Hugo L
Early mornings can provide us with a powerful window for weight loss, since our bodies are in a rested and fasted state.
Fact or fiction?
The proof is in the sugarless pudding. Try a few of these on for size and watch the pounds melt:
1. Low-Calorie Nutrient-Dense Smoothies for Breakfast
Smoothies that contain greens like spinach or kale and protein powder, as well as berries and seeds like flax, provide the perfect balance of nutrient dense fibre, hunger hushing protein, and delicious healthy fats in the convenience of a quick, easy to prepare breakfast.
Adding smoothies that is low in calories but nutrients dense to your breakfast is an easy way to start your weight loss journey.
2. Vegetables Before Breakfast
Seriously? Yes.
In case it’s not completely apparent by now, vegetables are nutrient dense and low in calories. They provide satiety because of their high water content and fill you up quickly. Eating a fibre dense, nutrient rich serving of vegetables before breakfast, such as a cup of spinach, tomato, or cucumber will fill you up fast.
Afterwards, eggs, oatmeal or yogurt will keep you feeling full through the day.
3. Oatmeal
Not the pre-packaged variety, rather regular or steel cut oats are packed with fibre and low in calories. Those who have been trained to avoid carbohydrates may shun the idea of oatmeal for breakfast, but fortunately, it has little impact on the blood sugar since it digests slowly and is so high in fibre.
Adding delicious cinnamon will further enhance the flavour as well as control blood sugar. Want berries? Absolutely go for it!
4. Healthy Fats
Healthy fats are healthy for a reason. They provide richness, satisfying tastes, as well as a feeling of fullness. When consumed in moderate quantities they have numerous health benefits and can help you lose weight.
Some healthy fats can be found in grass-fed butter, olive oil, coconut, natural almond butter, avocado, and Greek yogurt. These foods can be added to any healthy breakfast to make it even healthier.
5. Lemon Water Before Breakfast
Before you have breakfast, have a glass of warm water with some added lemon juice to boost liver function, the organ that metabolizes body fat.
Lemon juice is a powerful way to clear toxins, support the immune system, improve digestion, and protect the liver and kidneys.
6. Build Good Bacteria
Not a pretty topic, but our intestines contain bacteria and possibly parasites. If there is an imbalance between good and bad bacteria, a lot of the unhealthy processed foods that we eat can’t be properly digested, resulting in bloat, and an inability to lose weight.
Taking a probiotic supplement with breakfast or probiotic yogurt will assist in creating “good” bacteria colonies within your intestinal tract.
7. Walking After Breakfast
Kick your metabolism into high gear with a half hour walk after breakfast to burn fat. This activity is nowhere near as strenuous as a workout at the gym, but squeezing a brisk walk into your morning routine not only burns fat, but also fires your metabolism to burn fat for the rest of the day.
Bear in mind that walking before breakfast can sharpen the appetite and cause you to eat more than you wanted, but regardless, a morning walk is powerfully-health building.
8. Stretching
Regardless of your lifestyle, gentle stretches in the morning make perfect sense, as they elongate every part of the body and prevent atrophy and stiffness that can come with aging. Stretching makes you feel slim.
It also doesn’t create a ferocious appetite, as some workouts do, yet supplies blood and oxygen to every part of your body. It also makes you feel absolutely wonderful because after stretching, the body feels more deeply relaxed.
9. Cold Showers
A cold shower every morning, as cold as you can stand, increases your metabolism and burns brown fat. In fact, a fifteen minute cold shower can burn as much fat as an hour of moderate exercise, according to studies published in a U.S. journal.
Shivering – the body’s response to the cold – releases those hormones that are released during exercise. Our white fat stores extra calories and our good brown fat stores energy. In essence, shivering from exposure to cold temperatures activates and releases the brown fat. The great news is that the white fat, during the process of shivering, is transformed into brown fat.
10. Breathing
Our breathing gets shallower as we age.
Weight loss is a biochemical process where the bulk of our body fat is expelled through the particular quality of carbon dioxide that we breathe out when we are exercising. Granted, according to science, the process requires us to be almost out of breath (from exercise only) for this biochemical reaction to take place.
A method that originated in Japan, called the “Long Breath Method” involves assuming a posture while breathing deeply, thus conditioning the core body and lungs internally. This would go hand-in-hand nicely with a morning stretching routine.
