What are the best ways to lose weight?

I’ve spent over a decade trying to figure out the answer to this question and biggest lessons I learned are what not to do:




1.Don’t fast for long periods of time. I once fasted for 40 days! It slows down your metabolism and causes you to gain fat much quicker when you inevitably give back into your food cravings. Intermittent fasting can be beneficial, but also very tough when your just starting out.
2.Don’t go way too extreme in your exercise routine. You will put too much strain on your body and it will end up setting you back months on your goals.
3.Don’t choose fad diets that severely restrict your food intake. They will work in the beginning and will fool you into thinking you have beat your food demons. Next thing you know, you will have gone from losing 50 pounds to gaining 100.
4.Don’t stick to a routine for a couple of months and then splurge for a night, telling yourself you earned it. The first couple years of your weight loss journey are crucial in changing your mindset. I’ve made this mistake at least five times. It will most likely break your resolve and you will head straight back to your old weight.
5.Don’t start with exercise and work your way up to eating well. You would think this would work, but in the beginning, it is much better to start with the food. Food is everything is to your weight loss. Exercise is merely the fuel to supercharge it and the foundation for keeping it off when it is gone.
6.Don’t obsess over every little mistake you make. We are human. You are going to make a poor choice on your journey. The more you shame yourself, the more you will stress out and head back to the food to cope. It’s a brutal cycle.
7.Don’t break your diet just because you ate a bad meal. I can’t tell you how many times I told myself that I might as well go big and binge for the rest of the day or week because I already screwed up. This line of thinking keeps you stuck in the mindset of food addiction. It reinforces food as a useful tool to achieve happiness and hurts even worse when you are reminded that it will never provide it.
8.Don’t make your whole life about it. I have spent every waking moment in periods of my life all in service to getting that “perfect” body. I had to have the perfect diet, perfect workout, and perfect mindset. It took such a toll on my relationships and heart. And in the end, I looked at the mirror, having lost over a hundred pounds and still was miserable. Think about that, I had lost what many of us on here would love to be rid of. I was healthy, looking good and on my way to six pack. Yet all I could think was: Not good enough. Write down why you want to lose the weight. Who you're doing it for. What it will give you that you can't have right now. If you start to notice that what you're searching for, you can have right now, then no amount of weight loss will ever change it.

So what is the best way:

1.Get through the first 3 days. In those first three days, your mind is going to play tricks on you. Tell you every excuse in the book on why you can eat what you want. Ignore it all. Set your mind on anything else. Each morning that you wake up, having stuck to your diet the day before, you will feel better and stronger in your goal. After three days, I still struggled, but I felt good enough to just let go and see this goal to completion.
2.Momentum is your friend. The first month is the hardest. But every day, every week, and every month that you remain steadfast, it gets easier to just continue on. Remember, change is just a matter of time. Nobody magically stops wanting all the bad foods. They have simply been sticking to their routine for so long that the choice to keep going is an easy one to make.
3.Find foods you can enjoy right now that will help you lose weight.
4.Find support and accountability so that when you are feeling weak in your resolve, they will help you.
5.Walk in the morning before you eat anything. This has been known to be very effective if you do it at 65 to 70 percent of your heart rate because it burns off your excess glycogen stores and sets up your body to eat away at your fat for the rest of the day.
6.Add in resistance workouts when you have reached 30 percent of your weight loss goal. Building your endurance will help set you up to up your exercise game when you inevitably plateau.
7.Learn to cook. This is a big one for me. When you know how to make tasty, healthy alternatives, you have a much easier time choosing them over fast food.
8.Stick to 50 percent protein, 30 percent carbs, 20 percent fats while you're losing the majority of your weight. It will give you less energy in the short term, but it always kept my cravings lower and it meant that my body would go after my fat quicker. Once you're closer to your goal and pushing harder in exercise you can switch to 40/40/20 macros.
9.Build muscle. I am always hungry. I always want more. So I need to be able to eat a large amount of calories. That’s the beauty of muscle. The more you have of it, the more food your body needs. DON’T GLOSS OVER THIS. Build up a lot of muscle and you can eat a lot of food.
10.End the night with protein. It is better, in the beginning, to eat most of your carbs in the day time and stick to veggies and protein at night. For most of my 100-pound weight loss, I ate chicken or fish and some veggies for dinner. Then about 30 to 60 min before bed, I would have a protein shake. This would keep my body working through the night and help me to not wake up starving right off the bat.
11.Choose realistic goals. Don’t place too much pressure on yourself. It will back fire. If you can’t find joy in your life outside of being fit, then it will never fully come even when you have your flat stomach.
12.Choose other goals alongside weight loss. I have been struggling to stay in this lifestyle. It is easy to lose weight and hard to keep it off. But a friend of mine has suggested a great way to keep my journey going: Competitions. By choosing to train for a spartan race where I will need to be at a certain fitness level in order to complete it, I have a meaningful motivator to push my body to new heights. Even more important, I have watched how the people around me have taken their struggle to overcome a race like spartan and easily translated it to their career, relationship and life struggles. This how you lose weight and change your life. You make your weight loss goals serve your life goals.


For more readings : 3 Week Diet Ebook