How to Lose Weight Without Dieting and Doing Hours of Cardio

How to Lose Weight Without Dieting and Doing Hours of Cardio

When it comes to weight loss, it’s common for people to think of dieting and doing tons of cardio. While those are effective ways to shed a few lbs. there are also simple lifestyle changes that can help just as much, if not more so, than dieting and cardio.

How can that be?

For starters, people usually hate dieting because it brings about thoughts of bland food, food restriction and suffering in general. Of course, there are different dieting protocols that do not entail eating bland food and restricting food groups to see results, but there will always be a certain amount of work involved. People don’t like that. They want to lose weight without lifting a finger, and therein lies the problem-- it’s not always that easy to lose weight but it can be a lot simpler than one would expect. Learn to make small, sustainable adjustments and you will never have to go on a diet ever again.

Here’s how you can see results without having to suffer through a diet:

1. Drink water instead of soda or juice.

This may sound obvious, but if you drink colored drinks such as soda, juice, fruit shakes, and the like, you are cheating yourself of precious calories that could come from more nutritious food. By switching to water, the pounds will melt right off. This is because most colored drinks—save for diet sodas and zero-cal drinks—contain calories. Weight loss is all about calories in versus calories out. In order to lose weight, you must burn more calories (by exercising more), eat less to create a caloric deficit, or do a combination of both.

For example, if you drink 3 cans of Coke a day and then switch to water, you will be consuming 420 calories less every day. That equates to 2940 calories less a week without even changing your food habits! Other sugary beverages that contain even more sugar-per-serving than Coke are Dr. Pepper. Barq’s Root Beer, Sunkist Orange Soda and Arizona Iced Tea.

Fruit shakes and juices are also not advisable because while they are healthier and contain more micronutrients than soda, they still contain calories. We recommend eating your fruits instead of juicing them or making them into shakes to keep the calorie count under control.

2. Sit less and stand up more.

A typical 8am-5pm desk job can be doing you more harm than you think, especially if you spend most of that time sitting down. Sitting down means less physical activity. Less activity means less calories burned. Standing more often will already cause you to burn more calories, but you aren’t going to transform into a statue, are you? You’re going to fidget and move around every so often, too. And since you’re already standing up, you might as well walk to the next cubicle instead of calling out to the person, or take the stairs if the elevator is taking too long. These small, trivial things burn more calories. Over time, you could easily burn 300-400 more calories a day just by staying on your feet. It’s as simple a change as that.

3. Avoid creamy soups, sauces and dressings.

We already know that fried food is dense in calories, but what happens when you’re faced with a salad plus a multitude of dressings and toppings? Which one should you pick? For starters, lime juice, lemon juice or vinaigrette is usually your safest bet. Mustard is low in calories too, unless it’s honey mustard. Try to stay away from caesar, ranch and blue cheese dressings because these are usually high in fat and therefore, more calorie-dense. Also, you may want to skip the drizzle of olive oil, bacon bits and nuts, because these are calorie-dense too.

For sauces, skip all the white sauces because they are usually made up of butter, cream, mayonnaise, cheese, milk or all the above. The same goes for oil-based sauces like pesto. Instead, opt for tomato-based sauces like marinara. Tomatoes are very low in calories and are filling, too.