Health is the result of a multitude of tiny steps.

Do you have weight loss on your never ending to-do list?  Or, are you thin, but perhaps don’t really feel fit?  Does feeling good about your body seem tricky?  Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried a diet.  Added weight loss to your new year’s resolution list?

My hand is up.

Next, are you busy?  Spread thinly?  Have you tried everything you know to lose weight and be healthy and fit and still feel like none of it works?  Do you ever feel like if you just had more motivation and will power that you could reach your fitness goals?

This post will discuss some realistic weight loss tips for getting healthier and feeling happier, without gimmicks.  The following list of pointers make healthy living seem not so unattainable.

This list is NOT leading up to sell you on some diet, some program, some supplement, bar, shake, or colon cleanse.  It’s not a sales pitch for anything.  The things that we know work for weight loss and fitness are not secrets or insider information.  The most helpful information is frankly boring and banal as telling people to brush their teeth, but when implemented, it is SO effective.

As a quick aside, to lose weight and see your body change, you don’t need to buy any diet books, any cleansing juices, any fat burning pills or pay for a membership into a weight loss program.  You don’t need to start a diet at all!  In fact, please, never diet ever again.  The best way to gain unhealthy weight is to start an unrealistic, unsustainable Diet with a capital D.

To change your body size and shape, many people assume they just need more will power and motivation to stick to that healthy diet, count those calories and huff and puff their heart out on the elliptical machine.

Well, that’s not quite right, either.

In reality, you don’t need to restrict yourself to a starving state or exercise some mythical will power to see real changes.  What works best for most people is to make small, manageable adjustments.  These tiny changes, made gradually, result in a lifestyle change that transforms us comprehensively: our body changes, our attitude changes, our habits change and over time, and we live differently.

We feel better because we prioritize taking care of our body and this prioritized self care has a ripple affect that then impacts our mood and our attitude.

So, here’s the list:

1.  D-I-E-T-S  and anything promising rapid weight loss, don’t work over the long haul.  They are quick fixes.  We all love quick results and to jump start with fast action.  However, if you take 1000 people dieting, taking a pill, or doing a weight loss program that they can’t sustain for life, and you follow them for a year, most people weigh more at the end of the year.  And, most Diets usually equate to restriction and hunger.  To lose weight, you do not need to be feeling hungry after every meal!

2.  Real change happens slowly.  That is not very fun to hear, but it’s true, so my thought is, let’s just be above board with this.  Real weight loss and true fitness happen slowly.  Own that fact and apply it to your approach by making tiny changes.

3.  Changing one thing per week and committing to one healthy change at a time is a great way to make it a real habit.  Instead of swearing off all sweets, carbs, alcohol and promising yourself you’ll exercise 5 days a week no matter what, just pick one healthy habit (from the list that follows) and do it for a week.  Then, add in another small, do-able thing the next week.  In 3 months, you will have 12 habits, many of which you’ve been doing regularly for a couple months.

4.  One of the most important things you can do to feel better in your own skin and be fitter, weigh less and be healthier is to prioritize your health.  If it’s not on the to-do list, it’s probably not going to happen is it?  To be healthy, we have to make time to be healthy just like we make time for anything else.  This sometimes requires us to make some big changes to make time for exercise and make time for healthy eating.  To make time for that which is important, demands looking with open eyes at where you spend your time and how what you currently do is working for you.

A great article on this can be seen here: Personal Values at Project150.  For real change we have to pro-actively carve out time for things that matter most.  This requires thinking critically and often times going against the grain in terms of doing what people usually do.

5.  On this same note, time is precious.  There are only 24 hours in the day.  To be efficient with your 24 hours, imagine an auditor looked at how you spent your day from rolling out of bed, getting the kids to school, getting to work, getting home, going to bed and starting all over again.  What would they see?  Where would there be time that wasn’t really helpful for getting you toward your goals?  Examples of unpopular changes that can actually bring more happiness are things like: watching less TV or no TV, surfing the internet less, and not always saying YES to extra work or extra activities.  Think about what the hypothetical auditor would tell you to tweak.

6.  Self care is akin to taking care of any machine— it requires regular maintenance.  Our car for example: if you never change the oil, rotate the tires, check the transmission fluid, you wouldn’t be or shouldn’t be surprised when a problem surfaces.  As the lovely, Dr. Susanna Carter at Project 150 says, if you left your car parked at the airport for months, would you really be surprised when it didn’t work when you tried to drive it?  Our bodies work the same way.  They require movement that’s regular and occasionally intense, and they need good fuel to keep them going.  Otherwise, they stop functioning properly: just like a car engine that wears out faster when it’s working harder when its components are damaged by friction and clogged with grime, when unfit, our hearts work harder, wear out faster and we end up suffering from a myriad of health problems we hear about everyday on the news: obesity, cancer, diabetes, vascular disease, heart attacks, etc.

So, here are the nuts and bolts:

7.  Staying fit requires two basic things: eat real foods/limit junk food (more on this in a minute) and move your body regularly and intensely.  That’s it.  I’ll break this down and explain it more below, but that’s the big secret.  Eat well, move more.  So easy, yet so intimidating until you break it down into small little steps.

8.  In general, there is not just one food or type of food that if avoided forever will help you lose weight.  Although you’ll read everywhere about the top 5 foods to avoid in order to lose belly fat, that message is flawed.  Demonizing one kind of food isn’t the answer.  However, there are some categories of foods that are ideal to limit and some categories of foods that are idea to eat more of.  Note, I’m not saying you must never have a bacon cream puff donut sundae float ever again, but, limiting some foods in favor of other kinds of foods is the most effective thing you can do to see real change.

9.  If there is one thing that you could stop eating or eat tons less of and notice a reduction in fat on your body, it’d be sugar and sweeteners.  Sugar is the most common drug of choice these days (worldwide, not just in the southeast of the USA).  Sweeteners are hidden everywhere.  Now, we all know cocaine and meth are addictive and dangerous.  We’ve come to learn that sugar and added sweeteners are just as addictive and just as dangerous.  The thing is, the consequences of eating sweets are so slow that it’s hard to see the actual deadly impact.

No one is surprised with the medical problems that arise after chronic nicotine, alcohol or cocaine use, but sugar?  A spoonful helps the medicine go down.  Sugar and spice and all things nice.  We think of sugary sweetness and we think of happiness, holidays, grandmas, weddings, and generous congratulations.  With sweeteners, it’s harder to connect the dots of cause (sugars) and effect (fat in places we don’t want it to be, heart disease, cancers related to obesity, aches and pains from carrying around extra weight, diabetes etc).  To this end, the American Heart Association recommends a daily intake of no more than 9 teaspoons/36g of added sweeteners for men and 6t/24g for women (source is here).

Years ago, some smart marketer in the food industry started marketing “low fat” foods.  It caught on like crazy, right?  We thought, “low fat means I won’t get fat.”  Well, fat tastes good and is flavorful; when it’s removed from food, it is replaced with sweeteners and lots of artificial stuff to mimic the original flavor.  The end result is a strangely modified food with a bunch of sugar in it.  What endocrinologists have known for a long time is that it’s not fats that make us fat, it’s not carbs that make us fat, it’s sweeteners (see this amazing talk for an in-depth look at sugar: Fat Chance, Fructose 2.0.  The tricky thing is, sweetened things are everywhere and are hiding in foods that we think of as “healthy”.  Which brings me to…

# 10.  Limiting processed foods is key!  People argue about the semantics of what processed means until they have carpal tunnel from typing angry Facebook comments.  Let’s keep it simple. Processed foods are any foods that are not real foods.  They are foods that have been modified, have lots of added preservatives, chemicals, sweeteners and have lots of weird named ingredients in them that your grandma couldn’t identify.  They usually come from a factory, can survive for years on a shelf, are packaged neatly in a box and have a long ingredient list.  Real foods don’t usually need an ingredient list because their identity is readily apparent.  Examples of processed foods: pop tarts, most all breakfast cereals, most all granola bars, all candy bars, cheetos, twinkles, swiss rolls (a favorite of mine), most yogurts that have any fruit, jam or flavor to them, fast foods, sodas, jelly beans, gummy bears, yogurt covered craisins, “american cheese” etc….Processed foods are almost all foods in the center of a grocery store.

11.  So, what to eat instead?  Instead, eat real food.  If most your intake of food is “real” food, your body composition will change and you won’t feel hungry along the way.  Real food examples are fruits, vegetables, eggs, nuts (especially raw nuts), beans, meats (think meats from happy animals that have been walking around living good lives- grass fed, local, the closer to home the better), fish (think happy fish, wild caught, local, the closer to home the better), whole grains, healthy fats like olive oil, sesame oil, peanut oils, avocados.  While excess of anything isn’t ideal, my personal opinion is that occasional intake of saturated fats found in some meats, eggs, coconut oil, butter and whole fat dairy is probably better for you than a highly sweetened, “organic” granola cereal with so-called yogurt, protein clusters.  One of the best resources I’ve found to date is the website 100 Days of Real Food: it shares how one family in North Carolina transformed their eating with a few simple changes and has practical insights and helpful descriptions about real food.

12.  Limit your juice intake.  Juice?  What?  Limiting juice may sound strange, but juice has a lot of sugar in it that is separated from all the hearty fiber of the original fruit.  Imagine eating 2 oranges.  All the pulp slows down our body’s digestion of all the sweetness.  In contrast, drinking a tall glass of OJ is like drinking sugar water.  It takes multiple oranges to make one glass and all the meat of the fruit is left behind.  Our body treats that glass of juice almost the same way it treats a soda.  For kids, up to age 6, even the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than 4-6 ounces of fruit juice a day (check it out here).  An alternative to juice is to eat the original fruit– an orange, an apple, some pineapple slices, or to make a smoothie that uses the whole fruit.

13.  Limit or eliminate sodas, sweet tea and any sports drinks.  Our body takes all these sweet drinks and turns the sugar to fat.  Usually to the fat we call visceral fat— the kind that is around our organs and leads to heart disease.  Now, if you exercise for 6 hours and are trying to stay hydrated while you ride your 100 miles, this does not apply to you.  The more we exercise, the more it can make sense to eat these simpler, sweeter fluids.  For the rest of us, keep in mind, a soda has the equivalent of about 8 teaspoons of added sweeteners and the best sweet tea in the south can have upwards of 12+ teaspoons in a serving.

14.  Maximize whole grains.  Examples are whole wheat bread made with only a few ingredients (yeast, honey, salt, water, flour), brown rice, quinoa, whole wheat pasta, whole wheat triskets, shredded wheat cereal, grape nuts cereal, puffed wheat or puffed grain cereals (with no sugar added).

15.  Look in your pantry and fridge.  Take everything that has more than 5 ingredients in it and look at the label critically.  Do you see added sugars?  Do you see words you can’t pronounce?  Sugar can masquerade under names like Florida crystals, cane juice concentrate, high fructose corn syrup, rice syrup, agave nectar, malted barley, beet syrup, and basically anything with the word syrup, malt and dextrose.  We tend to eat what we have available, so consider an overhaul of your go-to foods if there are lots of processed ones in your pantry.

16.  All calories are NOT created equally.  Do you have foods that say things like “100 calorie snack pack”?  It’s probably not ideal to put in your mouth on a regular basis because those 100 calories are likely a lot of processed calories.  A better alternative to a 100 calorie snack pack would be a handful or two of nuts, a banana and a bowl of yogurt with honey and raisins on it.  A wholesome snack may have more “calories”, but the way our body digests those calories results in less hunger and less production of unhealthy fat.

17.  Make time for exercise.  Of course, talk to your physician to make sure you are healthy enough to exercise.  For basic heart health, exercise a minimum of 150 minutes or 2.5h per week.  Exercise is deliberate activity that gets your heart rate up, makes you breathe fast and is intense enough to make it difficult to talk or hum.  Lifestyle activities, in contrast, are things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking at the back of the parking lot, walking around at your work.  Lifestyle activities are great, but insufficient to keep us healthy.  If you make time to move, regularly, and intensely, you will keep your heart and body healthy, you will build muscle that burns more calories than fat (and thus you’ll be able to eat more without gaining weight), and you will keep your body well.  For more motivation, check out the organization, Exercise is Medicine, here and on the Exercise is Medicine Facebook page.

18.  Get adequate sleep:  7-10 hours a night.

19.  Drink water, about 6-10 cups a day.

20.  Treat treats as treats.  If you’re like me, you may LOVE sweets.  My favorites are my mom’s homemade apple pie, dark chocolate with salt and almonds in it and this chocolate cake that one of the local Chattanooga brewhouses makes (anyone else love the Terminal’s chocolate cake?).  Eating sweets every now and then is not a problem— just don’t do it all the time.  Michael Pollan’s passage in Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is hard to improve upon:

“There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.  This is another case where the outsourcing of our food preparation to corporations has gotten us into trouble:  It’s made formerly expensive or time-consuming foods – everything from fried chicken and french fries to pastries and ice cream – easy and readily accessible.  Frying chicken is so much trouble that people didn’t use to make it unless they had guests coming over and a lot of time to prepare.  The amount of work involved kept the frequency of indulgence in check.

These special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored.  One way is to start making these foods yourself: if you bake dessert yourself, you don’t go to that much trouble every day.  Another is to limit your consumption of such foods to weekends or social occasions.  Some people follow a so-called S policy: ‘no snacks, no seconds, no sweets – except on days that begin with the letter S.’”

21.  Take time for yourself, every day.  If you don’t carve out some time for yourself, you can get lost in the rush of living and doing.  You can lose focus on what’s important.  If you’re a giving person, always looking out for others, you’ll eventually run out of steam and let’s be real— you’re not going to be at your best if you are never taking a few minutes or hours for just you.

22.  Lastly— try to make a habit out of focusing on what went right instead of what went wrong.  One way to do this is from Dr. Martin Seligman (author of the wonderful book, Authentic Happiness).  At the end of the day, everyday, make a list of all the good things that happened, so you go to sleep focusing on the positives.

There you have it.  Eat real, move more, sleep a lot, focus on the positives, take tiny steps.

What tiny step can you start this week?  I’d love to hear about what realistic weight loss tips you practice and what’s worked for you, so share any comments on the Facebook page or sign up below to keep in touch.

PS— If you want more from Dr. Susanna Carter, you can connect with her on Facebook, or get her Weekly 150 Newsletter at the main Project150 website.