Eat More, Weigh Less: 8 Surprising Reverse Diet Tips

Do you want to lose weight with some easy, expert-backed tips? Cori Lefkowith is the founder of Redefining Strength and is devoted to helping people get in shape no matter their age. In a new YouTube video, she reveals a few of her simple tricks for losing weight fast. “Stop believing that losing weight and maintaining your results has to be a full-time job because it doesn't. And the more we act like it has to be, the more we're ultimately sabotaging ourselves. We're just creating unsustainable habits that, while they may yield some fast initial results, also lead to a quick plateau and us just regaining the weight and even more,” she says in the clip. “To help you stop this extreme dieting cycle, I'd found myself personally caught in for years. I wanna share five weird but extremely effective weight loss tips to help you build your leanest, strongest body ever.”

1. Stop Trying So Hard to Lose Weight

Her first trick is one of the “oddest sounding weight loss tips ever,” she admits in her post. “Stop focusing on losing weight. That goal weight you have in mind that you've tried countless times to get back to is actually stopping you from losing weight,” she says. “It's causing you to eat less as you train harder, which doesn't make you actually lose fat any faster. Our singular focus on that scale and that number changing leads to burnout and metabolic adaptations that make each weight loss attempt harder and harder.

Measure Success by Non-Scale Victories

“Instead, we need to focus on multiple ways of measuring success and even step away from the scale for a bit because it isn't that number on the scale we're truly after. It's how we feel at that weight that we want back. And that feeling isn't attached to the number. It's how energized we felt,” she says. “Focusing only on that number being our only measure of progress often leads to us giving up on habits that are working habits that would yield the results we want if we gave them time because the scale doesn't really show us true fat loss happening, especially as we retain and even gain muscle.” She recommends using how your clothes fit, progress pictures, and measurements instead. “We need to celebrate the other signs of success such as improved energy, better sleep, crushing our workouts, and inches being lost that show us the habits are working.”

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2. Build Your Diet Based on Meals You Live

The next weird tip, and it's more a way of thinking about how to make diet changes, is to build your diet based on meals you love,” she says. “When we think about adjusting our diet, we go to all the foods we can't have and then find diet meals we now need to make. This makes us honestly often feel deprived and really not enjoy our lifestyle. It makes us dream of going back to what we were doing, and this is why the changes don't stick. We don't evolve our diet to match our needs and goals.”

Tweak Your Meals to Make Them Healthier

“Instead of focusing on diet meals, take meals you already eat and love and find ways to adjust them to match your goals,” she says. If you love pizza, she recommends finding ways to add protein or adjust the portion. If you are a pasta lover, either add more protein or swap regular pasta for chickpeas or lentils. “Take the dishes you ultimately want to enjoy and find ways to tweak them so you don't feel like everything you love is being cut out or that your meal prep and cooking habits all of a sudden have to shift so dramatically you're miserable. Stop making yourself extra miserable, trying to overhaul your diet completely.”

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3. Cut Back on Cardio

“The third tip is something some of you may hate here and others may love: Cut back on the steady state cardio,” she says. “If you love running or cycling, I'm not telling you not to do it, but if you've been struggling to lose weight and see the muscle definition you want, you may want to cut back on your mileage for a bit or really acknowledge the cost of doing this cardio and make massive changes to your strength workouts and diet to account for this. For those of you who refuse to cut back on the cardio, slow down your strength workouts. Lift heavier with lower reps and longer rest periods while increasing your protein more than you want to. And even deprioritize your endurance sports to focus on your lifting when you're freshest.”

Instead, Focus on Building Muscle

“For those of you who are thinking, I don't like cardio, but it's always helped me lose weight in the past. Think about that statement. You are here because you need to lose weight again. So, as a long-term strategy, cardio didn't work. Part of the reason is that we've always used it to try to out-exercise our diet instead of making dietary changes, but also because we haven't really built muscle, and we've even lost it in the process of eating less. As we try to burn more, this negatively impacts our metabolic rate and how many calories we burn, not only in our workouts but at rest. And the more calories we burn at rest, the more muscle we have, the more toned we look, and the easier our results will be to maintain. So instead of turning to cardio, focus on strength workouts, whether you challenge yourself with body weight sessions or hit the gym to lift, focus on building muscle,” she explains.

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4. Don’t Always Be on a Diet

“This next tip was one of the weirder realizations for me, but also why I feel I'm able to stay leaner all year round: Stop acting like the person always on a diet. When we're working to lose weight, we can feel like the friend who can never eat out. We can feel weird at parties or celebrations. We can feel like we have to avoid the baked goods at our work or office lunches. We can feel a bit like we have to isolate ourselves and not really have fun. No wonder most of us dread making diet changes and ultimately fall off the healthy habits we're trying to build. But we often do this because we feel this need to be perfect, to eat clean based on what someone else told us a healthy diet should look like. We also don't own who we are, our current lifestyle, or what we want our lifestyle to look like ultimately. We approach habit changes as being these very set things we have to do in one rigid form instead of finding ways to implement them to match what we need,” she says.

Instead, Practice Moderation

“If your friend invites you out to dinner at your favorite restaurant, instead of saying no, instead of trying to deprive yourself of a meal you love, plan it in. Maybe you go for a lower calorie and higher protein earlier in the day to have flexibility at that meal instead of feeling like you've ruined the day. Just focus on that portion control and getting right back into your healthy habits the day after, too. Don't let that dinner become multiple meals. If you love the baked goods someone surprised you with at work, maybe you have one, but instead of feeling guilty for it so that you end up eating ten or forgetting about the rest of your healthy meals the rest of the day, just enjoy it and even adjust your other meals to create a balance,” she says.

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5. Take More “Movement Snacks”

The final tip that she “found to be super key in not only achieving amazing body recomposition but sustaining it over the course of the year is to take more movement snacks,” she says. “I think so often we put this emphasis on working out and working out intensely over just moving more. But the more active we are, the more we want to be active and the more active we want to be. Often, the more we wanna do other healthy habits that support the fact that we feel good, the more we do, the more we do.”

The More You Move, the Less Likely You Are to “Indulge in Mindless Eating”

“Throughout the day, include movement, snacks, and getting up and doing something, even if it's just for a minute or two. Listen to a song or quick podcast and walk around your office. Get up and stretch to reverse, sitting hunched over. Get up between episodes of your nightly TV show and go roll out or even wash the dishes quickly. Do a quick post-dinner walk, but get up and move around,” she suggests. “The less we're just seated, bored, lazing around doing nothing, the less likely we are to indulge in mindless eating. And often, a big habit we have to break on top of the benefits of moving more is mindless eating. Especially the desire to eat late at night while watching TV. However, just trying to willpower our way through this desire can often lead to losing the battle when stressed because we haven't shifted our patterns or environment. That's why these movement snacks can be so key. We aren't focusing on what we shouldn't be doing. We're focusing on something good. We want to do this mindset shift in focus to help us feel positive or feel like we're fighting something.” And if you enjoyed this article, take advantage of these 15 Quick Ways to Lose Body Fat Percentage in a Week.