In this article, you will find 18 tips with which you can lose weight in a healthy way. Without exercising, without feeling hungry, and without the yo-yo effect.
Losing weight isn’t about eating less, it’s about eating differently. And it’s often not about big changes; the small adjustments in your diet and lifestyle (which we mention in the weight loss tips below) ensure that you lose weight successfully.
These small adjustments contribute to a slim body and good health, a higher energy level, and a more vital life.
Let’s start right away with the weight loss tips!
Tip 1: Eat natural food
By eating natural food, such as vegetables, fruit, nuts, and oily fish, you feed yourself with essential nutrients.
This contributes to good health and helps you lose weight.
Those nutrients help to keep your endocrine system in balance, including your hunger hormones. As a result, you are less likely to reach for an unhealthy snack.
With those nutrients, you also give your body all the nutrients and building materials it needs, so that you feel satiated for longer (which helps you to lose weight).
Tip 2: Drink enough water
Often when you think you’re hungry, your body is actually asking for fluids. A hungry feeling can also mean that you are thirsty.
That is why it is a good weight loss tip to first drink a glass of water and then feel whether you are still hungry.
We recommend drinking at least 2 liters of water per day. That’s about 8 glasses.
Drinking water contributes to weight loss and is good for your health:
- Scientific research shows that you burn more calories when you drink more water [1].
- If you mainly drink water, instead of soft drinks, you consume about 200 fewer calories per day [2,3].
- Drinking water increases your energy level and improves brain functions, such as your memory [4].
Drinking enough water is therefore a simple, but very effective tip for losing weight.
Tip 3: Eat low carbohydrate
Scientific studies show that a low-carbohydrate diet is very effective in losing excess kilos and improving your health [5-9].
If you want to lose weight, we recommend eating the following amount of carbohydrates per day:
- Lose weight quickly: 50 – 70 grams of carbohydrates per day
- Average weight loss: 70 – 100 grams of carbohydrates per day
- Lose weight slowly: 100 – 150 grams of carbohydrates per day
You can read more about a low-carb diet here.
Do you want to start eating low-carb right away? Then the Pure Figure Method might be something for you. This plan contains 5 weekly menus with tasty low-carb recipes and many practical tips for losing weight.
Tip 4: Avoid temptations
Make healthy eating and losing weight as easy as possible for yourself. Avoid being tempted to eat unhealthily. This can be done, for example, as follows:
Do not bring unhealthy products into your home
If you don’t have it at home, you can’t eat it.
Keep unhealthy snacks out of sight
If you do have unhealthy foods at home, put them in a cupboard. As a result, you grab it less quickly than if you see it all the time. A golden waste tip!
Avoid the middle aisles in the supermarket
This is where processed (unhealthy) products are often located. If you take the outer aisles, you will come across fresh products: vegetables, fruit, dairy, fish, and meat.
Provide a well-stocked (refrigerator) cupboard and fruit basket
If you always have healthy products at home, you prevent unhealthy snacking. You will also be less inclined to score something “tasty” at the supermarket or snack bar.
Do not eat while watching TV or with other distractions
Research shows that you eat 30% more snacks when you are distracted [10]. Other research even shows that if you eat with distraction, you eat significantly more not only at that time but also later in the day [11].
This weight loss tip is one of the most effective weight loss tips.
Tip 5: Make shopping lists
Walking into the supermarket on spec can jeopardize weight loss. Before you know it, your cart will be full of unhealthy products.
Therefore, think about what you want to eat for the next few days and write down the necessary ingredients. This way you deliberately walk through the supermarket and you have no reason to walk past the shelves with sweets, biscuits, and chips.
No idea what to get at home? Then we have an extra waste tip for a little more grip. We have put together a free shopping list for you full of healthy products that can help you lose weight.
Tip 6: Read labels
Many foods contain additives, such as E numbers and sugar. These substances can unbalance your hormones and counteract weight loss.
Products that you might not expect may also contain additives, such as meat products and tomato sauce.
Every product that you put in your basket in the supermarket has a label with an ingredient list. That which is listed first on the ingredient list is the most in it, and it then decreases in quantity.
So the further down the ingredient list the ingredient is, the less of it the product contains. If sugar is in the 1st place, there is more of it than if it is at the back of the list.
Take a good look at the ingredients list and compare it with another product. For example, one brand of tomato sauce may contain sugar and another may not.
Speaking of sugar, sugar is hidden under different names in the ingredients list. You can read the different names of sugar in waste tip 16.
Tip 7: Eat enough
This may sound contradictory if you want to lose weight, but it is an important tip for losing weight to eating enough.
The idea of losing weight is quite simple: if you eat less than you consume, you will lose weight.
But if you consume too few calories, it will actually work against weight loss in the long term. You can also damage your health with it.
Weight loss and fat loss are not the same things. If you structurally consume (much) too few calories, you may lose muscle mass instead of body fat. And you don’t want that, because muscles help you lose weight.
You also tend to snack unhealthy or suddenly eat a lot if you have eaten too little.
Therefore, eat 3 nutritious meals a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and eat a healthy low-carbohydrate snack if you are hungry in between.
Tip 8: Relax
When you are stressed, your body produces the hormone cortisol.
Your body needs this hormone, but if you have chronically too much of it in your body, it can cause weight gain, especially in the form of abdominal fat [12,13].
Too much cortisol can also have other effects on your body, such as:
- High blood pressure
- Insomnia
- Heart complaints
- Low energy
- Weakened immune system
Keeping stress to a minimum keeps your cortisol levels low, which can help you lose weight (especially around your midsection) and improve your health.
Tip 9: Use smaller plates
If you eat from smaller plates, you scoop up less and therefore eat less. This weight loss tip can help you reach your goal weight more easily.
Also, the amount of food appears larger if you serve it on a small plate, which can help you feel full faster.
Tip 10: Eat less salt
If you eat a lot of salt, your body retains more water. And you can see that on the scale.
You can (partly) replace salt with herbs so that you can still flavor your dishes and you lose excess moisture (and therefore weight).
Tip 11: Always have a healthy snack with you
After a long day at work, on the train, or while shopping: there may be times when you suddenly get hungry or just feel like a snack.
That is quite normal and no problem at all.
If you have healthy food with you, you prevent unhealthy snacking at those times. This is one of the easiest weight loss tips, yet very effective.
Examples of healthy snacks that you can easily take with you are:
- Fruits
- Candy vegetables
- Boiled egg
- Nuts
- Olives
Here you will find 77 quick and healthy snacks sorted by the number of calories.
Tip 12: Eat enough fiber
Fibers are important for your health and help you lose weight.
They provide a feeling of fullness. prevent binge eating, stimulate fat burning, and contain hardly any calories.
Examples of fiber-rich products are:
- Vegetable
- Fruits
- Quinoa
- Oatmeal
- Legumes
- Nuts
- Seeds
Tip 13: Sleep enough
If you want to lose weight, a good night’s sleep is essential. That makes this waste tip very important.
A good night’s sleep ensures that you start your day fresh and energetic in the morning and supports your physical and mental health.
The fact that sleep also affects your brain helps with weight loss. Because if you don’t sleep enough, it is more difficult to make healthy choices and avoid unhealthy snacks [14].
In addition, a bad night’s sleep causes your body to produce more cortisol. And cortisol stimulates the storage of belly fat [15].
Other hormones are also balanced during your sleep, such as ghrelin and leptin. They ensure that you feel full and that you do not continue to eat when you are already full (which helps you lose weight).
Tip 14: Leave the pans in the kitchen
When the pans are on the table, it is tempting to scoop up again, even if you are already full.
A good waste tip is therefore: to scoop up your food in the kitchen and leave the pans on the counter. This will prevent you from overeating.
Tip 15: Forget the trends
Miracle cures, crash diets, slimming pills… Trends come and go and often do more harm than good.
You don’t need any special remedies to slim down successfully and permanently. Natural, healthy, colorful, and varied food is the basis of a healthy diet.
With this diet, you lose unwanted body fat in a healthy way, without it coming back. You will also see that your health improves and your energy level increases.
Tip 16: Watch out for sugars with pseudonyms
Sugar occurs naturally in fruit, vegetables, potatoes, grains, legumes, and dairy products. Those natural sugars are no problem for your body.
The added sugars are the problem. They are not good for your health and weight loss process but are used in 70% of all products in the supermarket [17].
Sugar is not only in obvious products such as cookies and soft drinks but also in salad dressings, ready-made soups and sauces, processed meats, and much more.
Added sugars are not always literally referred to as ‘sugar’. This is how you recognize sugar on the label:
- Anything that ends in “ose” (such as glucose, fructose, and dextrose)
- Anything that ends with ‘syrup’, ‘syrup’, ‘honey’ or ‘nectar’
- Anything that mentions “sugar” (such as caster sugar)
Tip 17: Eat more proteins
Proteins help you lose weight. Then they do it in different ways:
- Protein-rich food makes you feel full faster and longer [18].
- With an increased protein intake you can halve your urge to snack [19].
- Protein helps you burn extra calories. By increasing your protein intake you can burn an extra 80-100 calories daily [20-22].
There are animal proteins and vegetable proteins.
Animal proteins are mainly found in:
- Eggs
- Meat
- Fish
- Dairy products
Vegetable proteins are mainly found in:
- Legumes
- Cereal products
- Nuts and seeds
Eating enough protein is therefore an important tip for losing weight.
Here you will find more information about how much protein you need per day if you want to lose weight.
Tip 18: Be gentle with yourself
Losing weight is a process and a process always has ups and downs.
So don’t panic if you can’t all apply these 18 weight loss tips right away, if you don’t lose weight quickly with these tips, or if you once ate something unhealthy. It is not the case that one snack cancels out all other healthy moments and it is almost impossible to eat 100% healthy every day. Of course, it should also be fun. So eating something tasty every now and then is fine.
If you treat yourself to a treat every now and then, it’s much easier to maintain your healthy diet in the long run. Then take a small portion of what you really like and then pick up the thread of healthy eating again.
