How to Eat for Weight Loss Without Counting Calories or Restricting
Most, if not all diets work. Temporarily. The reason they work is not because they contain some magic secret that unlocked the key to the human metabolism, but because they all have some commonalities. Whether it’s weight watchers, keto, high fat, low fat, liquid, all protein, etc., the diets work because you’re eating less and/or you’re eliminating processed foods. Not because they’re magical. But what doesn’t work about most diets is that most of the time, people who lose weight on them gain it back in a matter of months or years.
Dieting is not sustainable, and I have always loathed them for this reason. It’s great to lose all that weight, but if you haven’t created a sustainable way to live moving forward, how can you expect to maintain that same weight? We have to figure out a way that we can eat, day in and day out, that works for us and allows us to be at the bodyweight we want. And I don’t know about you, but a restrictive or excessively specific diet is not sustainable for me.
Fortunately, there are only a few really key eating practices that I believe are the cornerstone of both an effective diet, and a sustainable one.
Protein first. Fats and carbs, the other two macronutrients that make up our food, our bodies can mostly live without (we do need a bit of fat). Protein however, is necessary for our bodies to survive. Additionally, it is absolutely the most satiating nutrient out there and when combined with lifting weights, does amazing things for us through the production of lean body mass. I say this a lot but it’s always worth repeating: Focus on your protein first at every meal, and build the rest of the ingredients out from there. We should aim to eat about 1g of protein per pound of body mass (less if you are significantly overweight).
Reduce processed foods. Processed foods are manufactured to taste amazing and keep you coming back for more. The problem is that they have managed to take a large amount of food and distill it into a small bite that keeps us coming back for more. Potato chips for example, clearly come from potatoes. Most of us can sit down and eat a whole bag of potato chips, no problem. But imagine trying to eat each of the ingredients in that bag of potato chips individually: 4-5 whole potatoes, a good amount of oil, plenty of salt, and lots of other odd preservatives. We would be stuffed, whereas eating a bag of potato chips is barely satiating. By reducing processed foods we invariably reduce the total number of calories we consume and ensure we are getting the majority of our food from healthy sources.
Drink .5-1 G of water every day. It is not uncommon for people to consume many hundreds of calories per day in liquid form. Coffees, sodas, smoothies, ‘health drinks’, all contain calories and are usually not filling or healthy. Having a goal of drinking .5-1G of water every day not only keeps us hydrated properly, but it keeps us from eating when we think we’re hungry but we’re actually just thirsty.
Two out of three of these tips actually have you adding to your diet rather than taking things away. Eating less and feeling hungry all the time doesn’t work. But focusing on getting enough of what your body needs is not only doing your body a favor, but it naturally leads to less consumption of things that aren’t good for us. It’s sustainable, it’s not restrictive, and it’s how people keep weight off for the long-term.