Natural weight loss at home with diet, nutrition, fitness, and training tips from theory to practice

Lose weight without exercise: Clean up your diet

Learn how you can implement just 4 steps, which do not involve exercise, to clean up your diet and lose weight without suddenly depriving yourself of the foods you enjoy eating.

You may already know that if you want to lose weight, you have to consume less calories than you expend. Consuming calories comes in the form of eating, while expending calories can be done through exercise and increasing your BMR.

While exercise is a major component of any healthy weight loss program, you can make big weight loss gains just by altering your diet, that is, the things you eat. This weight loss strategy works especially well for people who are not getting any exercise at all and who regularly eat large amounts of junk food.

Most people when they go on a diet, they immediately cut out all of the things they think are bad for them from their diet. Unfortunately, these are the things they also enjoy eating. So they go from one day eating what they enjoy, to suddenly trying to eat only healthy foods which are mostly things they don’t enjoy eating.

Can you imagine the shock your body goes through having to switch from one type of food to another so quickly?

Think about it well… if you enjoy eating ice cream and eat it every day, you’re not going to feel happy about not being able to have it at all anymore, so you won’t be able to keep up your diet either. Such diets or ways of dieting don’t work.

The thing is this, when you eat junk food, you get accustomed to the taste of junk food, so your taste buds change to preferring junk food. The same thing happens when you eat healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables; your taste buds change to preferring healthy foods.

This is why a person who is already eating healthy despises the taste of junk food and a person who regularly eats junk food does not like healthy foods.

But all this can be changed. The trick is to help your body ease into a healthier diet, which will have less of an impact on it, and which will also help you feel like you aren’t really depriving yourself of the foods you enjoy eating.

Here’s what you can do to clean up your diet and start eating healthier and losing weight, without shocking your body, and which allows your taste buds to gradually adjust from preferring unhealthy foods to preferring healthy foods.

Step 1: Identify the unhealthy foods that are currently part of your diet
Unhealthy foods are all foods that are high in calories, saturated fats, and sugars. Make a list of the things you eat on a weekly basis that contain these things. For example, if you’re eating a meal at McDonald’s every week, put it on the list. Also list things like ice cream, pizzas, chips, candy, cookies, etc. etc.

Step 2: Start cutting unhealthy foods from your diet
Start reducing the amount of unhealthy things you’re eating on a weekly basis. For example, if you’re having both pizza and McDonald’s, remove one from your diet. If you’re eating 3 pizzas every week, reduce that to 1 pizza a week.

This small change in calorie reduction will already help you lose weight without moving a muscle.

Step 3: Start eating more healthy foods and less unhealthy foods
Look at for example increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables in your diet. Start out small and keep building up from that.

If you haven’t been eating any fruits, start eating an apple every other day, for example, or any other fruit you think you may like. If you don’t think you can handle an apple every other day, try it once a week. Any fruit addition is better than no addition at all!

The key is to slowly phase out the junk food from your diet and replace it with healthy foods.

Step 4: Allow yourself to have one "cheat day" every week
Once you’ve built up to being on a clean diet or mostly clean diet, pick out one day of the week to "reward" yourself with one of your favorite foods for staying on track.

However, do not use this day as a day to "pig out" on junk food. You must see it as a day where you are allowed to choose one of the unhealthy foods you’ve enjoyed in the past, and have a portion of it.

And if you aren’t looking forward to eating any junk food, congratulations! You’ve successfully managed to change your eating habits and your body now prefers healthy foods.

Putting it all together
The key to performing these 4 steps is not to do them one after the other in one week, but to spread them out over a period of a couple of weeks or even months. You need to give your body time to adjust to the changes.

Soon after reaching step 4, your body will start to prefer healthy foods instead of unhealthy foods, and your cravings for unhealthy foods will slowly start to disappear and you’ll start to crave only healthy foods.