Very low-calorie diets, juice diets, appetite suppressants, laxative teas, no carbs …When did weight loss become so complicated?!

These tactics do often work, don’t get me wrong. We lose a lot of weight, very quickly and feel fantastic – I mean, have you seen how many likes that before and after photo has on Facebook??

The issue with extreme dieting is that it is only maintainable for a short amount of time. Our before and after transformation may be great but what happens AFTER the transformation? Can we really maintain this way of life forever? Do we want to? Pass the bread please!

Weight loss doesn’t have to be difficult or feel like a battle, at Twelvmag you will find a lot of tips to help you achieving your desire weight.

I’m a big believers in long-term, maintainable results. We want you FEELING great while loosing weight!

Here are our 8-Simple tips for weight loss… Which are actually achievable!

1. Walking

Walking is greatly underestimated when it comes to weight loss! Not only does walking reduce our risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, but it also helps us to lose weight and keep it off.

To start with, any increase in exercise is fantastic. For those not used to walking, 2-3 20-minute walks a week can be greatly beneficial start. If you’re already a keen walker, tracking your steps and making step goals can be extremely motivating! Challenge yourself step it up a notch – can you reach 8,000-10,000 steps every day for the next week?

The trick to staying consistent with walking is to walk somewhere you enjoy, listen to your favourite music/ podcast, walk with a friend and schedule walking into your day.

Another trick is to go for your walk as soon as you wake up, before you’re awake enough to think it through.

2. Cut Out Alcohol

Alcohol can increase weight gain and contribute to ill health effects such as high blood pressure, insulin resistance, heart disease, stroke, liver disease and some cancers, especially when consumed in excess.

Alcohol stops our body from burning fat and can be high in calories. It also increases our hunger levels and can lead to poor food choices, further increasing weight gain.

Cutting out, or even reducing, alcohol can make a huge difference to our weight loss results.

3. Stop Eating Processed Foods

Processed foods are often low in fibre and high in sugar, trans fats and oils making them highly addictive! These foods have also been processed in a way which increases their ‘empty calorie’ content. This means these foods contain energy with no real nutritional value in the form of nutrients and minerals. These empty calories don’t make us feel overly full or satisfied after a meal. Instead, they often leave us craving more …Which isn’t great for our waistlines!

The best way to reduce processed foods is to increase other, more nutritious foods. This brings us to our next tip…

4. Eat More Vegetables, Glorious Vegetables!

The BEST way to reduce our processed food intake and lose weight is by increasing our vegetable intake! Vegetables contain loads of nutrients and are incredibly important to our health. Vegetables also include healthy fibre which helps us feel satisfied after a meal, reducing our feelings of hunger. This fibre is also important when it comes to our bathroom habits as it helps our body to naturally detoxify through our bowel movements.

5. Stop The Fizzy Stuff

As with processed foods, soft drinks are high in sugar and calories while having little nutritional value. Not to mention they’re highly addictive!

Try swapping your soft drinks for fruit infused water or a sugar free mineral water if you crave that fizzy taste as a start till you can wean off these too. Increasing our water intake is also highly beneficial toward weight loss – have you had your 1.5L today? Use other drinks like broths, collagen and herbal teas to fill the gaps.

6. Make More Home-Made Meals

Restaurants and take-away joints often add extra sugar and “bad” oils into their meals to improve taste and palatability and because it’s cheaper! To be more in control of what you’re eating, aim to cook more home-made meals. Meal prepping and having food ready-to-go in the fridge can make staying on track far easier as it reduces the need for making food decisions when we’re hungry. Have you ever gone grocery shopping while hungry? Don’t, It’s a trap!

Meal prepping also makes it easier to implement our next tip…

7. Portion Control!

Portion control is so important when it comes to weight loss as it allows us to control the number of calories we’re consuming. Portion control can be done in an intuitive way through visually changing the amount of food on our plate or counting calories. Although it can be tempting to dramatically cut our calories when starting a diet, this is sometimes not the most effective way. Eating a very low-calorie diet can make sticking to a diet plan extremely difficult (spurts of reduced calorie plans can be very beneficial). It can also leave us in a corner when our body adapts to this low level of nutrition – queue yoyo dieting! 

8. Make your goals ACHIEVABLE!

Our biggest tip when it comes to weight loss is to choose a strategy which you can maintain! Being consistent with your diet and lifestyle changes is the defining factor when it comes to weight loss. We may have to make some short-term sacrifices initially, but it shouldn’t feel like we’re trekking through the Sahara Desert with no end in sight. It’s far better to make simple changes to our lifestyle than to try and stick to impossible fad diets which aren’t sustainable. Let’s feel great while losing weight …And keep it off long-term!

Need help finding a weight loss strategy to suit YOU? Make sure you get your biochemistry checked too unlike most weight loss programs – high inflammation, high cortisol, high insulin, poor thyroid effect your weight.