Are you wondering what to eat to lose weight?
Or perhaps you are thinking about not eating to lose weight.
In either case, this article will address how to lose a lot of weight, primarily through dietary techniques, although exercise can greatly speed up your weight loss efforts. In this article, I will talk about the benefits and pitfalls of losing weight through calorie restriction as well as some sustainable dietary tips.
Let us first address a very common and loaded question:
Does not eating make you lose weight?
I have done just about every diet under the sun, and many of them have been calorie restriction diets. While effective, the biggest pitfall of these is how difficult they are to sustain. Competition bodybuilders have mastered this art, but it is not an easy road to travel.
Alternatively, if you consider the Bragg diet coupled with fasting, this leads to severe calorie restriction that causes you to lose both fat and muscle. This may be sufficient for your needs, and I honestly felt wonderful on the diet, but if you want to eat meat, you should look elsewhere. A raw foods diet is not for everyone, and if you couple fasting with a typical western diet (instead of a raw foods diet), you are far more likely to gain weight than to lose it.
You usually gain weight on this regime because your metabolism gets downregulated when you are fasting, and if you follow a fast with a high calorie meal anytime soon, your body absorbs all of the calories and quickly converts them to fat so that you can survive the next fast when it comes around.
So, can you lose weight by not eating?
Yes but…
Only if you can sustain a very low calorie diet with an excellent vitamin profile (think fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries). For many people, this is ideal, but others cannot stand it. If it sounds like a good fit, give it a try. If not, read on.
I will now discuss what to eat to lose weight if the above approach is not for you.
Foods to Avoid When Losing Weight
First, let us consider foods to avoid when you are losing weight. As I have said in other articles, if it comes in a box, bag or can – avoid it. Substitute for something that is natural and fresh instead. Cereal bars, despite their attractive packaging, are not full of living vitamins and nutrients – they are what are called “dead calories”. Dead calories do not help you much, and are all too easy to over-consume.
What To Eat To Lose Weight
Having lived in a second world country, I think the main reason for the American obesity epidemic has to do with the convenience of calorie dense foods. In developing countries, food has to be cooked and cleaned from scratch for the most part which means that there are few snacks easily available, and everything comes from fresh, raw ingredients which are generally much more filling and more expensive. The result is that people eat less food because it is harder to make and healthier food in general. Combined, that makes for a thinner population.
We often “don’t have time to cook” which usually means a highly processed, quick meal with little to no nutritional value and a very high calorie count. Take a lesson from the developing nations (that are getting fatter the more developed they get), and make meals from raw ingredients that take time to make.
This could end up being the best piece of advice you get for making foods that help you lose weight.
Weird Ways to Lose Weight
There are all sorts of weird ways to try and lose weight to avoid the heavy lifting of actually adopting a good diet and exercise regime. Do not waste your time on these because they are usually just as much work, if not more, and will often deliver less than acceptable results.
Heed the advice in this article; put more time into the food you make, use better ingredients, and stop going for the fast fix, and you will lose weight. Avoid the calorie restriction trap that often leads to yo-yo diets that make you worse off than you started. Finally, if it sounds appealing to you, give fasting and a raw foods diet a try. Although I no longer use this method because I require large amounts of calories for my power lifting workouts, it is very suitable for people that are less active, and I loved how I felt.
Best of luck to you and I look forward to hearing about your success in the comments below.
