There’s a fad diet for practically everyone.
But as fun as the diets may seem, it’s often difficult to stick with them for more than a few weeks. As a result few people actually see any long-term results.
Rather than trying one of those, here are 15 science-backed habits that can help boost your health and may help with weight loss as well.
- 1. Eat food you enjoy
- It may seem as if the easiest way to lose weight is to stop eating the foods you overindulge in. But this can be short-sighted, Lisa Sasson, a New York University nutrition professor, told Business Insider in 2015. “If you pick a diet with foods you don’t like, you’re doomed to fail,” Sasson said. Food is a pleasurable experience; if you cut out all the foods you like, you probably won’t stick to your plan.
- 2. Portion sizes are key.
There’s a psychological component to eating, especially when you have weight loss in mind. Being conscious of losing weight and sticking to the right portion sizes is half the battle, Sasson said. This phenomenon is whymost people in studies lose weight, regardless of whether they’re in the group assigned a special diet. Simply being studied can lead to people being more conscious of what they’re eating.
But overall, keeping an eye on portion sizes is a great way to help avoidovereating especially with portion sizes rising since the 1970s.
- 3. Skip the restaurant and pack your
Portion sizes in American restaurants have increased by as much asthree timesin the past 20 years, and it is changing what we think of as a normal meal.
“One way to keep calories in check is to keep food portions no larger than the size of your fist,” Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute,writes.
If you’re trying to control your portion sizes, it is best to pack your own lunch because restaurants will give you more calories than you need.
- 4. Stick with food that’s packed with fiber and protein.
Fiber and protein help keep you feeling full. Processed foods like candy bars and cookies are often low in both of these ingredients and instead are “readily absorbable,” Sasson said. That’s why you don’t feel as satiated after eating a bag of potato chips as you might after eating a fiber-filled baked potato.
In areviewof weight-loss studies focusing on fiber, protein, and fullness, psychologists at the University of Sussex made the case for high-protein and high-fiber foods to be included in weight-loss plans because feeling full can help prevent overeating and spurweight loss.
- 5. Go Mediterranean.
As if you needed more excuses to eat as ifyou live on the Mediterranean (olive oil, pasta, hummus, tomato, and cucumber salad what’s not to love?), studies have shown that a so-called Mediterranean diet may help reduce the risk ofheart diseaseand provide some potentialmemory-related benefits. And a recent study also found a link between the eating plan and a lower risk ofbreast cancer in older women.
According to Sasson, there may be an overlooked element of the Mediterranean diet: It may not be so much about what the people who live around the Mediterranean Sea are eating, but rather about what they’re not eating, such as oversize portions and heavily processed food.
- 6. Get your calories from food, not liquids.
Juice and soda may taste better than plain old water, but the calories inside them can add up.
In astudyof 173 obese women ages 25to50, researchers found that swapping out sweetened beverages with plain old water was linked with weight loss, independent from diet and exercise.
7. Be flexible.
Sasson says having an eating plan with flexibility is key. Weight Watchers, for example, allows for a variety of different meal types. Having options for what you can eat can makes it easier to build that into your life, as opposed to a diet that sticks to the same five meals every week.
In astudyof diets like Weight Watchers and Atkins thatallowed for such flexibility, doctors and dietitians at Tufts University looked at 160 overweight people ages 22 to72 on the diets over a one-year period. They found that the people who followed the popular diets sawmore weight loss and a reduction in heart risk factors compared tothose who didn’t stick with the diets.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
8. Go with your gut … bacteria.
The microbes that live in your stomach,collectively called your microbiome, play an important role in digestion. In a recent study, researchers in Sweden came up with amathematical formulato help find the right eating plan for each person based on his or her microbiome. The study authors found evidence that these plans could help the participants lose weight and even possibly prevent certain diseases.
This research is still preliminary, so beware of diets that suggest there’s some kind of magic formula for your microbiome. But if you want to diversify your gut microbiome, here’s some simple advice that makes for healthy eating either way: Eat a variety of dairy, vegetables, chicken, fish, eggs, and oils, the study authors suggest.
- 9. Don’t kill yourself on the treadmill. There may be a simpler way.
Eating when you’revery hungrycan make youmore likely to overeat.
One possible way to stave off this problemmay be as simple as drinkingat least 16 ounces of water about 30 minutes before your meal. Asmall studyfound that people who did this before at least one meal a day lost 2.7 pounds more than their study counterparts who did not drink water before meals. Neither of the two groups reported changes in their exercise regimes, either. (Needless to say, exercise has many, many benefits and should be incorporated into all healthy lifestyles; but moderate exercise is often enough and won’t leave you famished.)
- 10. Never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry.
Onesmall studyfound that hungry shoppers grabbed one-third more junk food than full shoppers. So, just make sure that you’re aware not only of what you’re eating, but also of what you’re buying.
- 11. A good night’s sleep could be better than a late-night run.
Beware the cravings that can come with feeling sleepy.
Researchers usingfunctional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)scanned the brainsof 25 men and women of average weight as they looked at images of delicious, fatty junk food. The participants were studied after a week of ninehours of sleep a night and then after a week of fourhours of sleep a night.
Someone took a bite out of the donut.Flickr/Kiran Foster
When the participants were well rested, the reward centers of their brains didn’t react nearly as much to the junk food photos as when they were lacking sleep, suggesting that we’re subconsciously more attracted to fatty foods when we’re tired and need energy.
- 12. Start each day right with breakfast. Your body will thank you.
There’s a saying that breakfast is the most important meal of your day, and it may be true. Evidence suggests that an early mealkick-starts your metabolism, the process that breaks down the food you eat into energy. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth on the topic, and astudy published in Julydidn’t see any effects of eating breakfast on the kids’ ability to perform in each of the cognitive tests compared to kids who had not eaten breakfast.
But, of course, breakfast does provide vital nutrients to keep you energized throughout the day, so if you do eat breakfast, it’simportant to eat amorning meal that’s highin protein and complex carbohydrates, butlowin sugar.
- 13. Don’t snack after dinner.
Ashort-term studyof 29 young men showed that they consumed on average 238 fewer calories each day for two weeks when they were told not to eat anything between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. And these calories they were no longer eating were coming mostly from high-fat, high-carb foods.
- 14. Avoid diet drinks.
In astudythat ran from 1979 to 1996, researchers found from a sample of nearly 750 people age 65 or older, that those who drank diet soda on a daily basis had a 70% greater increase in waist size than people who drank it less regularly or not at all.
While there’sno evidenceto support the scary notion that artificial sweeteners increase our risk of cancer, there is reason to suspect that in the long run it won’t help your waist line. Still, whilethese studies show only an association between drinking diet soda and putting on weight, you can’t go wrong switching from a highly processed beverage to plain old water or seltzer.
- 15. Don’t go hungry.
At the end of World War II,researchers starved36 young male volunteers for 24 weeks, giving them a low-fat diet limited to just 1,600 calories a day, which was600 to 1,500 calories fewerthan their body needed (depending on their level of daily activity) to maintain a healthy weight.
Though the men lost about apound a week for the first 12 weeks, they lost only one-fourth a pound a week for the last 12 weeks. Worse things happened as well: Many became obsessed with the thought of food, began to lose their hair, and noticed that their wounds seemed to heal more slowly.
When the men were finally allowed to eat freely, many went on extreme binges, consuming as much as 10,000 calories a day five times as many calories as they needed. Twenty weeks after freedom the men had gained an average of 50% more body fat than when they began the study.
You cannot go hungry forever, and your body doesn’t want you to, so be smart about losing weight. First, know how many calories your body needs with online calculators like this one from theMayo Clinic, and then reduce your caloric intake moderately.