5 Easy Tips To Lose Weight

Today, I want to give you 5 easy tips to lose weight that are a little more specific, but can pay huge dividends right away.

If you’ve been following my YouTube channel, you already know what the big things are to focus on. You need to workout. And the best way to do it is through resistance training so you can build some muscle. 

You need to focus on your diet. Focus on eating single ingredient, mostly unprocessed, nutrient dense foods. 

Get adequate and quality sleep. Make sure you’re managing your stress levels. And make sure you’ve got your head in the right place. Your mindset is what kinda ties everything together.

And I talk about all those 5 topics in detail in a lot of my other videos so make sure you check those out. 

So we’re not gonna go into those big pillars today. I’m just gonna assume you have a good understanding of all of them. In this video, we’re just gonna go into small but actionable tips. 

Because it’s so much easier to implement and stick with small changes. Rather than big sweeping changes, or just throwing over simplistic blanket statements like, eat and less and move more. You think people haven’t tried that? And when it doesn’t work, that’s when people start to hit that overwhelm button. That’s why I always like to say that there are levels to this. The higher you get, the better.

5 Easy Tips To Lose Weight

1. Get rid of soda, energy drinks like gatorade, juice and replace it with better options.

I don’t often throw a blanket statement that certain foods are bad for you. I mean, there are no “bad” foods per se, only ultra processed ones. So you should kinda know where I’m going with this.

But I’m gonna make an exception for this certain food group. And that’s soda, juice, and alcohol.

There is a grand total of zero nutritional value in soda. Same thing with energy drinks like Gatorade and Red bull. Let me just go as far as saying this. If you’re someone who regularly drinks this stuff and you take them out of your diet, your life will change. I guarantee.

You’re gonna lose a ton of weight and your health will drastically improve. Because soda is basically poison in your body. There’s really no other way to put it. 

You’re literally drinking liquid sugar which triggers a huge spike in insulin, which is your storing hormone, to store all the sugar you just ingested. 

Because too much sugar in your blood is toxic. Yes, some of that gets stored in your liver and muscle. But the majority of it? Guess what? It gets stored as body fat.

What about juice? It’s honestly no better. You’re literally drinking a can of coke with vitamins. If the vitamins is all you’re after, you can get it from way better sources like meat and vegetables.

The ugly truth about drinking alcohol

When it comes to alcohol? I have yet to find any research that shows that it’s good for the human body. It’s just not. You’re poisoning your body just enough when you drink this stuff. That’s why you get the buzz.

Alcohol, in the form of ethanol, is also known as the first to burn calories. Which means your body has to prioritize metabolizing it first. Because again, it’s poison. Your body doesn’t want to die. 

And the problem really starts when you eat and drink at the same time. Because drinking alcohol pauses the burning of all the calories from food. Because again, your body has to metabolize the poison first. And those food calories get stored as, guess what? Body fat.

If you drink once or twice a month? That’s fine. Your body can handle it. Which means alcohol should really be saved just for special occasions. 

But if you’re on an alcohol bender every weekend, it doesn’t matter if you have a good diet and you workout a lot. That’s not how it works. And you’re gonna be severely disappointed by your results.

Or, you might be able to get away with it at first. But it’ll catch up with you eventually. You might see people abuse this stuff and they look fine on the outside. But that doesn’t mean that everything is good on the inside.

Let’s talk about levels. If you’re severely addicted to sugar, you can try to substitute it first with something like Zevia. Which is a soda that’s sweetened with Stevia. But I only want you to treat this as kind of a training wheel.

Some people also switch to Kombucha. It still has a little bit of sugar but way lower than your average soda. I personally think it tastes like butt but I have to mention it because it is an option.

My favourite soda alternative these days is any naturally flavoured carbonated beverages like La Croix. or similar brands like Perrier or San Pellegrino. Those types of drinks have zero sugar. You still get the fizziness sensation and you still get a little bit of flavour. 

And then eventually, you just want to switch to unflavoured soda water or just plain old water. It’s boring but it works.

2. Set a goal of getting 10,000 steps every day

I try to mention this as much as I can because there’s only benefits to doing this.

And the barrier for entry is zero. Anybody can do it. My brother, who’s also an entrepreneur, started getting 10,000 steps every day without changing his diet or his lifting routine. He only lifts 3 times a week. And the guy lost 10 lbs and 3 inches off his waist in just a couple of months by just walking more. 

And walking is free. Yes, it doesn’t burn a ton of calories. But it doesn’t matter. Setting a goal to get 10,000 steps spread throughout the day almost ensures that you avoid prolonged periods where you’re completely sedentary. That’s the real benefit.

Because nothing shuts down your fat burning metabolism faster than prolonged periods of stillness. And living a sedentary lifestyle drastically increases your risk of all sorts of disease. The term sitting is the new smoking is a little bit exaggerated but it’s not that far off.

Now, I used to be guilty of this where I would workout for an hour every day. But after that, I turn into a couch potato for the rest of the day. If you do that, you’re still living a mostly sedentary lifestyle. You just move a little bit for a tiny chunk of your day.

And getting 10,000 steps isn’t that hard. You just need to be aware of your actions. If you work a desk job for example, it’s so easy to just bury your head and work away. 

But it’s so much more beneficial when it comes to your energy and focus if you take a 5 minute break for every hour you’re working. Or 10 minutes every two hours.

Smokers get a smoke break all the time. You can call it your mental/walking break with the benefit of not giving yourself lung cancer.

Personally, staying active is something that I have to constantly remind myself because I work from home. And I work in my room. So technically, I don’t even have to put pants on. 

In fact, you don’t even know if I’m wearing pants right now. Just kidding. I am, I shoot videos from my living room. But it’s so easy to just wake up. Walk two steps to my stand up desk. Start working away and stay home all day. Go to bed, and not get any steps in.

The importance of incorporating NEAT

I didn’t realize this until I learned more about the importance of increasing your NEAT which stands for non exercise activity thermogenesis. Which is just a fancy name for general movement throughout the day. 

When I first tracked my steps, I was mortified. I think I only got about 4,000 steps which is about the average in North America. The problem is, if you’re in the US, and Canada isn’t that far off, and that’s where I live. The average American adult, 2 out of 3, some stats even say 70%, is in the overweight or obese category. 

What I’m trying to say is you want to be above average when it comes to getting your daily movement. Hence the 10,000 steps a day goal.

So I like to make sure I get at least four 15 minute walks every day on top of my workouts. And that always puts me over the 10k mark. It’s also when I listen to audio books so I’m learning while I’m getting in my movement at the same time. 

Bonus points if you can also get in your steps close to nature because it’s a great way to lower your stress levels. 

Extra bonus points if you can get in some morning sun, and expose as much of your skin as possible, to get some much needed vitamin D in your body. 

Why? Because most North Americans, or if you live far from the equator, you’re most likely vitamin D deficient. If you get in 20-30 minutes of sun exposure, you’re set.

3. Learn to read labels

I mentioned this earlier in that your goal should be to revolve your diet around single ingredient, mostly unprocessed, nutrient dense foods.

In a perfect world, you won’t even need nutrition labels. If you eat steak and eggs with some roasted cauliflower and avocado for example, there’s only one ingredient in those foods.

If you eat a burger patty, there’s only one ingredient. Beef. For all the plant based advocates out there, If you eat a beyond burger, it has 18 ingredients. Which one do you think is healthier?

Speaking of burger patties, this is why it’s super important to read labels. For most people, a burger patty is just a burger patty. Well, not all of them are created equal.

What I’m trying to say here is for the foods with nutrition labels. You can learn so much about what you’re actually putting in your body once you get into the habit of reading labels.

It can even be pretty eye opening. You’re gonna learn that a lot of foods that you thought was healthy actually isn’t. 

Food manufacturers for example are extremely smart when it comes to hiding added sugar. Sugar has something like 60+ different names. 

It’s the same thing when it comes to highly inflammatory toxic vegetable oils like sunflower, canola, and soybean oil. I can’t remember the exact number but something like 60-80% of the foods you can buy at grocery stores in north america contain toxic oils and added sugar. 

For example, I bought minced garlic one time and I just thought it was soaked in water. So I didn’t bother checking the label. Big mistake. When I got home, I opened it and noticed that it was actually soaked in oil. I look at the back and the ingredients were garlic and soybean oil. 

Another seemingly innocent example are roasted nuts. Check the label? And sometimes they’re actually roasted in sunflower or canola oil. So you’re eating something you thought was healthy, but it’s actually roasted in toxic oil. That’s why you always want to buy dry roasted nuts.

The next tip that I want to give you is something that I feel like a lot of people forget to give themselves and I used to be guilty of this. And that’s practicing self care.

4. Practice self care

We live in a society where the state of “busy-ness” is glorified. It’s kinda now become our default answer to, “Hey, how are you?” We say we’re busy.

We’re always busy. We put things off. And one of the things that gets shoved aside is time for self care. We wear it like a badge of honour when we say, I worked X amount of hours today. Or, I don’t remember the last time I took a day off.

That kinda becomes the norm. And it makes it so much harder to actually carve time for yourself. And that’s not good. You’re not being nice to yourself when you do this.

Why you NEED to prioritize yourself

But I promise you, if you put in the time and effort to take care of yourself first. If you prioritize yourself and make your happiness your number one priority, you’re gonna be 10x more efficient in everything that you do. 

Your relationships will change. And that includes your relationship with yourself. And that’s extremely important if you want to achieve a successful weight loss transformation.

Because you can’t give what you don’t have. Think of a cup for example. If you pour into your cup first, then you’ll have something to give to other aspects of your life. 

But if you don’t prioritize yourself, you only have so much to give. And when your cup is empty, you have nothing to give and you’ll always be running on empty. 

The oxygen mask instructions on a plane is a perfect analogy for this. You have to put on your own mask first before you start worrying about other people. 

The moral of the story is you have to fill your own cup first before you start tending to everyone else’s needs.

That’s why to me, it makes no sense when people say, “My family comes first.” No, you come first. You need to take care of yourself first. You’re no good to other people if you’re not happy 

When I say self care by the way, I don’t always mean taking lavish vacations. I mean, you can obviously. It can be anything you want it to be. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. Or, it doesn’t have to cost money at all. As long as it’s something that’s solely focused on making yourself feel good. 

For example, I’ve gone to the movies by myself. I had this notion before in my head that that was weird. It’s actually kind of fun. You don’t have to share popcorn with anyone. I’ve taken myself out to nice dinners. And I didn’t feel weird about it.

I’ve gone on solo snowboarding trips. It can even be as simple as taking some time to just go for a walk and be with yourself, taking 10 minutes of your morning to meditate, it can be something as simple as journalling and practicing gratitude. 

If you do little things like that, you’re proving to yourself that you’re worth it. You deserve to be happy. 

And that compounds over time. You’ll feel like a different person when you do this. And this will only strengthen your mental fortitude and you’re able to bounce back so much faster from minor setbacks. 

Or, you don’t have setbacks to begin with. Because now, every time you’re faced with temptations, you can easily say no because you know that it’s not worth it. And it doesn’t get you closer to your weight loss goals. 

My last tip might be the easiest thing to implement and it will yield immediate results.

5. Change your environment

You need to do a complete purge of any trigger foods you have at home. Be ruthless about this. Use this rule. If you have to think twice, it needs to go.

If you feel bad about throwing it out, donate it to your local food bank or homeless shelter. 

And don’t feel bad about wasting money. This is addition by subtraction. You’re taking out foods that doesn’t move you closer to your weight loss goals and you’re replacing it with better options. This is part of practicing self care.

You need to make space in your life literally and figuratively in order for this better and more awesome version of you to emerge. And you’re going to fuel this new version of yourself with the best foods possible. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, human beings are not wired for self control. We’re just not. 

Which means if there’s trigger foods at your house, you can only say no to it so many times. 

So if you really want a treat, schedule a day for you to have it. But don’t have leftovers for you to bring back home. Because now, that cheat meal all of a sudden becomes back to back cheat meals. 

Listen, one bad meal won’t ruin your progress. But two in a row? That’s the start of a new habit. So don’t even go there.

If you live with your family, it’s extremely important to communicate your goals with them. Better yet, make them your accomplice and get them on your side.

This is just all about putting yourself in the best position possible to succeed. You need to give yourself a fighting chance and it starts by making small changes that add up to staggering results over time.

As always, if this was helpful, share it with a friend who could benefit from it as well!

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