Content

• To step
• Part 1 of 3: Get better calories
• Part 2 of 3: Strengthening your willpower
• Part 3 of 3: Fooling yourself
• Tips

You don't have to hate yourself for not going to the gym! While exercise is certainly important for health, the best starting point for weight loss is to change what you eat. Here are a few suggestions for getting started with weight loss without taking a step.

To step

Part 1 of 3: Get better calories

The best thing you can do to lose weight is eat better. The principle behind losing weight by changing what you eat is cutting your calories, but without requiring excessive portion control or calorie counting. The trick is to cut back on foods that are high in calories but give your body little in return.

1. Start eating natural, unprocessed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, healthy meats and fish. Much of the food in supermarkets and snack bars is highly processed to make it cheaper to produce and to extend shelf life. This processing often comes at the expense of essential nutrients and changes the composition of the food in a way that makes you fat.
   • Stick to the outside aisles in the supermarket. An easy way to eat better is to shop along the outer aisles, where fresh food is kept, and avoid the center shelves where all the canned and processed food can be found.
   • Learn how to read food labels. Reading the fine print on food packaging will tell you the difference between food that is really good for you and smart food marketing. Many of the "healthy" food products make claims that are willfully misleading, enticing consumers to buy them.
     • Check the portion size. Sometimes they advertise low-fat or low-sugar foods, and the numbers in the food guide appear low, but the portion size turns out to be much smaller than normal.
     • Pay attention to how healthy products are across the board, not just as a stand-alone health claim. Many foods claim to be high in fiber, but also have a very high sugar content and are full of other refined carbohydrates. This ensures that it makes you fat, even if the other health claims are correct.
2. Avoid empty calories, such as those in soda, sweets, and junk foods. Again, these have very little nutritional value, and they pack no more than a lot of calories in small portions.
   • Be especially careful of refined carbohydrates. These are notorious for causing obesity. Anything that contains flour or sugar (glucose, fructose, sucrose) will be stored in your body as fat.
     • Refined carbohydrates can also lead to changes in your body that make your metabolism less efficient.
     • Sugar can also lead to a quick appetite, which makes you want more at a later time.
   • Make water your favorite drink. It has no calories, aids digestion, and can also help flush out toxins from your system that slow down your metabolism.
     • Sugary drinks, such as soda or even fruit juice, are high in carbohydrates and therefore cause weight gain.
     • Despite the manufacturer's claim that it contains few or no calories, diet soda contains sweeteners that can make you gain weight, and may be toxic.
3. Don't be afraid of healthy fats, such as those in olive oil, avocados, nuts and fish. It is acceptable to get up to 40% of calories from healthy fat sources, especially if you can replace refined carbohydrates in your diet. This is in contrast to the low-fat diets of the 80s and 90s, many of which have been proven ineffective.
   • Beware of low-fat products. Just because something is low in fat doesn't mean it can't make you fat. Many low-fat products are full of sugar and other refined carbohydrates, which are converted into fat in your body as soon as you eat them.
   • Avoid trans fats. Trans fats, such as hydrogenated oils, are made by manipulating the chemical structure of natural oils and converting them into something completely foreign to the body. These cause weight gain, but are also involved in the development of diseases, such as cardiovascular disease.
   • Limit saturated fat intake to no more than 10% of your daily food consumption. Recent research has shown that saturated fats such as those found in butter and red meat are not as bad as previously thought, but most mainstream nutritional guides suggest it may increase LDL or "bad" cholesterol.

Part 2 of 3: Strengthening your willpower

1. Don't make yourself feel like you're being denied something. The worst thing you can do for motivation is to make yourself feel like you are being taken away from you. The feeling of being deprived of something can make you anxious, and this can lead to your unconscious eating.
   • Don't starve yourself! There are many health risks associated with irregular meals. Additionally, if your body is not getting enough to eat, it will begin to prepare to survive what it thinks is the precursor to a lean period, by going into "starvation mode" and additional store fat.
   • In the first instance, it is better to add rather than omit food to find out what you like. Don't just focus on limiting unhealthy foods. Look for new, healthy foods to add to your diet. These foods will gradually replace the more unhealthy foods, until your overall diet is a lot healthier.
2. If your willpower is insufficient to resist unhealthy eating, don't feel guilty! Just understand that you will have to get creative to stick to your diet, even if your willpower isn't enough.
   • The impulse to eat is vital to your survival, and for most of human history the biggest problem has been to enough get food. Our brains and organs have not yet adapted to the modern surplus of food.
   • Salt, sugar, and fat (and all the tasty, modern combinations of the three) are things our bodies are designed to crave. Again, these were once scarce but essential nutrients, so in many ways we are "programmed" to look for them.
3. Make healthy eating convenient. We are faced with an overwhelming number of decisions to make about our eating every day, so it helps to make healthy food the easiest option. Create eating habits and make sure that healthy food is accessible to you at all times.
   • Have snacks ready, such as nuts, carrots, or fruit for when you get hungry, so that they are easier to reach than the processed stuff (even better, make sure that healthy food is the only food in your house!).
   • Have some healthy meals that you can "eat as standard" when you are not too picky about what to eat or when you need something quick and easy. Instead of stocking up on ready-to-eat noodles and peanut butter with jelly, keep ingredients for making salads and vegetable stews on hand.
4. Keep a few records. Measure your waist periodically, or have your fat percentage measured. The mere act of measuring your body has been associated with weight loss.
   • Tracking the results of your diet can be a great motivational factor.
   • Remember that your weight fluctuates a little every day, so don't be discouraged if the weight on the scale goes up a little unexpectedly.
5. Get enough sleep. Research has shown that drowsiness can cause you to overeat. When you are sleepy, you often function on autopilot, and you may find that it is much more difficult to make good decisions.

Part 3 of 3: Fooling yourself

It is surprising that makes us eat more. Sometimes just the presentation of the food or location in your home can affect how much of it you consume. Restaurants and food manufacturers use these tricks all the time to make you buy and eat more, so why not reverse some of their tricks?

1. Use smaller plates and larger glasses. Because of the way the brain processes image information, the size of your plate can affect how much food makes you feel satisfied.
   • If your plate is a lot bigger than the amount of food, then you feel like it's not enough. Using smaller plates means you need less food to make them look full.
   • Small, narrow glasses seem to hold more liquid than short, wide glasses, even if they are the same volume. Use this optical illusion if you are drinking sweet drinks that you want to limit.
2. Plan your portions for meals. Most people tend to finish what is served to them, even when they are already full, and food manufacturers know that people buy and eat more when offered larger packages.
   • Don't sit in front of the tube with a big bag of chips. Put a few in a bowl and stop when it is empty.
   • If you buy large packages, divide it into smaller quantities.
3. Make less healthy food more difficult to reach. If you put unhealthy favorites where they are harder to reach, you will be much less likely to eat them mindlessly. Even emptying your desk and putting food across the room can make a big difference.
4. Eat with friends who eat less. When people eat socially, they often take cues from their table mates about how much they can eat. If you have people around you who eat a lot, try to have your meals with people who eat less.
   • If this is impossible or unpleasant, at least be aware of this tendency and notice how you are affected by the way other people eat.
   • If you tend to eat more when you are alone, try to have more meals with other people and see if this helps.
5. Concentrate on what you eat. If you are distracted during meals, for example because you eat while watching TV or while driving, you will be less likely to notice that you are full or how much you have eaten. Be aware of what you eat and pay attention to the feelings in your body that tell you when you feel full, and you will start eating less.

Tips

• If you regret something you ate, don't let it cause you to stop your diet. Healthy eating is a daily process, not all or nothing.
• Even small changes can help you lose weight. Just reducing the number of calories by 100-200 per day can cause you to lose 10-20 pounds after a year!
• Eat a healthy amount, otherwise you will be hungry at the next meal and eat more or fat. DO NOT start a starvation diet because it will not make you lose weight.
• Try to stick to this diet for at least 21 days, and it will become more of a habit.
• It is not always the meals that make you gain weight - it is what you take in between meals. Replace cakes and chocolate bars with nuts, seeds and fruits, and that alone will lead to weight loss.