The Best Weight Loss Tips Anyone Can Use (10 step guide)

Hey guys, I thought why not start my first blog article with the topic of the best weight loss tips that have worked well for me. Today we are going to be going over the best weight loss tips anyone can use from athlete to weekend warrior to lose weight and keep it off permanently. Without further a do let’s get into the best weight loss tips and tricks I have found work great for me and most certainly for you too!

My 10 step guide to lose weight

1. Sneaky weight loss tip..water!
2. The most important weight loss tip, a calorie deficit: Find your maintenance calories and track your food.
3. Fruit and vegetables are the Batman and Robin of weight loss.
4. Eat when you are hungry.
5. Sleep!
6. Stress Management.
7. Shop smartly, shop for weight loss!
8. Prepare ahead of time.
9. Whole, low calorie dense foods
10. Be realistic when losing weight.

1. Sneaky Weight Loss Tip..Water!

Water! Yes who would of thought water would be included as a weight loss tip? Water helps to keep us hydrated, allows for the transport of minerals around the body and helps remove waste from cells but it is also going to be a major help on our quest to losing weight! Think of your stomach for a moment. When you are feeling hungry, your body gives you signals, “FEED ME NOW!”, “I’M HUNGRY!”. So you eat some food, it goes to your stomach and after eating for a while you feel full and don’t feel the urge to eat anymore. Why? Because your stomach has sensed the food in your stomach and now knows it is full and fed. It stops sending our brain signals to consume more food. Now we are satisfied for while until the next meal.

Where does water come into play?

Well we can use water as a way to “trick” our stomach to feel full quicker which allows us to eat less food but still feel full. A sneaky weight loss tip for those people who can’t put the fork down! What I’ve been doing that works really well is drink a few cups of water BEFORE EATING and while I am eating. Now my stomach is “prefilled” with water so it takes me less time to feel fully satiated. This means less food is consumed which can help place us in a calorie deficit and ultimately fat loss!

2. The most important weight loss tip, a calorie deficit: Find your maintenance calories and track your food

Alright this is the most important weight loss tip of the article, so if you leave with something today may it be this. In order to lose weight we need to place our bodies into a calorie deficit. Or in layman’s terms we consume less calories than our body needs. Meaning our body is forced to take energy from stored fat cells or muscle mass (hopefully not) and so we loss weight.

How do I create a calorie deficit?

• Firstly you will need to find your maintenance calories or the amount of calories you need to maintain your weight. You can do this by finding a calorie counter online and get an estimate of your maintenance calories.(I like to use https://www.myfitnesspal.com/)
• Track your weight with a weighting scales each day first thing in the morning after going to the toilet, before getting dressed and eating any food. Do this while eating your estimated maintenance calories making use of a food tracker to track your food intake and watch your weight on the scales each morning. If it’s staying the same or doesn’t go north or south of 0.5kg woohoo you have found your maintenance calories!
• Now subtract 200-300 calories from your maintenance calories and continue to track your morning weight. If it’s going down your losing weight! ( If you are looking to maintain your muscle mass then we are looking for an steady weekly rate of weight loss (0.5-1ib or more if you have a lot of body fat) so we don’t lose too much weight all at once. A part of that weight loss will also be muscle depending how lean you are).
• Keep monitoring your weight, once your progress stalls (our body’s metabolism adapts to the calories we are consuming), subtract another 200-300 calories and watch your weight start to lower again. Keep doing this until you are satisfied with your progress or before you get cravings to over-consume (which is common the longer we stay in a calorie deficit.)

3. Fruit and vegetables are the Batman and Robin of weight loss.

Just like Batman and Robin are the perfect tag team, fruit and vegetables are the perfect tag team for weight loss and my third important weight loss tip! As well as providing us with a host of vitamins and minerals, fruit and vegetables are also low in calories/ low calorie dense meaning we feel fuller quicker eating these types of foods compared to higher calorie dense foods. Think of 100g of an apple and 100g of a snickers. For the same 100g we are going to be able to eat a LOT MORE food with the apple compared to the snickers because the apple contains fewer total calories. This males weight loss a lot easier, as we feel fuller quicker with less food. I should also mention when eating fruit and vegetables it’s also less likely you will over-consume as these foods tend to be not as “exciting” to eat compared to foods like snickers. There’s only so much lettuce or tomatoes you can eat before you say to yourself “Yeah I don’t want to eat anymore of this” and your back about your day. With a snickers, well you know if your in the mood for a snickers that could turn into 2 or 3! It’s just too tasty! It’s also worth mentioning that some fruits and vegetables contain higher calories than others so choose wisely depending on how low your calories are during your diet.

My weight loss tip with fruit and veg is to consume at least one of either at every meal during the day to feel fuller quicker as well as giving our body the minerals and vitamins it needs to stay strong and function optimally.

4. Eat when you are hungry.

This is an important one and can really set yourself up to losing weight. Have your ever paid attention to yourself and noticed when you are actually feeling hungry versus when your just craving food or eating out of boredom? Well I have and in my case as a self proclaimed foodie sometimes I just eat out of boredom or because I like the taste of mashed potatoes! If you remember in point no.2 we have a certain amount of calories we can consume each day or calorie budget to place ourselves into a caloric deficit. If you eat over your calorie target to lose weight you will either maintain your weight or gain weight. Eating when you are feeling hungry makes it easier to stick to our calorie target and gives us more “room/space” to consume the rest of our calories throughout the day.

5. Sleep to lose weight!

Sleep I think this is a weight loss tip most people forget or at least don’t place too much importance on. Sleep is going to not only help with weight loss but with a lot of other things in life too. We need sleep and rest to recover from the work, study and more laborious tasks we carry out throughout our day but did you know sleep also helps to regulate our hunger? Making it harder to over-consume on high fat/calorie foods our body craves in times of low energy or stress. Have you ever noticed when you don’t get a good sleep your craving higher calorie/tasty foods? This is our body using an age old system dating back from the times of our ancestors many many years ago to keep ourselves safe. We consume calorie dense foods or over-consume as our bodies sense we are not feeling at our best after that poor night of sleep and that chimp brain we all have inside of us doesn’t know when we will get our next meal. So it triggers us to over-consume on the food we have available to us at that moment and “plan for the worst”. (remember food was not always abundant back then like it is now?).

6. Stress Management.

Like we have touched on in our last weight loss tip, when we feel stressed the likelihood of over-consuming increases which is no good for us and our weight loss goals. Managing stress is going to be very important for the long-run. If we have a lot of stress in our lives, from work commitments, our finances whatever it may be this is not conducive to living our lives optimally and is certainly no good for weight loss. As you see when we lower our calories, we are putting our bodies under stress (not consuming those tasty foods we like to eat, avoiding the temptation of eating tasty foods and eating fewer calories than what our body is used to eating.) If we have added stress from other areas of life, this just creates a recipe for over-consuming when going through a period of eating below are maintenance calories. This can undo all of our progress putting us back where we started or worst (yo-yo dieting) and making us feel frustrated and disillusioned about the whole process. Plan your diets with times when you expect to have lower levels of stress for diet success!

Limiting stress is important for recovery and we should look to include things we like to do in our lives which lead to feelings of contentment, happiness and good well-being. Maybe that’s reading a book, meeting up with friends to go to the movies, walking in nature or playing our favorite sport/physical activity.

7. Shop smartly, shop for weight loss!

Probably the easiest weight loss tip you can implement out of all of these. One where you have 100% control over. Doing this is going make achieving your fat loss goals even easier. So you have decided to lose weight and your thinking of going for your weekly shopping haul. What will I buy? What will help me achieve my fat loss goal? Well now that you know what kind of foods you should eat for fat loss, you should go and buy these foods and ONLY these foods!

Next time you go to the shop, you should be filling your shopping cart with foods that are conducive to your weight loss goals. Foods like fruits, vegetables, high-fiber foods, lean proteins and healthy fats. All of the other stuff, the pizza, the ice cream etc can be left where it is! We are on a mission to lose weight and these foods are not on menu! Once your at home when your feeling hungry or maybe you get a craving here or there, you will have these healthier, lower calorie foods you can turn to so you stay on track.

You have probably noticed there are “lower calorie versions” of foods nowadays and though these can be useful in moderation I would mainly stick with the go to foods we all know will help us achieve our fat loss goals. It’s as much as about instilling good eating habits as it is about losing weight for a few weeks or months. Fruit and vegetables should be a part of our daily diets. Good eating habits will help us out for our whole lives.

8. Prepare ahead of time.

We all been there. We are going about our lives, we are working, we have lots of commitments, maybe we have to drop the kids off to their friends house, go food shopping, pick up something for a member of the family and finally we come to preparing dinner. By this stage you are tired and that fast food restaurant down the road is sounding quite tempting right now. Well don’t worry because you are saved! The answer? Meal prep or have some kind of structure in place so that you have healthy, low calorie foods at reach, So when you do get tired or something comes up, you will choose these foods over something else which could be less than ideal for your fat loss progress.

There are levels to this, like there are levels to health and fitness. You can meal prep all of your meals for a few days (like a bodybuilder) or you can prep 1 or 2 meals at a time to save you when willpower and energy levels are waning. I always have my go to healthy foods stocked in the fridge or in the cupboard and do not have any type of sweets or treats lying around which helps me stick to my goals. When it’s not there, it can’t interfere with you.

9. Whole, low calorie dense foods

This one is mandatory but easy to implement. You need to get used to eating whole, unprocessed, low calorie foods. What humans have been eating since we have been living on this earth. Just like fruit and vegetable, these foods are going to help you feel more satiated , fully for longer, you can eat more of them and provide you with important nutrients, minerals, vitamins and fiber which should be the foundation of our diets for general health. I’m thinking of foods like oats, wholewheat pasta, brown rice, quinoa and starchy carbohydrates like potatoes.

If you try to diet while eating junk food, well firstly your already in a calorie deficit so your body is not getting enough nutrients etc than when it normally would, eating junk food is bringing nothing to the table. Junk food is also highly calorific which makes it harder to put yourself into a deficit and the chances of overeating are increased as we all like to eat tasty food right?

10. Be realistic when losing weight.

The other points we have gone through are all very important but your mindset around losing weight and taking into consideration that you will have to go without some one those tasty foods you like for at least a while to see some fat loss progress. But a “diet” doesn’t have to be hard or extremely challenging, it only requires a little bit of discipline, a will to see the goal through and a commitment to yourself that you will complete it. Afterwards you can go back to eating at your maintenance calories which leaves more room for other tasty foods we have been avoiding for a few weeks. If other human beings have lost weight or overcame unfavorable odds why can’t you lose a little bit of weight for a few weeks? Healthy habits and discipline are not complicated. Make these habits, these foods, your way of thinking a part of your life and then when things do hit the proverbial fan you will have something to fall back.

There you have it guys! Some of my top 10 tips to help you lose weight and keep it off! If you enjoyed this article please feel free to leave a comment on what you found useful, share your weight-loss progress, subscribe to my email newsletter and follow me on my social media accounts to receive notifications about my latest articles. Happy weight loss guys!