Lose Weight Tweaking your Lifestyle
Sometimes, achieving weight loss involves making significant life changes and committing to a rigorous workout program or overhauling your diet. However, there are instances when a subtle tweak to your daily routine can make a noticeable difference. Here are five simple adjustments you can incorporate into your lifestyle to help shed those pounds:
#1: Stop the Pop
Americans in general drank the lowest amount of soda (or “Coke” for us here in Texas) per person in 2021 than they have since 1987. So…go us! But before we pop the champagne, we should note that we still drink a lot of Coke. Like, 40 gallons a year each. We’re too scared to even do the math on how much sugar and empty calories that comes out to.
While breaking the soda habit may not be “easy” at first, it’s such a simple way to lose weight over time. And there are lots of good substitutes such as Zevia, coffee, tea, and jazzed-up waters available today that can help you make a clean break without resigning you to nothing but water forever.
#2: Swap Seed Oils for Healthy Fats
It’s well worth your time to take a deep dive into how we all decided something as highly processed as canola oil–which must be extracted from rapeseeds with a petroleum-based solvent, boiled, centrifuged, degummed, bleached, and deodorized before it hits the shelf–was healthier than good old-fashioned butter.
In the meantime, it’s easy enough to replace all that margarine, corn oil, canola, sunflower oil, and soybean oil–collectively known as “vegetable oil” or “seed oil”–with things like coconut oil, avocado oil, lard, tallow, and ghee. The former are highly correlated with weight gain and obesity thanks to excess linoleic acid, which triggers inflammation and downregulates metabolism. Healthy fats, on the other hand, help quash hunger and speed up your metabolism.
Just be sure to pay attention to smoke points, as not all fats are appropriate for all kinds of cooking, depending on the temperature at which they oxidize. This should be indicated somewhere on the label.
#3: Put That Phone Down
Ready for some more stats? Nearly half of Americans spend 5-6 hours on their smartphones every day, not including work usage. More than eight out of 10 of us use them at least an hour every day. Imagine if you were to replace a fraction of your scrolling through Twitter or watching HBO Max with stretching, yoga, jumping jacks, pushups, fill-in-the-blank easy desk-side exercise…That would be belly fat burning time created out of thin air!
#4: Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good
We’ve all heard this saying, but you may never have thought to apply it to your eating habits. One woman did just that, pairing her strength training and exercise regimen with the mantra “Unwise, better, best.” In other words, she approached each meal as just trying to make better choices than she had in the past, even if that choice wasn’t always “perfect.”
She credits the principle with being the reason she was able to lose 100 pounds.
#5: Cut Back on Beer
There’s another drink out there that may be hindering your ability to lose weight, especially for dudes, and that’s beer. A recent peer-reviewed study found an increased risk of not being able to lose weight for guys who drink more than 500mL of beer per day, or just over one pint, or about 1.5 cans.
So while you don’t have to cut beer out entirely, scaling back can help your weight loss endeavors.
These simple lifestyle changes can help you to lose weight.
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