.748 times”, but different food has different textures. You don’t need to chew soup that many times, and if you’re eating a steak, you might need to chew it more. The best advice is to simply take longer to eat than you currently are.
  2. Mindful eating. This has become a pseudo-spiritual term lately, so let’s take the woo-woo out of it. Mindful eating is simply just eating. Not eating while watching TV or scrolling through your phone or reading the newspaper. When you’re eating, just eat. Enjoy your food. Notice the smell, texture and flavour.
  3. Eat out of smaller plates. If you’re the type of person who has to “finish everything on your plate”, just use smaller plates to eat from.

Dislike Cooking

If you dislike cooking, give me a high five. I’m in the same boat as you. I hate to cook, but I like to eat. There are plenty of solutions for this one. Here are a few:

  1. Subscribe for a meal delivery service. My favourites for people living in the Greater Toronto Area are Power Kitchen and Easy Mealz. And no, I don’t get paid if you buy from them. The meals are healthy, use very few ingredients, and are tasty.
  2. Get someone else to cook for you.
  3. Some higher-end grocery stores (like Longo’s, Loblaws and Whole Foods) have warm meals, with ingredients all disclosed. You can just buy enough for a few days, and heat them up when it’s time.

Other People Do the Grocery Shopping

I hear it all the time: “I want to eat healthy, but it’s my husband/wife who does the grocery shopping, and they buy things that aren’t conducive to my health.” There are a few solutions to that as well:

  1. You can do the grocery shopping.
  2. Nobody needs to do the grocery shopping, since many grocery stores now have a service where you tell them what groceries you want, they collect those groceries, you pay for them, and they get delivered to you.
  3. If the person doing the grocery shopping in your household buys things that aren’t conducive to your health, just ask them to hide those things from you, without even telling you that they bought them.

It’s Time to Eat

Sometimes, we sit down to eat not because we’re hungry, but just because it’s time. A couple of the solutions from the previous sections work here as well, like:

  1. The hunger-fullness scale.
  2. If you’re sitting down to eat because you’re in a social setting, and it would be rude to not join for a meal, just have a smaller meal.

Fear of Going Hungry

A lot of us eat even when we’re not hungry, for the fear of going hungry. So we eat pre-emptively. A huge part of breaking this fear is exposure to hunger. Learning that hunger is not a big deal. Hunger is not pain. Hunger is just hunger.

You’ll also learn that hunger is not a continuously increasing sensation. Rather, at first, when you’re truly hungry, you’ll feel hunger. But if you don’t eat, the hunger doesn’t continue increasing indefinitely. Rather, after your first hunger pang, if you still don’t eat, a few minutes later, the hunger just goes away. Then comes back. The goes away. Then comes back. So hunger is really not that big of a deal.

How can you break this fear of hunger? Here are a couple of ways:

  1. Skip lunch on purpose one day. So you can see what hunger feels like. If you’re really hungry, pack something with you that won’t go bad if you don’t eat it. This way, you have that peace of mind that if worse comes to worse, you have something “in your back pocket.”
  2. Most people, have virtually unlimited access to food at all times of the day. If you’re home, and you go hungry, well, no big deal, you can just eat when you are hungry. If you’re not home, there’s always something fast and cheap that you can buy almost anywhere – fast food place (yeah, it’s not the healthiest, but it’ll keep you from going hungry), gas station, grocery store, etc.

As you’ll notice, all of these strategies are much more about logistical management than they are about nutrition. They seem simple and fast, and they are. But don’t mistake that for being ineffective. Ironically, the simple and fast approach is much more effective than the difficult and complex.

Pick your biggest reason for the inability to stick to that diet, and just select 1-2 strategies from the lists provided. Implement it consistently, and watch the weight drop.