If you can’t lose weight even with diet and exercise, try these 12 tips for natural weight loss!
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Tips for Natural Weight Loss When You Can’t Lose Weight
Looking for the Best Ways to Lose Weight
Weight loss is one of the most researched subjects in the world. Hundreds of thousands of internet searches are made each day—that’s millions each month—on this topic alone.
Clinical study after study explores what works and what doesn’t, disproving fad after fad.
We’re searching for easy solutions and quick fixes and we’re willing to pay to make it happen. This has transformed weight loss into a massive business that revolves around diets, exercise routines, pills, and gadgets that rake in plenty of money but often fail to provide real, lasting results.
Various people try juice cleanses, low-calorie diets, low-fat diets, only eating lean protein foods, and limiting portion sizes. Along with these diets, people also try going on an intense workout routine, strength training, or simply increasing physical activity to lose weight fast.
But why is it that some people still can’t lose weight and even gain more pounds?
Why We Gain Weight
Our modern diet is filled with rich, delicious, and calorie-dense foods we instinctively crave, even when it’s obvious to us that they don’t have what we truly want or need deep down.
Rich foods were hard to come by just a few hundred years ago, and even harder a few thousand years ago. It made sense that our bodies sought out these calorific, high-energy rarities.
We needed them to fuel our way through another day of hunting, gathering, farming, building homes from scratch with little in the way of tools, and all the hard work of life before smartphones, cars, computers, and televisions. Our workload is now less physical, and the fatty, carbohydrate filled foods we’re hardwired to seek out are cheap and plentiful everywhere we turn.
Then there is stress, both from within and without.
We used to release stress quickly. When stress struck in ancient history, we fought the jaguar, we ran to safety, or we died.
No matter the outcome, the stress passed fairly quickly. Modern stress is less tangible and more chronic.
We can’t punch a coworker in the face or run out into the parking lot when work becomes unmanageable. Instead we hold onto our stress for days, months, and even years.
This compromises our digestive systems and fills us with stress hormones. Then we add plastics and environmental pollutions to the mix and our bodies don’t know what to do with all the added stress.
Our fat cells get stuffed with toxins to keep us safe because it’s better there than floating freely.
With all these things going on inside our bodies and in the environment, are there still ways to lose weight naturally?
Can’t Lose Weight? These 12 Ways Should Help
Before we get into natural ways to lose a few pounds, we need to know if we really do need to lose weight.
A couple pounds fluctuation is pretty normal for everyone, so if your jeans are feeling a little tight, it may not call for anything drastic just yet.
You need to look at your lifestyle, family history of illness, how you feel, and perhaps consult a physician before you lose any weight. You can also use a BMI calculator to help you decide, though you should know that many experts disagree about where overweight and obesity begin, and BMI is just a guideline, not law.
Mainly it comes down to how the added padding affects your health.
If you’re within the overweight or obese threshold, then losing weight should be a priority. Doing so helps prevent chronic illnesses from developing like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and gut bacteria overgrowth.
Here are 12 tips on how to lose weight naturally:
1. Start Small
Changing your lifestyle is a hard thing to do, and you don’t have to change everything all at once.
There is nothing fast about weight loss. Make one or two changes at a time and the fat melts off at its own slow pace.
We may wish it were quicker, but it’s healthier to go down your weight loss path unhurried so your body can keep up with the toxins hidden in your fat cells.
Working off pounds too quickly may not be the best way to lose weight. Work on a long-term weight loss plan of shedding off 1-2 pounds a week.
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2. Drink Water
Water hydrates cells, cleans out the digestive and urinary systems, plays a role in metabolism, and keeps your lymphatic system moving to remove excess waste, toxins, and fat from our tissues.
What is the lymphatic system? It is made up of tissues and organs to bring infection-fighting lymph fluids into the bloodstream.
Choose water over other liquids. You don’t want to be drinking your calories in the form of soda or even fruit juices.
These come chained to hundreds of extra calories each day most of us don’t need, especially without much nutrition attached. For those of us who drink soda at every meal, we’re looking at closer to a thousand unwanted calories.
Simple sugars suspended in a liquid are very hard on the body and a big reason for unnecessary fat storage.
Diet sodas aren’t the answer either. These may not have any calories, but they encourage us to eat more, induce cravings for sweets, and may be broken down into more calories than you think by the friendly bacteria in our mouths and intestines.
Diet sodas also dehydrate rather than hydrate the body.
Drink clean water and flavor it with lemon or lime wedges if you like. Herbal teas work, too.
If you need to sweeten them, do so lightly with stevia or monk fruit rather than table sugar.
3. Avoid the Snack Aisle
Chips, cookies, candy bars, popcorn, crackers, and similar snacks all pack a lot of calories into very small packages. They are also rather addictive, making it hard to eat one of the tiny serving sizes they use to fool you on the labels.
They not only contain high calories, processed foods and sweets also have high sugar and sodium content. These can spike your blood sugar levels and eventually lead to chronic diseases in the future.
Reach for unsalted, raw nuts when you’re feeling snacky or grab a piece of fruit when you want something sweet. Berries are the ultimate sweet treats with a sugary flavor while low in calories.
4. Get Plenty of Fiber
Fiber is often removed from our processed foods, and our bodies definitely miss it.
Fiber helps fill us up, slows down digestion, cleans out waste, removes toxins, gets rid of cholesterol, and metes out energy for hours rather than all at once. This means you have fewer cravings, eat less, and still feel satisfied.
Add more veggies to your favorite dishes to make them less calorie intense. Reach for pears and apples more often between meals.
This way you won’t be tempted to reach for high-calorie snacks a few hours after eating.
5. Eat Out Less Often
Fast food and sit-down restaurant meals carry a ton more calories than the same meals prepared at home. They usually rely on processed foods that include more fats, carbohydrates, preservatives, and chemicals than you get at home.
By preparing your own food at home, you can control what ingredients to put into your meal to make sure you’re eating high quality, whole foods.
Limit yourself to eating out once or twice a week and try to order sensibly. It makes a big difference.
6. Eat a Light Breakfast
Don’t skip this meal.
Eating breakfast jump-starts your metabolism, so you burn calories throughout the day. Skipping breakfast means you end up going 10-12 hours without food.
Your body takes this as a warning and starts storing everything it can, rather than burning through fat stores like you were hoping. Keep it simple and fairly light, but don’t ever go without it.
You can try lemon water, herbal teas or a meal replacement, for a light breakfast in the morning.
The Sunwarrior Illumin8 Meal Replacement contains all the essential nutrients you need to start your day with the energy you need. It’s also gluten-free, organic, and full of fiber and enzymes essential for digestion and overall health.
7. Clean Out the Pantry
Toss out the foods you know are unhealthy and don’t replace them with the same unhealthy things. If you have them in your pantry, you will use them.
Stock up on more fruits, veggies, nuts, and seeds so you still have something to reach for when you need to.
You can also make protein bars, a smoothie, or mixed nuts to keep you full in between meals.
Refining your food choices helps with natural weight loss without side effects.
8. Get Active
It doesn’t take much to start sweating away that unwanted weight. Just 20 to 45 minutes of any activity that raises your heart rate is enough to easily lose two to three pounds each week without changing anything else about your lifestyle or diet.
No gym membership required either. You can walk briskly, jog, run, bike, swim, do jumping jacks, follow along with a fitness video on YouTube or even play a fitness game on your favorite game console.
These exercises can be broken up throughout the day into five-minute chunks if you can’t manage to squeeze a larger block out of your busy schedule.
Get up and move during TV commercials and lunch breaks, pass a message to a coworker rather than use email, walk your dog a little faster than usual, jump up and do fifty jumping jacks next to your desk, or sign up for a yoga, tai chi, or other fitness classes.
If you already exercise, just add another 20 minutes to what you already do to see some amazing results fast.
Increasing your physical activity helps your body burn more calories and more fats.
9. Strength Training
Cardio isn’t the only way to lose weight. Muscle burns more calories than other tissues.
The more muscle you build, the more fat melts away.
Women often worry about bulking up, but a little weightlifting may actually have the opposite effect, making you stronger, leaner, and tone up faster. Women have a much harder time bulking up than men and have little to worry about.
Talk to a fitness trainer at your gym and learn to love your barbells. Add weights or elastic bands to your other exercises.
Do yourself a favor and stop fearing muscle. If you develop more lean muscle, you not only shed off pounds but you also make your body lighter.
10. Treat Yourself
You don’t have to abandon all hope. A little treat each day can be your reward for all the good choices and hard work.
I suggest dark chocolate. A small square of dark chocolate each day may help your cravings while still acting as a healthy indulgence with some good fats and antioxidants.
If chocolate isn’t your thing, choose something small you can gift to yourself at the end of each day. By giving in to your little reward, you also keep the sugar cravings at bay.
Better yet, make these treats yourself at home. Who says you can’t eat dessert when you’re on a diet?
11. Don’t Eat Late
Metabolism and digestion slow down as you sleep, so it’s always best if you don’t eat just before laying down for the night.
This lets your body process all that nutrition you threw at it and prepare for the rebuilding phase we enter every night when we repair and mop up the mess of the day. If you have food in you later, it can lead to heartburn, acid reflux, constipation, and, you guessed it, weight gain.
12. Eat More Lean Protein
Protein requires a lot of energy to digest, creating a thermic effect. This means you burn more calories for hours after you eat lean protein.
We recommend clean plant-based sources as often as possible. Add Sunwarrior Protein Classic into your meals or drink it as is.
Watch this video from Sunwarrior as Dr. Weston talks about weight loss:
There are really a million ways to lose weight, but these are the ways you lose it forever.
A diet or pill only helps you for a moment, but a change in the way you live is true lasting change you can count on to keep you feeling and looking your best for years to come.
Whatever good habits you try to adopt, we wish you luck, and feel free to come back and share with us what worked for you. We’d be more than happy to know.
Still need help losing weight? Join the Sunwarrior Fitness Challenge where you get free meal ideas and workout plans tailored to fit your lifestyle. Have you joined our fitness challenge? Let us hear your experiences in the comments below!
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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on March 18, 2015, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.
