Easy Weight Loss Tips Without Dieting

Whether you officially declare you are on a diet, or resolve privately in your mind to lose weight, the mathematical principles of losing weight are the same. You must take in fewer calories or burn additional calories through exercise to lose pounds. However, you can lose weight without officially dieting if you use some simple, intuitive strategies that can help you make a permanent change in your attitude toward weight.

Reorder Your Thinking

To lose weight without dieting, try reordering your thinking. Rather than thinking of dieting as deprivation, think of changing your eating habits forever to achieve a better balance of nutrients, get your body weight within a healthy range and reduce your risk of some diseases. A true lifestyle and attitude change can help you lose weight. Understanding that you do not have to avoid your favorite foods forever, that fad diets do not work and weight loss will occur when you learn to control your caloric intake through making healthier choices may help you reorder your thinking.

Limit Processed Foods

Heavily processed and packaged foods generally offer less nutritional value than natural, whole foods. The sodium in packaged foods may help preserve the food or cover up chemical flavors in processed foods, but also increases your risk of hypertension, according to MayoClinic.com. The high-calorie, lower nutrient nature of packaged chips, cookies, snack crackers and boxed pasta meals makes it easy to eat too much and make losing weight difficult. Switch to natural fruits instead of cookies, make whole-grain pasta with low-calorie sauce rather than boxed, snack on 1/2 oz. of nuts instead of sleeves of crackers and eat dried fruits or raw crunchy vegetables instead of fried chips.

Use Your Plate

Nutritionist Lisa Young, in her book "The Portion Teller Plan," recommends a simple technique of examining the food on your plate before eating to limit calories and maximize nutrition. Young emphasizes that larger portions contain more calories, contributing to weight problems among Americans. Rather than a standard-sized dinner plate, use a smaller salad or dessert plate to limit the amount of food you can fit on the plate. Limit yourself to one small serving of the main dish, and put vegetables and fruits on at least half of your plate to avoid overeating on rolls, meats or grains.

Increase Your Activity

Although it is best to change your eating habits while adding exercise into your daily routine, it is possible to lose weight without significantly changing your eating habits by increasing your activity level. Both strength building and aerobic exercise burn calories and give your metabolism a short-term boost, which helps with weight loss. If you burn 300 calories from exercise each day while also cutting 200 extra calories from your diet, you can lose about 1 lb. per week, as 1 lb. equals 3,500 calories. It takes about 45 minutes of walking at a 3.5 mph pace to burn 300 calories, if you weigh 240 lbs., and about 52 minutes, if you weigh 200 lbs., according to MayoClinic.com.