5 Daily Weight Loss Tricks (That SAVE You Time and Money)
The two biggest hinderances to losing weight that I hear in the healthcare setting are:
I don’t have time to lose weight
It’s too expensive to eat healthy
Let’s look at 5 easy things you can do every single day (that are cheap and time-efficient), which can help you shred weight as you work towards your summer goals, and keep your new years resolutions! Weight loss and gain comes down to one thing: Calories. If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. If you burn more calories you consume, you will lose weight. Simple as that, every time. Of COURSE, there is so much nuance from person to person in determining exactly how many calories you burn every day, but that nuance never changes the math. For more clarification, check out my article on The Math behind Weight Loss and Weight Gain. Knowing that the name of the game is calorie manipulation, how do we decrease the number of calories you eat in a day, and increase the number of calories you burn in a day?
Drink More Water
This is the easiest, quickest strategy to help your body operate more efficiently, AND to curb hunger cravings. I’m sure I don’t need to convince you about the important health benefits of water and hydration, but in this case, our goal is weight loss. Very often, when you feel your body craving a snack, you are actually dehydrated. Drinking water can help curb these cravings, and give you a sense of satiety that will help limit snacking. Carry a water bottle you like with you at all times (I love Owalas), or structure in consistent water fountain breaks every hour.
2. Eat More Protein
Protein is a “satiety cheat code” that pairs perfectly with tip #1. Your body prioritizes breakdowns of alcohols, carbs, and fats, and takes a much longer time to break down proteins, meaning you won’t feel hungry for much longer after eating. Now, I did promise these tips would be cheap and easy, and I’m very well-aware that proteins are a little more expensive than cereal and harder to prepare than boxed pasta and pre-bottled sauce, but only barely. My recommendation is finding 3 protein sources that you like, and learning 1-2 easy recipes for each of them. For example, if you eat ground beef, find a seasoning mix you like and throw some hot sauce on top, and you’re done. If you’re vegetarian, slice up some tofu or paneer and toss it with soy sauce and some honey, and you’re done. These are simple things you can prepare very inexpensively and quickly, that will keep you full much longer!
3. Increase Your Daily Steps
There’s a reason you have often heard about the value of aiming for 10,000 steps per day. Though it’s not going to cause you to immediately shed weight simply by crossing the threshold from 9,999 to 10,000, it does something much simpler. It forces you to focus on hitting a minimum movement level. It also does a secret second thing. If you walk for about 10-15 minutes within about an hour of eating, your body will prioritize feeding sugars to skeletal muscles, which helps to decrease insulin spikes and accelerate digestion. Walking is a very powerful tool in the toolbox for helping the weight loss journey get started!
4. Chew More, and Slow Down
I am perhaps the fastest eater on the planet among non-competitive eaters. My wife genuinely worries sometimes that I’m swallowing food whole. Chewing food thoroughly eases digestive strain, slows you down, and increases satiety. When eating quickly or eating distracted, it’s extremely easy to overeat. This can shoot you well past your calorie goals when you’re eating non-portioned food. This is one of the most underrated tips for decreasing caloric intake without changing a single thing.
5. Stop Drinking Calories
This is another tip that has been world-changing for me. Let’s say, hypothetically, you drink a vanilla latte with breakfast, a can of coke for lunch, and a glass of wine with dinner. That latte can run you 250 cals, the coke about 140 cals, and the wine another 120 cals. That’s over 500 calories, which, over the course of 1 week is over 3,500 calories, which is the sweet spot number of calories for burning 1 pound of fat. Those drinks can be replaced with black coffee (with a splash of milk and zero calorie artificial sweetener), a coke zero or diet coke, and a sparkling water or another diet soda with dinner. Is this quite as fun as the original three drinks? Probably not. Will this be a safe, cheap, healthy, sustainable plan that won’t uproot your lifestyle and will help you easily decrease calories every single day? Absolutely.
BONUS. Track Your Calories
This is the gold standard for weight loss. It’s also HARD. To properly track your calories every single day, you need to:
Buy a food scale
Make pretty much all your food, or only eat pre-packaged, single item foods
Weigh out every single ingredient of what you’re cooking with
The value of this, however, is that you know EXACTLY how many calories you’re actually consuming every single day, and subsequently, how much weight you gain or lose because of it. This is so powerful. This gives you full control of your weight loss by giving you hard data about what your body burns, and how much wiggle room that leaves you. For most people, however, this is not sustainable. My favorite method for counting calories for first-time macro trackers is to commit to it for a week. This won’t create lasting changes, but it will teach you how much you’re actually eating, and how far that amount is from where your brain innately thought you were at. Once you’ve taken a couple months off from tracking calories, you will likely have reverted from the things you learned from your original tracking week. At this point, I recommend tracking for another 3-day period, just to recalibrate your brain. I’ve found this pattern very sustainable, and I use it as a great mental reset whenever I feel like I’m slipping a little.
That’s it! These are simple, cheap tricks to help you on your weight management journey! Send me a comment if you have any questions about these, or even if you simply want more tips in another blog post!