How Can I Lose Weight?
Losing weight can be hard at times, especially if you’ve tried so many ways without success. However, it’s important to maintain an ideal body weight to stay fit and healthy. When trying to lose weight, bear in mind that the fashionable trend of dieting for some time then bouncing back to your usual lifestyle habits is not great for losing weight. Instead, aim for a gradual, natural transition to a healthier long-term lifestyle. Here are five tips to help you get started, along with some key points about how Chinese Medicine can help.
1. Eat more Fruits and Vegetables
When you include more fruits and vegetables into your diet, you are sure to lose weight. Whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains contain so many nutrients that are essential to our health and wellbeing, without the added fat and sugar that comes with most processed foods. Fruits and veggies are also great for weight loss, because you can eat a huge volume of them without gaining many calories.
It’s a good idea to keep some handy whole food snacks at home, rather than buying unhealthy snacks when you get desperate. Healthy snacks ideas include fresh fruits, carrot sticks with homemade chickpea hummus, and a natural trail mix of nuts and seeds.
2. Drink more Water
Often, we might mistake our feeling of thirst for feeling hungry. If you have set mealtimes, try to avoid eating too much in between, and instead drink some water. This can help you to feel full as well as keeping you hydrated. If you drink sugary drinks, try to replace these with water, or even herbal tea.
3. Eat Slowly
Living in our busy modern world can mean it’s hard to find time to even eat properly. But no matter how busy we are, we need to take care of ourselves as well. Although we may not realise it, it takes some time for our bodies to realise that we are full. That means that if we eat too fast, we may consume too much food before we realise that we’re full. So, eating more slowly and consciously can help us stick to healthy portion sizes. Eating slowly can also promote the production of hormones that may help weight loss.
4. Exercise
To get best results when losing weight, combine healthy eating habits with some physical movement like cardio exercises. You might like to include some power walking, cycling, running, hiking, or swimming to your week to boost your physical and mental health and lose weight simultaneously. Cardio can help to burn dangerous fat that may build up around our organs and may also help to reduce the risk of heart disease. Be sure to include some resistance exercise as well, to maintain your muscle mass and keep yourself fit and strong.
5. Get a Good Sleep at Night
You might be wondering, “what has sleep got to do with losing weight?” But getting enough good quality sleep is vital to losing weight. In fact, you are 55% more likely to become obese if you are sleep deprived compared to someone to gets enough sleep. Getting enough sleep helps to maintain the natural fluctuations of hormones that control appetite, which means it’s easier to regulate eating habits. But when these hormones are disrupted by poor sleeping patterns, it can lead to uncontrolled eating which may lead to weight gain.
How Can Chinese Medicine Help Me Lose Weight?
While these five lifestyle tips are very important when it comes to losing weight, you might still need an extra boost to get back to your ideal weight. This is why Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is so useful. TCM can help you treat diseases such as obesity in a very holistic and effective way. While other treatments focus on the external symptoms, TCM treats the underlying cause of symptoms like obesity.
TCM is highly unique in that the treatment prescribed to you is based entirely on your individual health situation. This means that your Chinese Medicine practitioner might prescribe one combination of Chinese herbs to help you lose weight, while another person might need completely different herbs to encourage weight loss. This is the special significance of TCM in treating obesity.
As shown below, researchers have also found that TCM has an important role to play in the treatment of obesity. “As obesity and obesity-related metabolic diseases are often multi-gene variation, multi-target disturbance and multi-disease related, it is not realistic to treat obesity in a single way, while TCM’s multi-target, synergistic effect between drugs, small toxic and side effects, and easy to obtain from nature will become its advantages in treating obesity.”
Conclusion:
Overall, lifestyle changes like eating more fruits and veggies, drinking water, eating slowly, exercising, and getting a good sleep are all important factors in reducing your body weight. These strategies should be applied gradually and in a sustainable way, to ensure a healthy, long-term weight loss experience. TCM is also great way to boost weight loss in a holistic and effective way.
References:
Bjarnadottir, A., & Holland, K. (2022, January 19). 29 Easy Ways to Lose Weight Naturally (Backed by Science). Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/30-ways-to-lose-weight-naturally
Li, C., Zhang, H., & Li, X. (2020). The mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of obesity. Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy, 13, 3371–3381. https://doi.org/10.2147/DMSO.S274534