How to Lose Weight Naturally

You can lose weight naturally by following straightforward methods that have been scientifically proven to work. This allows you to avoid extreme weight loss practices that involve pharmaceuticals or highly processed meal replacements. Employing a balanced diet and building healthy exercise habits will lead to you losing weight in a sustainable way.

Natural weight loss is incredibly beneficial for your overall health, particularly if you are overweight.  It helps you live a healthy lifestyle and keeps you alive longer. Meanwhile, it will improve both your physical and mental health in key areas.

Fundamentally, weight loss will occur when you’re in a calorie deficit. This means you need to be burning more calories than you consume. The two areas that we can influence to create a deficit are our diets and our activity levels. Picking the right foods and making an effort to exercise will lead to burning more calories while taking less in. This results in natural, healthy weight loss.

Key takeaways

• Natural weight loss can help with mood, mobility and lowering your risk of disease
• Eating slowly gives you gut more time to signal your brain that you’re feeling full
• A high-protein diet makes you feel sated and gets your body to burn more calories
• Intermittent fasting helps you to reduce your calorie intake over the week
• Having single-ingredient meals allows you to avoid processed ingredients
• Cutting down on sugars and refined carbohydrates helps you reduce calories
• Drinking more water can boost fat burning and keep you feeling full
• Green tea contains antioxidants that boost the body’s ability to burn fat
• Tracking your food and physical activity helps you stay on track with your weight loss journey

What are the benefits of natural weight loss?

Natural weight loss brings a lot of great health benefits without the drawbacks of pharmaceuticals and processed foods. While many people simply want to lose weight to fit into smaller-sized clothing, there are excellent health reasons to lose some weight. The benefits of losing weight naturally include better mood and mobility, as well as lowering your risk of disease.

Mobility

Excess weight can often be a hindrance to your mobility. It can put extraneous stress on your joints, leading to pain and injury. Losing some of this excess weight naturally will let you stay pain free and move with ease.

Mood

If your diet is unhealthy, it may cause you to gain weight, which could affects your mood. This is because nutrition can affect the hormones produced by your body’s endocrine system. This, in turn, could lead to emotional eating, creating a vicious cycle of weight gain. Getting to a healthy weight and sticking to the right foods helps regulate your hormones and leaves you feeling better.

Lower disease risk

Excessive weight is a risk factor for a range of different diseases. By lowering your weight, you may significantly reduce your susceptibility to a range of diseases. Piedmont obesity medicine physician Jeffrey McDaniel, M.D., asserts that weight control lowers your risk of developing cancer. Many studies have also shown that weight loss helps to reduce chronic pain, as well as the risk of developing heart disease or diabetes.

1. Eat Slowly

Eating slowly has been shown to be a positive contributor to natural weight loss. There is strong research suggesting that people with type 2 diabetes are less likely to be obese if they are slow eaters.

Satiety plays a major role in losing weight naturally. However, there is a delay between eating food and feeling full. Gut hormones often take 20 minutes to reach the brain and tell it to stop eating. This means that if you eat too quickly and don’t give yourself enough time to feel full, you might overeat.

By making an effort to eat slowly, you can ensure you feel sated from the meal you had. This will translate to you feeling less compelled to consume extra calories. 

To start incorporating slow eating into your natural weight loss strategy, there are a few strategies you can employ. One idea is to time your meals, using a stopwatch or timer. This  ensures you’re taking it slowly and not rushing through them. Another option is to try and chew every mouthful between 15 and 30 times. This slows down your eating and also breaks down your food so it can be digested more easily. In between bites, it may help you to drink some water, which hel[s you feel fuller and aids the digestive process. And if you need an extra push, you can make the eating process more deliberate by putting your hands and utensils down between bites.

2. Incorporate Protein into Your Diet

Incorporating more protein into your diet provides a great boost to natural weight loss. It does this primarily by increasing the thermic effect of food and helping you feel more sated.

The thermic effect of food refers to the calories your body burns during the process of digestion. Different categories of macronutrients burn calories at different rates. Protein has the highest thermic effect, meaning a high protein diet with the same calories as a low-protein diet burns more calories during digestion.

Another way that eating more protein helps with natural weight loss is by leaving you feeling more sated. According to many studies, people with high-protein diets end up consuming around 400 fewer calories than those with low-protein diets. This is incredibly significant when it comes to getting into a calorie deficit and an important part of a balanced diet.

A good way to employ this strategy is to start your day with a high-protein breakfast, like eggs. This gets you started on the right foot so you’re not compelled to snack early on.

3. Consider Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is a method of losing weight that uses time restriction to help people consume fewer calories. According to several studies, fasting intermittently for up to 24 weeks can help overweight individuals to lose weight effectively. There are a number of different intermittent fasting variants that people can try out, depending on their preferences.

Intermittent fasting variants

Time restrictions for intermittent fasting may be based on restricting eating to certain hours in the day or refraining from food altogether on some days. It’s worth experimenting to find the approach that works best for you. The three most common variants are alternate day fasting, the 5:2 diet, and the 16/8 method. 

Alternate day fasting (ADF) is a method that involves fasting every other day and eating a normal diet when you’re not fasting. A modified version of the ADF involves eating between 30% and 40% of your energy needs on fasting days, rather than abstaining from food altogether.

The 5:2 fasting diet requires that you fast for 2 days of the week and eat normally during the other five days. During fasting days, you’re not required to completely refrain from eating. You are simply required to eat between 500 and 600 calories throughout the day.

The 16/8 fasting method involves eating within an eight hour window throughout the day and fasting for the remaining sixteen hours. This can be modified depending on a person’s routine and preferences. Studies have shown that people will typically consume fewer calories when sticking to a time window.

4. Consume Whole, Single-Ingredient Foods

One popular strategy for natural weight loss is to consume single-ingredient foods. Doing this eliminates the majority of processed foods as well as foods that are high in sugar and fat. 

Whole foods are naturally filling, so they make it easier for you to stick to your calorie limit. They also provide your body with a lot of essential nutrients, which help your body feel good and function properly. This combination of factors makes them a great choice for weight loss.

5. Reduce Consumption of Refined Carbohydrates and Sugar

One thing that can massively boost natural weight loss is to reduce your consumption of refined carbohydrates and sugar. Eating too many foods that are high in these two categories leads to a massive caloric surplus.

On average, Australians consume half a kilo of sugar every week. This includes everything from cake and pies to lollies and sweetened drinks. People often aren’t aware of how many calories are truly in these foods.

Australians also eat a lot of very refined carbohydrates like pasta, white bread and rice. The problem with these is that due to heavy processing, many of them lack fibre and other nutrients.

Whole foods full of sugars and carbohydrates are fast-digesting, but they’re also converted to glucose quickly. When your bloodstream has an excess of glucose, insulin is produced. And insulin can promote fat storage in adipose tissue. The end result is greater weight gain due to excessive sugar and carbohydrate consumption.

While these foods are not ideal in excess, they can still be part of a balanced diet. There is no need to attempt an unsustainable low carbohydrate diet that leaves you feeling miserable and low in energy.

One good strategy for managing your consumption of these substances is to replace them with healthier alternatives whenever possible. Opting for whole-grain options is a great idea in place of white rice, bread, and pasta. Another option is to swap out high-sugar snacks with fruits, nuts and seeds. If you want to switch from sugar-sweetened beverages, try drinking herbal teas and fruit-infused water in their place. And rather than buying fruit juice, you can make your own smoothies with water and milk.

6. Drink More Water

A really easy and simple way to provide a boost to your natural weight loss is by drinking more water. Drinking half a litre of water has the potential to increase your calorie burning by 24-30% for the following hour. Additionally, drinking more water before a meal helps people to reduce their calorie intake. This is especially true if you have replaced sugary or high-calorie beverages with water.

7. Consume Unsweetened Green Tea

Green tea is packed with health benefits including a range of anti-oxidants and a boost to natural weight loss. There is evidence that drinking green tea can increase your body’s energy expenditure by 4% and selective fat burning by up to 17%. And matcha green tea may offer even greater help benefits overall.

8. Watch Your Diet and Exercise

Managing your diet and exercise is a critical component of any natural weight loss plan. You should make an effort to track everything you eat and drink as well as all your activity for the day. Employing a food diary or an online food tracker can help you stay on top of this.

Studies have shown that tracking physical activity helps maintain consistency with weight loss. By engaging in regular aerobic exercise and recording it, you will make it easier to stay on track. There is also a lot of literature to support the correlation between monitoring food intake and weight loss. Even employing a simple pedometer can be helpful for weight loss.

Take Better Care of Your Health

You can take better care of your health by achieving weight loss naturally. Aside from that, you can also regularly tune in for more health tips from Click Clinic. 

We strive to make healthcare accessible to all, so we offer online services, such as online medical certificates and online prescriptions. If you are currently taking weight loss medications, we can also provide repeat certificates. Check our website to know more!