Diet culture is everywhere, and it’s full of weird and contradictory rules. “You must eat this” or “never eat that”, and that’s not including all the hundreds of fad diets with funny names. The good news is, none of this “dieting” is necessary in order to lose weight. All you need to do is eat fewer calories than your body needs to operate (i.e. a calorie deficit). However, this is easier said than done, which is why we’ve come up with 4 strategies for losing weight without resorting to “dieting”.

1. Have a Regular Eating Pattern

One of the first things you should do is to establish a (somewhat) regular eating routine. It doesn’t matter what the routine is, as long as it meets your needs and you can stick to it. This makes things easier in a couple of ways. First, it reduces some of the mental load involved in losing weight by standardising meal timings and food choices. You don’t need to eat the same thing every day, but a reasonable amount of consistency will mean that you’re not constantly thinking about when and what you’ll be eating next. A regular eating pattern also helps to reduce the likelihood of overeating. When losing weight, people often push their calories to later in the day because they’re busy going about their day. However, by the time that they want to eat, they’re often so hungry that they end up having far more calories than they were planning to. A regular eating pattern that your body acclimatises to will make it much easier to manage hunger signals and stay in a calorie deficit for an extended period of time. 

2. Set Up Your Food Environment

Another thing that you can do to make losing weight easier is to make sure that your food environment supports your goals. By food environment, we mean any space that you spend time in regularly that may also involve food. For most people this means their home and their workplace. Common strategies to start with might include not keeping easily overeaten foods in the house, stocking up on fruits and vegetables as a low-calorie snack option, and preparing meals to take to work. Everybody’s food environment is unique, but the overall goal is to restrict access to the foods that are easy to indulge in, and provide easy access to nutritious, health-promoting foods instead.

3. Increase Non-Exercise Physical Activity

Using more energy than your body needs to maintain itself is the other way to create a calorie deficit. Most people’s first instinct is to exercise more, which on its own is something that we try to encourage. Unfortunately though, structured exercise doesn’t actually burn that many calories relative to the time and effort that it takes. Exercise is amazing for many health and fitness benefits, but it’s not really great for weight loss. What can help though is trying to increase the amount of incidental physical activity that you do. There are many small ways to raise the amount of energy you expend throughout the day that will all add up to help you lose weight. Some simple examples include taking the stairs instead of the lift, parking further away from where you’re going, or even just regularly standing up from your desk and moving around. It might not be groundbreaking, but every extra calorie burned will help!

4. Have a Flexible Mindset

Our last tip is to have a flexible mindset around losing weight. It’s a difficult process, and being too rigid only makes it harder. In our experience, people who are too rigid tend to have an all-or-nothing mindset, meaning that they have strict rules that absolutely have to be followed. If any of those rules are broken, then the whole diet is ruined. This usually leads to a period of overeating and undoing all of the progress that they’ve made so far. Adding in a little flexibility goes a long way towards making this easier. Make sure to incorporate foods that you actually enjoy. Let yourself skip a day if you need to. Most importantly, be kind to yourself if you don’t perfectly adhere to your calorie deficit. You still need to be in a calorie deficit, but you should do this by following guidelines, not ultra-strict rules.

Conclusion

There are many strategies for losing weight, and they’re not all suitable for everyone. This list isn’t exhaustive by any means, but they’re 4 starting points that are pretty adaptable to most people’s circumstances. The most important thing to take away from this article is that even small changes can add up, and that they don’t need to adhere to common ideas of what “dieting” should be.

If you’d like some more individual help with your weight loss journey, get in touch with us. We have a whole team of coaches with the skills and experience to get you to your goal.