Excess weight or obesity can expose you to several health issues, including heart attack, diabetes, sleep apnea, and high blood pressure. The Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) recommends that the safest weight you should cut weekly is between one and two pounds.
However, cutting weight isn’t as simple as it may sound when you compare it with weight gain, which in most cases is much easier. Although losing excess weight can enhance your confidence, you must achieve this goal in a natural, healthy, and safe way. Consider the following six natural ways to help your body lose weight.
1. Embrace a Protein-Rich Diet
If you’re interested in losing excess weight naturally, perhaps it’s time you try adding more protein to your diet. Often, your body burns calories as it digests and metabolizes the protein you consume. Therefore, embracing a protein-rich diet can increase your body’s metabolism by between 80 and 100 calories daily.
Additionally, embracing a protein-rich diet helps in making you feel full, lowering your appetite. Studies have demonstrated that people can consume nearly 400 fewer calories daily if they embrace a protein-rich diet. Eventually, by adopting a diet full of natural protein foods, you can significantly help your body lose excess weight by enhancing its metabolism.
2. Drink Plenty of Water
Perhaps you’ve heard people say that water can help you lose weight, but you think it’s a myth. According to experts, consuming half a liter of water can boost the calories your body burns by between 24% and 30%.
Moreover, studies have found that water intake before eating can lower calorie intake, particularly among older and middle-aged persons. Furthermore, water is especially effective in helping your body lose weight when you replace it with other beverages with high calories and sugars.
3. Intermittent Fasting
You can think of intermittent fasting as a form of eating pattern where you alternate between periods of eating and fasting. Usually, there are several ways you can undertake intermittent fasting, including the eat-stop-eat, the 5:2 diet, and the 16:8 approaches.
Typically, these approaches are meant to help your body intake fewer calories without you consciously limiting calories during the eating periods. Ultimately, this induces your body to lose excess weight besides offering you several other health benefits.
4. Embrace Fiber-Rich Foods
Studies have revealed that foods rich with fiber, particularly water-soluble fiber, can aid your body in losing excess weight because it makes you feel full. Also, fiber helps in delaying stomach emptying besides making your stomach enlarge, promoting the production of satiety hormones.
Eventually, this makes you naturally consume less food. Moreover, most forms of fiber act as food for healthy gut bacteria, which are associated with minimized risk of obesity. However, ensure you raise your fiber intake systematically to avoid diarrhea, stomach bloating, and cramps.
5. Have Sufficient Night Sleeping Hours
Having a good night’s sleep is crucial for weight loss and avoiding future weight gain.
Researchers have discovered that sleep-deprived individuals have up to 55% more probability of gaining excess weight than persons who get sufficient sleep. Studies further indicate that this number is even greater among children.
The statistics are partly a result of the fact that sleep deprivation interferes with the daily variations in appetite hormones. More often than not, this hinders your body’s ability to regulate appetite, causing you to eat more than necessary. Therefore, having a good night’s sleep can significantly aid your body in losing weight naturally.
6. Juice Cleanse for Weight Loss
Think of a juice cleanse as a diet where you only drink juice made from vegetables, fruits, or both for a specific period. A juice cleanse is popularly used by people keen on cutting excess weight, boosting the body’s metabolic process, and getting rid of toxins.
Drinking certain juices before and after sleeping can enhance its efficacy in helping your body lose excess weight naturally. The logic behind being on a juice cleanse diet is that by abstaining from eating solid food but still taking a considerable amount of nutrients from the juice, your body can lose some weight. That explains why advocates of a juice cleanse consider it one of the natural ways you can help your body lose weight.
With a simple online search for the terms “juice cleanse before and after” you can find hundreds of testimonials and varying stories of how these people found success with the process. After doing some research, decide if this is something worth trying.
Final Remarks
Although losing weight is more challenging than gaining it, there are many ways to achieve your objective of losing excess weight. Nevertheless, not all ways of losing weight are healthy and safe. If you’re keen on losing weight, consider the above six natural, healthy, and safe ways.