Weight Loss: 5 Healthy Ways to Lose Weight
Swimsuit season will soon be upon us! This is the time of year where it is relatively easy to shed your winter weight. If trying on your spring and summer wardrobe has been a depressing experience, here are some weight loss tips and tricks. They can help you to lose weight and get into summer shape more quickly and easily:
- Reality check – use a program like MyFitnessPal or the Fitbit app to track your caloric intake and exercise for a day or two. You don’t need to get obsessive about it, but people tend to underestimate how many calories they consume and overestimate how much exercise they get.
- Reduce your stress. Stress is bad for weight in so many ways: Increased cortisol, emotional eating, lower T3 (active thyroid hormone), higher reverse T3 (inactive thyroid hormone).
- Get enough sleep. Lack of sleep lowers your willpower. It promotes sugar cravings to supply energy. Even one night of fewer than 4 hours of sleep makes you more insulin resistant the next day. Higher insulin means more fat gain.
- Don’t snack. The old 3 meals two snacks advice was bad advice. Research has shown that people who snack between meals consume more calories in a day than those who don’t.
- Exercise. If you want everything you need to do to lose weight, my amazing colleague, Dr Jade Teta, has created an exercise program for weight loss. It comes with bonus materials that include a healthy menu and recipes. His workout will challenge what you thought you knew about exercise. It won’t take you long (only 15-20 minutes 3 times per week). There is no gym membership required, you can do it in your own living room, with or without weights or bands. It’s science-based and it is cheap. The purpose of the program is to reset your metabolism to it’s prime. I’m in my second round of the 12-week program. I can attest to the fact that it is hard. But I feel fitter than I have in years and I have lost weight and I’m exercising less (despite my best efforts, my weight has only been doing a slow steady climb since I hit 45). Best of all, the program creator is a naturopathic doctor as well as a personal trainer and a heck of a nice guy. Check it out here.
Authored by Dr. Pamela Frank, BSc(Hons), ND