8 Simple Steps to Lose Weight Without Dieting

Since you’re reading this, you’ve already taken your first step by deciding: “enough is enough!” with fad diets and quick fix solutions (or you’re about to very soon!). You’re ready to start looking and feeling better for good this time, and know that a big key to that starts at the end of your fork.

Improving your health and ultimately losing weight (if that is your end goal) by changing your eating habits can be difficult because there is SO much conflicting information out there about what’s good for you and what isn’t. Figuring it all out and incorporating it into your lifestyle can be really overwhelming… especially because diets tend to be fear based and drill a harsh, restrictive mentality around food in our minds.

I tried various diets and ate what I thought was healthy for years so I could lose weight, increase my energy, stop my headaches, end my bloating, and clear up my skin. This came with a lot of constant thoughts and feelings around guilt, willpower, blame, judgment, control, and weakness. Needless to say it didn’t work, I didn’t look or feel any better, and I developed a poor body image and relationship with food that made everything worse.

Finally MY day came when enough was enough!

I decided to stop looking for the short cut, easy way out, and instead learned about nutrition, which foods helped my body look and feel fantastic and which foods make my body look and feel like crap. This not only improved my body image and relationship with food, but the new healthy habits I developed stuck. I no longer self sabotaged. My emotional eating was basically non-existent anymore. My life was forever changed.

Now, I help people like you do the same thing.

Imagine what it would feel like to:

know which foods to eat to help you look and feel your best
not feel restricted or confined to the rules of another diet
trade in your cravings for sugary and salty foods for healthy, whole foods
jump off of the weight loss, weight gain rollercoaster
look in the mirror and love the reflection you see looking back
put an end to the self sabotage and emotional eating
save time, money, and enjoy results that actually last

That would feel pretty amazing, right??

These steps are designed specifically for you to go at a place that feels best for YOU. This will ensure you get the most out of it and see the best, lasting results. I recommend working on one or two steps at a time, rather than trying to do a bunch at once. Remember – this material is yours forever! There’s no prize for finishing first. 🙂

To make these steps even simpler, I’ve created a private Facebook support group where you’ll be able to get support, motivation, recipes, inspiration, and feedback from me an all of the other amazing women who are going through the steps with you!

I know change of any kind is hard, but celebrate that fact that you’ve already taken your first step! So buckle up, get excited, and get ready to enjoy the ride. It will be life-changing.

STEP 1: GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD

This area that will make or break any type of long term success you will have with changing what you’re eating, and it often gets overlooked.

You’re not alone if you are unhappy with areas of your body, or wish you could just feel comfortable in your own skin. Often times people think the answer to their problems lies in their own lack of control or willpower around food: “if I could just eat super healthy all the time, I would be skinny and automatically love my body…”

It doesn’t exactly work like that. Losing weight, gaining confidence, and loving your body is SO much more than food related. Plus, any type of all-or-nothing, perfectionist thinking around food (or anything really!) is just not realistic and basically sets you up for failure – which triggers feelings of guilt, sadness, blame, judgement, and leads to self-sabotage.

The key is to focus on loving the body you’re in NOW.

That’s because we take care of what we love, and what’s important to us. If you love your body, you’re naturally going to want to do things to take good care of it, which in this case will help you make and stick with the healthy habit changes you’re looking to make.

Think of it this way, you can’t self-hate yourself into self-acceptance. You have to meet yourself where you are and work from there. It will make everything SO much easier for you!

This step takes some time and work if you’re not already there. Start journaling, brainstorm your limiting beliefs and potential obstacles in your way so you can then work on replacing them with healthier beliefs and solutions to challenges. Release “good food” / “bad food” labels you put on food, which attaches judgment and guilt to your food choices. If you want a brownie, eat it, enjoy it, and move on  What’s on your mind that’s holding you back? Share on the FB group!

STEP 2: PRACTICE MINDFUL EATING

By now you’re starting to realize the food you eat is only 1 piece of the puzzle. Your mind and mental state is a HUGE make-it or break-it piece. It’s that piece in the middle you need to complete the puzzle and see the big picture.

Many of us fall into the trap of mindless eating, which is super closely connected to emotional eating. Learning to identify and pay attention to when you’re physically hungry versus when you’re emotionally hungry (out of boredom, stress, procrastination, sadness, etc.) is the first step to mindful eating.

If you realize your hunger is “real” vs. emotional, mindful eating should carry through to your actual eating process to fulfill your body and your mind. Seeing all the food on the plate, smelling it and tasting it are all ways to let our mind know “we’re all set, we’re full!” If we miss these cues then our brain still thinks we are hungry, and we keep eating.

Have you ever eaten a large meal and then wanted to eat more food, even though you feel full in your belly? Your brain probably didn’t get the memo that you ate a whole bunch of food, so it’s telling you to go back for more.

Some of the ways you can practice eating mindfully are to:

Pay attention to what you’re doing when you eat, relax, and minimize distraction
Chew more, double your typical bites per fork/spoonful. Enzymes in the saliva you produce while chewing start breaking down the food to help your digestive system/li>
Eat slowly, put your fork down between bites/li>
Enjoy your food, notice its aroma, how it looks, its taste and texture

Pick just 1 meal a day to start to practice these things. Tell me on the FB group how it feels!

STEP 3: BALANCE YOUR PLATE

To help stabilize your blood sugar and hormone levels PLUS get a variety of key nutrients, vitamins, and minerals your body needs to stay healthy: balance your plate. When you think about what to make for your meal or snack, think about your plate as a big circle, then divide it up in your head to look like this:

1/4 protein
1/4 starchy veggies or complex carbohydrates
1/2 non-starchy vegetables
PLUS healthy fats

Protein: Choose meats that are pasture-raised, grass-fed, and wild caught due to the antibiotic, pesticide, and cancer causing growth hormone exposure. Great options: beef, buffalo, chicken, fish, turkey, eggs, beans.

Starchy Veggies or Complex Carbohydrates: Swap out the blood sugar and insulin-spiking simple carbs (white bread, white pasta, white rice, white flour) for alternatives like quinoa, cauliflower rice, millet, lentils, teff, brown rice pasta.

Non-Starchy Vegetables: Choose organic whenever possible to avoid disease-causing synthetic chemical pesticide and herbicide exposure. To save money, use the Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists (see next page!), shop local, and shop seasonal. When cooking, use an oil with a high smoke point like coconut oil.

Healthy Fats: Don’t fear fat! Certain types are key to losing weight, reducing inflammation, absorbing nutrients, and more. Great options: avocados, olive oil, coconut oil, nuts, seeds, nutbutter, grass-fed butter.

Practice balancing your plate! Post a picture of your favorite balanced plate meal to the FB group.

STEP 4: BE A FOOD LABEL DETECTIVE

Balancing your plate is great and certainly ideal, but let’s face it, life is busy and fast paced, and sometimes we just don’t have time to make sure our food is clean and balanced.

The food package and label has one purpose: to make you buy the product. There are very little restrictions and rules to what food companies can say on food labels and packages, so it’s hard on us as consumers, to navigate what’s actually healthy and what’s not. This is not an easy task!

If you want to ensure that you are buying foods that are truly as healthy as they claim, high-quality, nutritious, unprocessed, there are some steps you can take:

Look at the serving size to know what a single serving is (or how many are included)
Don’t fall for fancy language or deceiving pictures and marketing claims
Note the list of ingredients. They are listed in order of how much of them was used to make the product. The largest quantity of ingredients used is listed first
Read through the ingredients. If you can’t pronounce any of the ingredients, stay away (they are probably a harmful preservative or additive)
Steer clear of artificial ingredients, like sucralose and aspartame, and artificial colors like Red#40
Choose organic or non-GMO when possible

Want to see some of my favorite healthier processed snack bares when you need to grab and go? Download the FULL free guide to lose weight without dieting by clicking here.

Trouble deciphering a label? Post a picture of it to the FB group and get some help!

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STEP 5: BEAT YOUR FOOD CRAVINGS

Food cravings happen to even the best of eaters, but once you’ve been eating a healthy, well balanced diet for a while, they are very rare.

When you start out eating healthier, you’ll probably experience some cravings. Processed foods and sugars are addictive and make you want more! Luckily there are lots of things you can do to help those feelings go away pretty quickly and painlessly.

Before trying any of the tips below, revisit step 2 to see if it’s coming from an emotional place like stress or boredom making you want that chocolate bar. Also, see if you’re in the habit of every day at a certain time you eat a certain type of food (like every day when you get home from work you have ice cream).

If not, check out these tips:

Eat a balanced breakfast with protein, fiber, fat
Remove temptations, don’t buy processed, sugary foods at the grocery store, avoid walking by the vending machine at work
Exercise: interval training is the best kind
Sleep: skipping sleep releases more ghrelin, an appetite-stimulating hormone
Nutrient deficiencies, when we crave something like chocolate it might mean we’re deficient in magnesium (so load up on leafy greens, nuts, fish)
Not enough eating calories made up of healthy fats, protein, complex/starchy carbs, produce

STEP 6: CHOOSE HEALTHIER RESTAURANTS

On average, Americans eat out about five times a week, according to the National Restaurant Association. Since those meals are generally higher in calories, chemicals, additives, preservatives, trans fats, sodium, and artificial flavors and colors than what we make at home, they can create a recipe for weight gain and health problems.

Eating at a restaurant does not have to sabotage your healthy eating habits.

If you go into a restaurant without any thought or research ahead of time, you’ll be more susceptible to diving off the deep end and ordering food that you’ll regret later. This does not apply to those times that you go in knowing “I’m gonna order the crap outta those nachos!”

As some general guidelines of what to look for and what to avoid when figuring out where to eat:

Avoid “all-you-can-eat” places. More healthy eating efforts go there to die than any other type of restaurant
Choose a restaurant with a varied menu. It’ll make it easier to find something healthy and to your taste
Use a website to help find healthier restaurants near you, like Eat Well Guide or Happy Cow or even Yelp
Avoid restaurants that promote “entertainment” eating, where the food is one of several attractions. This usually means the menu is choked full of fried, fatty and huge dishes
Look for restaurants that use local ingredients or promote a scratch kitchen or farm-to-table concept

*Want even more helpful tips on how to eat healthy while eating out? Click here for lots more!

STEP 7: MORE HOME COOKING

Good old fashioned home cookin’ is the best way to control portion sizes, the quality of ingredients used to make the meal, monitor how much sugar, salt, and sodium that go into our bodies, and completely avoid preservatives, pesticides, and artificial ingredients.

One of my favorite things to do is to take my favorite restaurant or comfort food dishes and make them into healthier versions. That way I can still enjoy the delicious flavors of those foods, but they help me
stay on track with my healthy eating habits.

If you’re not a big fan of cooking, keep things simple. Use the balancing plate formula to create tasty and well balanced meals made easy.

Here are some of my favorite tips for cooking at home:

Use fresh herbs and spices to flavor food to help reduce sodium intake (and when you do use salt, use a sea salt or Himalayan salt instead of table salt)
Resist the urge to peel. Produce like apples, potatoes, carrots, even eggplant contain many vitamins and minerals in their outer skin or just below it.
Take recipes as suggestions. Scan before cooking to see which ingredients you can swap out for healthier versions (like using coconut oil for sautéing instead of vegetable oil)
Beef up your meals with veggies. Add lots of chopped vegetables to your meal to add more volume to your dishes. This will not only give you even more nutrients, but by eating more it’ll help you feel fuller longer
Meal prep in advance! Cook a big batch of grains, chop a bunch of veggies, grill a couple pounds of meat all at once so it’ll cut your cooking time for future

What’s your favorite home cooking tip or trick? Post to the FB group!

STEP 8: HYDRATE, HYDRATE, HYDRATE!

The food we eat is obviously really important to our overall health, but so is hydration! The two are really closely linked.

Drinking enough water throughout the day helps prevent dehydration, which commonly causes headaches, muscle and joint pains, hinders digestion, and tricks us into thinking we’re hungry. Water also keeps us healthy by flushing out toxins, promoting healthy skin, and even slowing the aging process!

The general rule of thumb is to drink half your body weight in ounces of water per day…so if you weighed 150 pounds you’d want to aim for 75 ounces of water.

Water on its own can be kind of boring, so mix it up! Make it fun by adding natural flavors. By putting things like fresh herbs, vegetables, essential oils, or fruits in your water (I add them to a pitcher of water or my glass/bottle of water) it’s a lot healthier for you than sugary juices, sodas, or even flavored water you can buy at the store.