Following our last post about “Why Dieting is Worse for You Than Being Overweight”, we thought that many of you might be wondering what you can do to help you manage your weight.
The first step would be to get yourself out of the “dieting” mindset of drastically changing your diet for a short period of time, hoping for long-term results. Sustained weight loss can only happen with sustained transformations to your diet and lifestyle.
4 Things You Can Do Instead Of Dieting
There are way more than four things that you can do. But if we gave you a longer list, you might never start. These four are among the essentials. You can use any one or all of them to start your sustained weight loss journey.
- Balance Your Diet – Especially if you have bad habits hanging around from your dieting days, like avoiding carbs as if they were the plague. Here are the general proportions of macronutrients that make up a balanced diet. A perfectly balanced diet for you might be different than one balanced for someone else, but it should fall into this range:
- Carbohydrates – 40% to 50% of your daily calorie intake
- Protein – 25% to 35%
- Fats – 25% to 35%
- Eat Fewer Processed Foods, and More Whole Foods – This one translates to eating fewer prepared and packaged foods, and making more of your meals from fresh, whole foods. Processed foods are full of weight-inducing fats and salt. Whole foods have more nutrition and fibre, a great combination to help set the stage for weight loss.
- Eat Healthier Snacks – Poor snacking can ruin even the best weight management program. Check out these fast, healthy snack ideas to see the sorts of tasty snacks you can enjoy without packing on the pounds.
- Make Every Activity Count – More activity means more calories burned. But that doesn’t make it any easier to start a formal exercise. New research shows the benefits of “incidental” physical activity or the things you do on a regular day, like climbing stairs, carrying the groceries, even loading the dishwasher. Many of these activities are related to “functional training”, which focuses on exercises that help you move throughout your day. Also known as functional fitness, studies have linked it to lower body fat and cholesterol levels, and increased muscle strength and coordination.
If you would like to learn more about how you can lose weight without dieting, visit your nearest Herbal One location and speak to one of our nutrition consultants.
And you can check out our article “5 Healthy Weight-Loss Lessons from Experience”.