This post contains an affiliate link(s). An affiliate link means I may earn advertising/referral fees if you make a purchase through my link, without any extra cost to you. It helps to keep this blog afloat. Thanks for your support. Read my Disclosure.<

Best 5 Sustainable Weight Loss Tips That Work

————————————————————————————————————————————-

How to finally lose the excess weight and keep it off forever by making little key changes in your lifestyle by adopting these best 5 sustainable weight loss tips that work.

Sustainable weight loss is not a diet. It’s a nutritional approach. A “diet” is something you do for a while and then you stop. A nutritional approach is a “lifestyle”.

So, if you want long-term sustainable weight loss results, you want to be able to permanently stay in great shape it’s NOT going to be the best diet for sustainable weight loss that will take you there.

It’s going to be a lifestyle – a way of living that will take you to the long term sustainable weight loss.

You’re reading this article because you’ve gone on several diets and you didn’t get the results. In this article, I will show you 5 strategies to ensure healthy sustainable weight loss. Are you ready?

I’ve got some great news for you: most diets work. But diets do work initially!

When you get on a diet, you lose weight for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden, the weight loss starts to slow down. It then stops. And before you’re fully aware of it, all that weight comes back.

Do you feel discouraged or demotivated? I’ve got some good news for you. In this article, I will show you the best healthy sustainable weight loss plan that will help you finally break that cycle.

If you’re sick and tired of failing, you are reading the right article. If you follow these sustainable weight loss tips that I will share with you, you will finally be able to reach your healthy, long-term sustainable weight loss!

1 – Be Clear How Sustainable Weight Loss Actually Works

One of the biggest obstacles to healthy sustainable weight loss is the fact that you have this magical thinking about diets. You think that it’s all about the diet itself, how it helps you skip certain foods, or how it magically boosts the amount of fat you burn on any given day.

You fail with your diets because you don’t have a clear picture of how fat is actually burned by the human body.

Reading this article you will have a good working understanding of how sustainable weight loss actually works so you can make better-informed decisions as far as your lifestyle goes.

Weight Loss is All About Calories In and Calories Out

While there are metabolic dynamics that complicate how quickly you lose weight, weight loss is basically all about calorie counting at the end of the day. 

It’s actually quite basic. To lose weight sustainably, the number of calories you ingest in any given day must be less than the calories you burn for that day.

Your body is actually a calorie-burning machine. All of us have to breathe, digest our food, go to the bathroom, pump blood through our system, blink, and other seemingly “automatic actions.”

Do you think these things happen magically without any kind of energy source? Absolutely not. Every breath you take as you read this article burns calories.

The truth is, every single moment you’re alive, you are burning calories. For your body to maintain a certain temperature, you have to burn calories. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the number of calories you eat every single day must be below the number of calories you burn. If you eat more calories than your body burns, your body stores the excess energy in the form of fat.

Most Stored Fat Starts Out as Blood Sugar

To get a clear understanding of how sustainable weight loss works, you have to first be clear on how your body uses energy as well as what kind of forms of energy it usually uses.

Generally speaking, your body burns sugar for energy. Are you with me so far? Good.

Now, when your body can’t burn the sugar in your bloodstream because there is simply too much sugar, it will try to do two things. First, your body will try to pass that extra sugar as waste.

If that doesn’t happen, the excess is converted by your liver into fat, which is then stored in your fat cells.

Please understand that the human body has a certain fixed number of fat cells. But just because you have all those fat cells, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re fat. Your body has to fill those cells with fat molecules for you to look fat and to weigh more.

Weight Loss is All About Triggering a Net Negative Calorie State

For you to lose weight sustainably, your body has to burn more calories than the calories that it’s taking in. In other words, if your body doesn’t have enough calories to cover its energy requirements, you start to lose weight.

How does this happen? Well, first of all, your body starts to unlock the water in your system. You lose water, and this translates into heavy initial weight loss.

If you’ve ever gone on the Keto, Paleo, or Atkins diet, a lot of the initial weight loss that you enjoy at first is actually leaving your system.

When you switch mostly to a fat-based diet or protein-based diet, this means there are less carbohydrates in your system. Carbohydrates absorb quite a bit of water. So, when you switch to a protein or fat-based diet, a lot of the carbohydrates in your bloodstream are flushed out and a lot of water goes with it.

However, if you’re looking for more sustainable weight loss, and I would dare say “real” fast sustainable weight loss, you have to start burning fat for energy. This is the long-term solution for sustainable weight loss.

At this point, I just want you to be clear on how sustainable weight loss actually works so you can make an informed decision as to how to alter your lifestyle in a painless way so you can turn your body into a fat-burning machine.

2 – Why Most Diets Fail

 Most weight loss programs fail because of their lack of sustainability.

It has nothing to do with its overall effectiveness. It’s all about sustainability. And where is sustainability centered? Sadly, it’s centered on you.

It’s all about your willpower. Are you willing to commit to certain lifestyle changes so you can keep the weight off? This is where people fall short.

Diet for sustainable weight loss is not sustainable because they are not familiar to us.

They push us to eat one type of food over another, require such drastic portion control or even insist that you cut out certain classes of food entirely from your diet.

Unfortunately, the typical diet is like some sort of imposition. It’s just not part of who you are.

You’ve grown accustomed to certain tastes; you are very familiar with a certain eating lifestyle, so what happens is you’re pushed to eat less of the food you like.

This is the kind of food that you simply grew up with or it’s just simply part of you. And, to make matters worse, the typical diet usually shifts you to a class of food that you normally don’t eat.

This disconnect between what you’re used to and the new diet that you’re on will come to the surface, and guess what? You’re going to lose out. You’re simply not used to the change.

Most people can’t just sustain a diet for a long-term period. They may jump in with both feet because they’re pumped up at first, especially if they enjoy a tremendous amount of weight loss, but sooner or later, they hit a plateau.

Most Diets Fail Because Your Body and Mind Fight Back

This is not just a simple matter of being uncomfortable or not getting used to something. Eventually, this disconnect that I’m talking about pits your body and mind against your willpower.

The sad reality is that if you leave your body and mind unchanged and unmodified, they will push back. There is such a thing as Regression to the Mean. We just go back to what we’re accustomed to. We just go back to the lifestyle that we’ve always known.

What makes this really tragic and somewhat depressing is that it involves a lot of self-sabotage. You know that you should be eating a certain type of food, but you trick yourself into believing that, “Hey, if I can cheat one day, that’ll be okay” or “I owe it to myself anyway. I’m just being kind to myself.” You rattle off a million and one excuses why you should get off the program.

Well, let me tell you, that one cheat day turns into a cheat week. That cheat week turns into a cheat month. And before you know it, you’re completely off the program.

It’s not that obvious. But sooner or later, you find excuses to get off this new programming or new lifestyle and you end up where you began.

The worst part? You become fatter when you get there.

3 – Burn Fat by Changing Your Mindset

The first place to look to when you’ve decided to finally get serious about losing weight sustainably is your mindset.

Well, let’s take a step back and understand why most people fail with their diets. The sad reality is that when people go on a diet, they adopt a diet mindset. What is this mindset? What truths does it yield when we break it apart?

When you ask a person that is about to go on a diet, they would tell you that they’re excited about the diet. But the subtext of what they’re doing, as far as their attitudes go, is that “This is temporary. This is not really me. This is just a stage in my life or a solution to a problem that I have.”

The next assumption, which is closely related to the first one, is that “This is alien to me.”

Believe it or not, on a subconscious level, most people think that the diet they’re on is strange to them. It is not something that they would normally choose. I hope you can see the picture here.

When you go on a diet, your mindset is looking at what you’re doing as something that’s temporary, so it’s not really part of a long-term sustainable weight loss. It’s looking at the changes that you’re going to go through as something that’s fundamentally strange. It’s not part of you.

That accommodation leads to a pushback because you’re doing something that, deep down inside, you feel that you shouldn’t normally do. Why? It’s not part of you.  You’re doing something weird. 

Think of Your Fat-Burning Diet as Part of Your Routine

There is an alternative to the typical diet mindset. When you decide to finally get off the weight loss treadmill, you can choose to start looking at these lifestyle changes as part of your routine.

In other words, you’re looking at food selection as part of who you are. This is not something that’s imposed on you, this is not something that comes outside of you, but is really just an extension of who you already are. Do you see the difference?

This is why one of the first steps that you need to take to burn fat sustainably is to DISPLACE, not REPLACE. Instead of just waking up one day and saying, “Okay, I’m not going to drink any more soda” or “I’m not going to eat that,” you simply add to your plate.

You’re pumped up about a new sustainable weight loss program so you take the foods in that system and you add it to your routine. You don’t cut anything out. This leads to displacement.

How? Well, you think of the small changes to your diet as supplementing your existing habits.

It doesn’t feel like you’re punishing yourself or you’re somehow, someway, being left behind. Instead, you’re just adding to what you’re already doing.

The assumption then, when you choose to displace rather than replace, is that these changes are permanent: I’m simply adding on or rediscovering certain things that I already like. This then leads to a more profound assumption, which is “These changes are part of who I am.”

I hope you can see the difference between this approach with the typical diet mindset.

Prepare to Make Changes and Adapt

A lot of weight loss success really depends on our attitude. 

Basically, their mindset when they got on that diet is, “I better lose weight or I quit.” There’s a sense of do or die in their mindset because they look at the diet essentially as a tool to an objective.

Remember, they’re thinking that the diet is temporary. That it’s just a means to an end.

If you want to be successful with your fat-burning lifestyle change, you have to lose that mindset. This is not a question of do or die. Instead, this is a question of rediscovering who you are or enhancing what you already have.

If you’re able to make this mental pivot, then you would be able to prepare to slip up. Remember, anything in life that is worth having is going to be a challenge.

The same applies to a sustainable weight loss lifestyle. If you want to burn fat sustainably, be prepared to slip up.

Sustainable weight loss is a journey

The truth is, sustainable weight loss is a journey. Not just a journey in terms of you getting acclimated to a new way of eating and allowing your taste buds to evolve, it also involves changing your mindset and perspective. And one of the most important points of adaptation is the willingness to slip up.

Now, keep in mind that preparing to slip up is very different from expecting or wanting to slip up. I’m not saying that you should want to slip up or want to fail. I’m not advocating self-sabotage here. Instead, I am saying that you should have an expectation that you’re doing something profound. You’re doing something new.

It is difficult, so give yourself a break and understand that you will slip up. But the difference is, when that slip up does happen, you’re prepared for it.

The first time you get knocked off track, it’s really difficult to get back with the program. But the good news is, the more you get knocked out and get back up, the shorter and shorter that time gap between setback and recovery will be.

So, understand that this change that you’re going through so your body can burn fat like a machine, is a test of your ability to adapt and scale-up.

If you were able to adapt in those situations( learning to ride a bike), what’s stopping you from adapting to a fat-burning lifestyle today?

What Mental State Should You Be Aiming For?

Now that we know the negative impact of mindset on sustainable weight loss, particularly when it comes to diets, what is the alternative? Well, the mental state that you should be aiming for should be one of relaxation.

Chill out. It’s not that hard. People have done it before you. It’s not like you’re going to the moon and you’re doing something that humanity hasn’t done before.

The healthy sustainable weight loss program is a journey of discovery and it is a journey filled with challenges.

By understanding that you are going on a journey, you can present yourself with two choices. Either this is going to be a long series of punishments or it can be a long series of puzzles, problems to be solved and your ability to get inspired.

If you’re able to make this transition, your overall mental state would be one of hopefulness and optimism.

If you’re aware of the mental state that you should aim for, it’s much easier to be hopeful and optimistic because everything worth having requires some sort of sacrifice. There’s always some level of doubt or some price you have to pay before you achieve the reward that you desire.

Personally, I look at any kind of learning experience as some sort of neat grand puzzle. It’s challenging and it takes a lot of time.

If you break everything down into one puzzle at a time, it’s not only doable, but it’s also a lot of fun. If anything, it’s a journey as to how creative, inventive, resourceful, and clever you really are.

4 – Burn Fat by Eating More of the Foods You Like… Strategically

I know a lot of dieticians will probably get into trouble by saying that people looking to lose weight should eat more.

The number one factor that leads to diet failure is the perception that they’re doing something that is completely alien to their lifestyle.

Part of them even warns them that they shouldn’t be doing it at all because they are way beyond their comfort zone. This is where the advice of eating more of the foods you like start to make sense.

First, you have to zero in on your favorite tastes. Identify the foods that you think you like. Test yourself and go without those foods for a few days. Can you confirm that you really like those foods?

Maybe you like the condiment, not the main dish. Maybe you like the side dish or the appetizers instead of the main dish. Whatever it is, do a lot of experiments with yourself until you can identify and confirm that you like certain foods because of a certain taste profile.

At this level, you’re just looking for the taste profile that you prefer. Some people have a sweet tooth, other people like oily and salty food, others like spicy food. There’s really no right or wrong answer. What’s important is that you get an accurate read of what your natural favorite taste ranges are.

Identify Your Favorite Dishes

Now that you have a clearer understanding of what your favorite tastes or range of tastes are, the next step is to track all the dishes that you normally eat in a given month. I know this sounds like some sort of record-keeping nightmare, but believe me, you’ll get used to it.

Your food journal doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You don’t have to cut and paste pictures of dishes and recipes and ingredients. There’s no need to do that. Just write down the dishes that you eat every single day. Keep in mind that this includes snacks.

At the end of the month, you would be able to identify your favorite dishes. Now that you have zeroed in this, you can correlate them with your preferred tastes.

Also, when you have clearly identified what your favorite dishes are, you would also be able to know what your favorite textures are. This is very important.

A lot of people think that when it comes to food, the only thing that matters is taste. Absolutely wrong. People prefer one dish over the other, not just because it tastes different, but it also has a different aroma or it has a different texture. So, you have to factor in these other elements so you can have a more accurate listing of your favorite dishes.

Identify Your Preferred Portions

After one month of tracking your favorite dishes, the next step is to identify your favorite dishes and pay close attention to your portions. In particular, I want you to ask yourself how much do you have to eat of a particular food item until you feel “full”?

There is physical satiety where you feel physically full, and then there’s mental satiety.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I felt hungry when I’m physically full. Like I can’t stuff any more food in my stomach but I still feel that there’s something missing.

The flip side can also be true. You can feel full, but there’s almost nothing in your stomach. So, understand the difference and then apply this difference to how you track your eating habits.

Identify Your Hydration Points

After you have identified your preferred portions, the next step is to map out when you normally drink before, during and after a meal. This is a very important piece of information to have because this can help you reduce hunger.

Did you know that a lot of people feel hungry but they’re not really hungry? How come? Well, it only takes one glass of water to get rid of that hunger.

I know it sounds crazy, but you’d be surprised as to how much of your hunger goes away when you choose to drink one or two glasses of water. For this to happen, you have to know what your ideal hydration points are. 

Make Each Meal a Celebration

The flavors are to be relished in one’s mouth. The texture is to be experienced as one chew.

The meal should be a celebration. Each mealtime should be an opportunity for you to truly enjoy your food.

Eating is not just a simple act of opening that hole in your mouth. When you eat, a lot of your senses are actually involved.

When you eat, it’s obvious that your sense of taste is engaged. But you shouldn’t also forget that your food looks a certain way. When you smell it, it has a certain aroma. When you bite into it and chew then swallow, it has a certain texture. In other words, it’s a multi-sensory experience.

Sadly, a lot of people with weight problems or diet issues don’t look at it that way. They see it really just as some sort of pitstop to load up on calories, and then they move on to the next pitstop, and on and on it goes.

You have to change your mindset regarding your food. Make each meal a celebration. This means truly enjoying your food.

How do you do this? Just allow yourself to chew food for a longer period of time. What do you think will happen? Well, if you’re like most people, this would lead to smaller portions because you actually taste and enjoy your food better. This means that you don’t need more of it to get the same sense of appreciation.

Truly savoring your food means giving it enough time.  You make it a ritual that takes a long time to unwind and truly savor. As a result, you require smaller portions.

Try to eat with friends and family. When you enjoy a meal with friends and family, you redirect your attention from simply filling your belly to satiety.

Get Out from Under Emotional Eating

All of us suffer from some level of comfort eating or other. 

A lot of people have issues with eating is because they have some sort of emotional association with it that’s not all that healthy. 

You eat not because you need to. You eat because you associate it with the release of serotonin in your brain that makes you deal with life much better.

A lot of people eat because they’re stressed, eat comfort foods because they feel down. They feel anxious or uncertain.

Do you see the problem here? You’re loading up on calories precisely at the point in time where you should avoid calories and deal with your problem.

Your problem is emotional, not physiological. To get out from under this pattern which can easily become addictive, you have to identify your comfort eating patterns. When do you normally eat for comfort? What needs to happen for you to engage in this type of eating behavior?

Second, look at the stress patterns that you go through and your eating choices. Once you see these patterns, you will then be able to prepare.

When you experience them, disrupt these by eating less calorie-dense foods. You’re still eating, but the number of calories that you are ingesting into your system does less damage.

Similarly, you could disrupt by choosing to cope by doing something else.

If you’re feeling stressed, you don’t necessarily have to raid the fridge. You can do deep, slow breathing, simply choose to count slowly, walk or drink water.

Be Aware of and Take Control of Your Snacking

A lot of people can do much of the things that I’ve described above, but unfortunately, a lot of them would find the following quite challenging.

So how do you take control of your snacking patterns? Well, first of all, you should decide to savor your snacks.

Instead of just running through that package of potato chips, savor each chip. Taste the fat. Taste the salt. Enjoy the texture.

When you do this, you control your eating process. You smell it, you touch it, you taste it. It’s like you’re eating several times with one bite.

Because normally, when people eat, they just look for the taste. They experience the food once, in one dimension.

When you make a conscious effort to smell, touch, taste, and really experience the snack item, you control the process. And this leads you to reframe your snacking into an experience.

Instead of something that you just have to do, it’s something that you choose to do. Because let’s face it, if you think that something is an activity that you have to do, it’s more likely that you will race through it.

But when you shift your mindset and you think that this is something that you choose to do, you start looking at it as an experience. You start looking at it as an option that you can sit down, enjoy, and relish.

5 – Burn Fat by Increasing Your Daily Practical Activity Levels

This chapter is going to involve a topic that a lot of people on diets find rather uncomfortable. I am of course talking about physical activity.

The general idea most people have is that if they want to burn fat, they necessarily have to sign up for a gym membership and put in the time hitting the weights, pumping iron, and sweating buckets.

As you can well imagine, a lot of people look at that picture as something involving pain, sacrifice and, let’s face it, some sort of torture or another.

I really can’t blame people because that is an alien experience. That’s not how you normally experience your life. That’s not your normal activity level. But people think that if you’re serious about burning fat and losing weight, they have to go crazy and hit the gym.

Well, let me tell you when people adopt that drastic and abrupt lifestyle change, that change isn’t usually permanent. They end up going back to their previous physical activity level, and guess what? That’s right. The fat comes back.

Quick Recap: How Your Body Burns Fat

Your body burns fat when you increase your body’s physical activity. That’s the bottom line. Why? Increased physical activity requires more calories.

Your body needs calories for its energy requirements. When this happens, your body will first tap the amount of sugar in your bloodstream. Once that’s gone, it will raid the amount of sugar in your liver. Once that’s tapped, your body then goes through a transition called Ketosis. 

Assuming that you don’t eat any sugar in the form of carbohydrates after your blood sugar levels are depleted, your body will start to tap your fat cells for energy. This happens in a low carb setting where you ingest less than 20 to 12 grams of carbohydrates per day.

Now, don’t get too excited. This doesn’t happen overnight. For you to make that Ketosis switch, you have to stick with it for the long term.

But the good news is, once you are more ketogenic than otherwise, your body is now primed to burn that nasty layer of fat all-around your body, especially that spare tire you have in your midsection, for energy.

Adopt Gradual Long-Term Fat Burning Daily Activities

As awesome as ketosis is, a lot of people think that they should just jumpstart. They should just jump in with both feet, hit the gym, or run five miles every day, and ketosis will take care of the rest.

I’m happy to report that they’re absolutely correct. If you increase your physical activities and you cut down on sugar or you cut down on calories, you will lose weight quickly.

The problem is, it is not weight loss. Weight loss will happen. The problem is sustainability. Can you keep the fat off?

The problem is, you’re not really setting in motion any long-term changes that will ensure that the weight stays off. The real solution involves adopting gradual long-term fat-burning daily activities. 

It involves day to day small changes in your physical activity levels that add up to a lot.

What are we talking about? You can park far away from the entrance of your office. It may seem small, but each and every footstep you add to your daily routine leads to more calories burned.

You probably already heard of taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Now, the good news is that you don’t have to be a hero about this. You can just choose to take one set of stairs, you don’t have to start with ten. 

You can start low and slow. Once you get used to it, increase it to two flights. 

If you choose to do this on a day to day basis, you eventually get used to it. 

Finally, it’s a good idea to adopt a morning physical activity routine. By simply just walking around first thing in the morning, you can do yourself a very big favor.

Easy Does It

Boosting your physical activity levels doesn’t have to be dramatic. You’re not trying to impress anybody.

What will truly impress people is not you losing weight as if overnight and then gaining it all back. That doesn’t impress people. Do you know what will impress people? Losing weight and then keeping it off.

And the best thing about doing things low and slow is that you put yourself on the road to doing exactly that. You’re focusing on sustainability. You’re not shooting for that shock and awe “onetime big time” kind of effect.

Conclusion

Everything that I’ve shared with you here is not going to change your life unless you choose to do it.

In other words, you need to take action. Taking action doesn’t mean mentally realizing that you have to do something. Hey, anybody can do that.

Choosing to do something means you have to decide on a date. This has to be a date or a start time that you cannot simply postpone.

Decide on a date that you know you can stick to. This is not as easy as you would think.

You just have to start one step at a time, one choice at a time, one meal at a time.

When you’ve started,y our mind and your body will try to play tricks on you.

Remember, you’re trying to regress to a mean. You’re trying to go back to what you’re accustomed to, so choose to be aware of these tricks.

Well, this is not your diet. This is not the Atkins diet where you can see 5, 10, or even 15-pounds of weight loss in as little as a week. Don’t set yourself up for failure. You’re much more precious than that.

Allow yourself to feel good about any progress you make. If you used to eat large portions and now you’re eating smaller portions, feel good about that. If you used to snack throughout the day and now you’re snacking less often, feel good about that.

By following all these sustainable weight loss tips, you will be able to adopt a sustainable weight loss lifestyle that burns fat instead of jumping from one diet to another. In other words, you totally change your weight loss orientation so that the weight loss becomes sustainable.