No-Diet Tips to Lose Weight and Stay Fit

First things first: stay away from fad diets. This means no small meals microwaved in plastic. No shake for breakfast, shake for lunch. No all-protein diets for weeks on end. No pills, and no injections.

Quick-fix diets appeal to our immediate sensibilities, but they are short-sighted. Adopting healthier eating patterns is a much better way to lose weight and keep it off, and to get fit and stay fit.

A sustainable planet begins with a sustainable you.

Forget lunch on the run.
Our culture – and particularly families – favor dinner over lunch, as suppertime is typically family-bonding time. But your digestive system is most powered-up when the sun is at its peak point in the sky: noontime. So switch it up; make lunch the most important meal of the day. Swap your sandwich habit for a mindful and nutritious mid-day meal, then eat a smaller meal or snack in the evening. The fam can chat it up over moderate sized bowls of soup just as well as it could over chicken and mashed potatoes.

Only eat what you can hold in your hands.
Most of us tend to eat whatever is served up on a plate. But a plateful of food in the average American meal is often two or three times the size of what your stomach can optimally digest. Medical wisdom from ancient India tells us that your ideal serving size for any given meal is the amount that you can hold in your hands when your palms are placed together. This leaves enough space for your stomach’s digestive juices to work with air and space elements to break down and churn food.

Overeating invariably prevents the perfect digestion of releasing toxins that get stored in fatty tissue. So eat in proportion to what your stomach can actually handle.

Let your metabolism be your meal planner
While we are all told to eat three square meals a day, this might not actually be ideal for everyone. That’s not to say you should skip meals, but rather figure out your metabolism rate, and plan accordingly. The trick to maintaining a healthy weight, is keeping your metabolism active. If you have a quicker metabolism, eat smaller meals several times day. If you have a slower metabolism rate, then eat fewer, slightly larger meals. But whatever you do, always maintain regular eating times. Skipping meals altogether slows down your metabolism and interferes with digestion and healthy weight maintenance.

Get to the core of it
Don’t underestimate the power of core strength exercises when it comes to digestion. You might think the objective all those trips to the gym is a toned and fit-looking body. Who doesn’t want a six pack when jogging on the treadmill in her sports bra? In actuality, strengthening your core is as much about balancing your digestion as it is about exercising. Toned muscles in and around your mid-section “massage” your intestines and aid in digestion –helping with the absorption of nutrients and the flushing out of waste products. Adding core strength exercise like pilates, yoga, dance, or even guided weight-training will also keep in check your digestive system and weight.

Rid Yourself of the 5-A-Day Mindset
While you might think that getting five servings of fruits and vegetables everyday is all you need, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) says you should be having much more than that. Fruits and vegetables are naturally low in calories and provide essential nutrients and dietary fiber necessary for healthy digestion and weight maintenance.

Your daily fruit and vegetable needs depend on your calorie needs, which in turn are determined by your age, sex, and physical activity level. MyPyramid.gov is a great resource for healthy eating; enter your age, sex, and activity level, and get a personal eating plan that includes the appropriate amount of calories and recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables.

Start Your Day with Hot Lemon Water
Most of the foods we eat – like pasta, cookies, breads, and meat – create acid in our system. The more acid-creating food we eat, the more body fat is required to cope with it. Contrary to, well, common sense, lemon’s effect on your body is alkaline, meaning that it actually mitigates the built-up acid in your system. Drinking a glass of hot lemon water (hot water mixed with a few drops of lemon) when you wake up each morning is a good way to control your weight. The less acid in your system, the less fat your body needs to store.

Relish Real Foods
You might have heard this one already, but it’s really worth repeating: Forget the ready-made snacks and foods that attract you with colorful packaging and marketing spiel. Rule of thumb says that the more that a food is processed, the more it is stripped of natural fiber, difficult to digest and likely to release toxins into your system.

Snack on real foods like raw, unsalted nuts, raw fruits and vegetables or lightly cooked ones, all of which have plenty of fiber, flavor and natural goodness. When you think “Real Foods,” think about who would eat them in the wild. When is the last time you saw a fat forest monkey eating a processed protein bar?