How to lose weight
Do you have trouble losing weight? Or would you like to lose faster? You’ve come to the right place. Get ready for weight loss without hunger.
Our conventional ideas about weight loss – eat less, move more – require a lot of willpower. Counting calories, exercising for hours every day and trying to ignore your hunger? At DietDoctor, we believe that’s needless suffering, and likely a waste of your time and precious energy.
Eventually people often give up. An excessive focus on counting calories has certainly not done much to reverse our current obesity epidemic.
Fortunately there may be a better way.
The bottom line? Calories are not the only things that count in weight loss. Your weight is also hormonally regulated. If you reduce your hunger and the levels of hunger and fat-storing hormones you’ll likely have an easier time losing excess weight.
Top 18 weight loss tips
Are you ready? Here we go. Start at the top of the list (most important) and go down as far as you need. Click on any tip to read all about it. Perhaps you only need the first piece of advice?
- Choose a low-carb or high satiety diet
- Eat when hungry
- Eat real food
- Eat only when hungry
- Measure your progress wisely
- Be persistent
- Avoid overeating fruit
- Avoid beer
- Avoid non-caloric sweeteners
- Review any medications
- Stress less, sleep more
- Eat less dairy products and nuts
- Supplement vitamins and minerals
- Use intermittent fasting
- Exercise wisely
- Achieve higher ketone levels
- Get your hormones checked
- Consider weight loss medications
For extra support on your weight loss journey, join our Connect community.
Eat when hungry
Eating when hungry sounds simple: if you’re not hungry, you probably don’t need to eat yet.
When on a low-carb or keto diet you can trust your feelings of hunger and satiety again — something many people following a low-fat or standard American diet cannot do.
Feel free to eat as many — or as few — times per day as you feel is right for you.
Some people eat three times a day and occasionally snack in between (note that frequent snacking could mean that you’d benefit from adding protein, fibrous veggies, or extra fat calories to your meals, to increase satiety). However, there’s some evidence that frequent snacking may not be wise when trying to lose weight.
Some people only eat once or twice a day and never snack. Whatever works for you. Just eat when you’re hungry, and don’t eat when you aren’t.
It also helps that low-carb diets and higher protein diets — at least 20% of daily calories — tend to reduce hunger.
Studies demonstrate that people eating a very low-carb, ketogenic diet reduce their feelings of hunger and the amount of food they eat.
Multiple other studies demonstrate that adding protein to your diet markedly reduces hunger and food intake.
Our suggestion? Try a low-carb, higher protein approach and see what happens to your hunger levels.
Avoid overeating fruit
This piece of advice is controversial, as fruit has an almost magical health aura today. While fruit does contain fiber, antioxidants, and important vitamins, it also contains a fair amount of sugar – around 10% by weight (the rest is mostly water).
Just taste an orange or a grape. Sweet, right?
Eating whole fruits in moderation – especially ones that are low in sugar, like berries – can absolutely be part of a healthy diet. The soluble fiber in fruit can help with short-term satiety; it also reacts with water in your gut to form a thick gel that helps delay and reduce the amount of sugar absorbed from that fruit. In fact, up to 30% of the sugar from fruit may not be absorbed.
Larger quantities of fruit, however, will deliver a significant sugar load to your intestines. Even if only 70% of that sugar is absorbed, 70% of a big number is still a big number. For example, five servings of fruit per day can be equivalent to the amount of sugar in 16 ounces (500 ml) of soda – 52 grams of sugar!
