12 Powerful Tips on Losing Weight

Megan Elizabeth-- Before and After Losing Weight

12 Powerful Tips on Losing Weight

Here is a list of 12 easy things that you can do to lose weight.

1. Make sure that you get all the sleep that you need. They have found that the longer you sleep, the less that you weigh. Also during the time that you are sleeping, you are fasting (not eating). When someone starts eating after fasting, it is called breaking the fast. The first meal is called break-fast. Getting plenty of sleep is important to losing weight.

2. Try to minimize stress. Stress causes you to eat more food and causes your body not to digest food and work right. You can do yoga to help with this. Dr. Oz gets all of his patients to do yoga. Here is an article with 23 Celebrities that Do Yoga. Also yoga helps your self-esteem so you are more motivated to lose weight.

3. Instead of drinking water or other beverages, drink green tea all day. The EGCG in it will help you lose weight. Also it has many other benefits like reducing your chances of getting many different diseases like cancer. Here is an article about the Health Benefits of Green Tea. You can sweeten it with stevia that is good for blood sugar regulation. Green tea is the most alkaline food that there is (above site has a link to the chart) and alkaline foods help you lose weight and gain health.

The Chinese do not drink water. They drink green tea or black tea (similar to green tea but fermented). In the United States in Chinese restaurants, they serve tea for free instead of water. There is a saying that it is better to go without food for 3 days than to go without tea for one day.

If you do not like green tea, there is another tea that you can try. Yerba mate tea is the national beverage of Argentina and the most popular beverage in most of South America. I like the taste of it a lot more than green tea. But I actually mix them and drink both of them. In fact Whole Foods markets has their own brand of tea that contains organic green tea, organic yerba mate tea and organic peppermint. See the article: Health Benefits of Yerba Mate Tea.

This tea has caffeine in it just like green tea. Yerba mate is very high in chlorogenic acid. This is the phytochemical in green coffee that helps you with losing weight. Chlorogenic acid is an antioxidant that prevents type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. It is anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-fungal.

Yerba mate tea contains 196 active chemical compounds and 144 of these are found in green tea. So caffeine in green tea and yerba mate tea is a very small part of these beverages. Yerba mate was drank in South America before the Europeans arrived there, so it may have been used for thousands of years just like green tea.

4. Add cinnamon to your diet. You can sprinkle it on foods and/or take it in capsules. Cinnamon helps to balance your blood sugar levels. This webpage says:

Cinnamon, experts say, can lower blood sugar levels by up to 29 percent. A study at Wadsworth Medical Center in Ohio showed cinnamon could help people retain more muscle and lose fat [making it excellent for losing weight].

5. When it comes to using oils, only use EVOO-- extra virgin olive oil. This oil is different than other oils. It can help you lose weight. It contains omega-9 essential fatty acids (EFA) instead of omega-6 EFA. It is also healthier for you.

 6. Be careful of medications that you take including birth control pills. They can mess up your body's ability to control weight making it very difficult to lose unwanted weight. It is better to avoid any medications. One of the most popular medications ever was Vioxx to reduce pain. It was recalled since it was causing many people to get heart attacks.

7. Since eating leafy greens can make you fat, try to eat organic food. There are fungicides that they add to conventional (not organic) foods that can make you fat. For example according to the New York Times, the fungicide triflumizole is used on leafy vegetables and it causes obesity in mice. See The Importance of Organic Food for more on this.

8. Do a little resistance training. People have gotten confused with this. You are not trying to burn some calories exercising for hours. A little bit of resistance training changes the body and makes it work differently. It helps the body to build muscle and burn fat. Also the more muscle that your body has, the more calories it burns all the time no matter what you are doing. So this makes you look much better while losing some weight.

9. Eat whole grains instead of refined grains. Refined grains have fiber and nutrients taken out and this causes your body not to work right. So your body has a tendency to become fat and sick. Eat less wheat and more of other grains like brown rice, quinoa, millet and amaranth. This will also help with elimination so that you are carrying less waste around with you. This also reduces the size of your waist.

10. Eat less processed food and more unprocessed foods like fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds and fungus (mushrooms). When processing foods, they make sure to add things to make the food addictive and fattening. That way they can sell a lot more. Dr. Oz says to eat foods without an ingredient list.

11. Learn how to eat right. This is not a common idea but it is very powerful. Here is an article called Why You Shouldn't Drink Water While You Eat by the Wellness Warrior. Actually it is better to not drink any liquid with your food.

This dilutes the digestive acid in your stomach. I heard this from someone who owned a farm while staying at a farm for the summer as a 12 year old. Drink all the liquid that you want before you eat. Then wait at least an hour after eating before drinking any liquid. This helps your digestion to work much better. Just try it and see how it works for you.

12. Fruit first. This has to do with the previous tip. If you eat watermelon, isn't that like drinking something since it is like 98% water? Yes. So this does not pertain to dry fruits but fruits that are very juicy. Juicy fruits do not digest like other foods. They pass through the stomach like drinking a beverage. There were 2 best-selling books called Fit for Life I and Fit for Life II. Both of these books suggested the above

In fact unlike what many say, they had people skip breakfast so the body could continue its fast from sleeping and this helped many people with losing weight. They said that if you could not skip breakfast then just eat fruit for breakfast since it can still continue the body cleansing from while you were sleeping.

So eat your juicy fruits on an empty stomach. Then wait about 15 minutes for it to pass out of the stomach. Then you can eat regular foods. So the juicy fruit is treated like a beverage.