Skip to content How to lose weight?
Only eat completely unprocessed foods
Processed foods are very calorific and a person needs to eat a lot of them in order to feel full. Simple unprocessed foods like vegetables, fruit, beans, and grains will keep a person satisfied for hours with solid nutrition and very little calories. Soups and salads make good weight loss meals.
Processed foods contain many additive chemicals which interfere with the endocrine system, which manages the delicate metabolic system needed for weight loss.
Processed foods create cravings for more high calorie, nutrient poor foods. These intense cravings go away after two weeks on a diet of unprocessed foods.
Stay away from all processed dairy and sugar. Sugar is more addictive than cocaine. See the Malka Reichman food pyramid to learn what to eat.
Meat is not a low calorie food. It is good only in a small portion once or twice a week, as long as it is grass fed meat. Grain fed beef on average has an Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio of 20:1. Grass fed beef has a ratio closer to 3:1, well within the 4:1 guidelines of a healthy diet.
Do some form of restrictive eating
This means if you are up 16 hours a day, do not eat all 16 hours of the day! For health reasons, a person should not be eating outside an 8 hour a day eating window. People should preferable have the eating window close before nightfall. A person needs to stop eating at least 4-5 hours before bedtime to be able to sleep properly. A person should just drink filtered water outside the eating window. If a person wants to lose weight, they should restrict their eating window to 6 hours a day.
This enables a person’s body to enter a state of ketosis which is critical for the body to engage in self healing.
Limit toxins in food, drinks and body and household products
Toxins interfere with the endocrine system, among many systems. Losing weight is a complex metabolic process and a person needs a high functioning endocrine system to lose weight.
If a person is lathering on commercial creams and soaps, breathing in cleansers, and putting on makeup that are all endocrine disruptors, and consuming foods and drink from plastic which leach more endocrine disrupting chemicals, it makes it almost impossible for a person to lose weight. Most commercial products are a blend endocrine and respiratory disruptors and carcinogens. Check household and personal products on this toxin checklist https://www.bcpp.org/resource/red-list/ and you can find cleaner replacements on EWG.org or your local health food store. Not everything in a health food store has clean ingredients, so it is important to check labels, but you can be sure that every product in the pharmacy is very toxic.
Eat only organic to not eat glyphosate on produce, grains, nuts, seeds and only eat meat from grass fed cows. Commercial dairy is full of hormones and antibiotics (both cause weight gain), causes diseases like cancer and inflammation and is also very calorific. Getting a reverse osmosis (RO) water filter to filter our the tens of chemicals and toxins in city tap water is very important so a person’s kidney’s do not need to do this. An RO system can filter out the fluoride that is being added to most cities’ water. Fluoride is a biproduct of aluminum manufacturing and is a serious poison.
Exercise everyday
Exercise means doing a minimum of 1 mile of brisk walking or jogging a day at a rate of 4mph, which is enough to raise the heart rate. That means 1 mile in 15 minutes or less. Doubly better is 2 miles a day, in 30 minutes or less. You won’t lose many calories with exercise. But exercise is critical for weight loss and health for so many reasons. Full body aerobics and dance are also forms of exercise.
The body needs exercise to function. It also strengthens the body (which will make the body look toned; muscles do look good!), which will make the body more efficient at performing all functions and a delicate task like weight loss.
Exercise helps detox by sweating out toxins and by helping a person eliminate properly. Elimination is the body’s primary way of detox, the skin is the secondary detox pathway. The intestines are sandwiched between other internal organs and during a brisk walk, they will be mechanically pressed and squeezed, which helps the digestion process along. The body can not only use the squeezing motion (peristalsis) and acids to digest foods. The body needs brisk waking or jogging in order to mechanically push the food through the system. Toxins get reabsorbed with sluggish elimination pathways. Detox is the way to make the endocrine system more efficient.
I do not recommend competitive sports since it can cause unnatural wear and tear on the body and also can cause injury. I do not either recommend man made ‘exercise’ reps like crunches which can cause the stomach muscles to separate (diastasis recti). It is unknown what harm other unnatural ‘exercise moves’ can cause.
Swimming is not as solid an exercise since it does not do enough to build bone density. It is beneficial for a person who is compromised physically and is not capable of doing a brisk walk. Swimming in a chlorinated pool is very unhealthy since chlorine is a carcinogen. Salt or ozone are healthier alternatives to keeping pools clean.
A full body motion like brisk walk or jog, while using both arms, means a person will also develop arm and abdomen muscles. Brooks brand makes great sneakers.
Exercise helps detox through elimination and the skin, and it also helps detox the mind. A person releases stress through exercise and the body releases feel good hormones (endorphins) after exercise. This can eliminate the desire the eat because of stress.
Exercise slows the aging process on the cellular level, helps prevent disease by strengthening the heart and all internal muscles and increases circulation to all parts of the body.
Maimonides, also referred to as the Rambam, was a preeminent physician 800 years ago and also served as the personal physician to Saladin, the first sultan of both Syria and Egypt. Maimonides writes that if a person eats healthy food but does not exercise, he will suffer from many ailments. And that exercise is so important that even if a person eats unhealthy food in small portions but does exercise, he will still be healthy.
Drink enough water
A person needs to drink half their body weight in fluid ounces of water everyday, to sustain the body to be able to perform its basic life functions. A person needs to drink 75 ounces of water everyday for a bodyweight of 150 pounds. If a person does not drink enough, the body cannot function optimally, to be able to lose weight.
Also, not drinking enough will make a person feel hungry, when they are really thirsty, and will cause constipation.
Make sure to eat a calorie deficit everyday
This is the most basic concept of weight loss.
You can find your daily calorie needs by searching online ‘find daily calorie need.’ You input your height and weight on an online calculator, and you will get the amount of calories needed to consume everyday to maintain your current weight.
This means that if you eat more than those calories daily, you will gain weight. And if you eat less than those calories daily, you will lose weight. It takes a loss of 3,500 calories to lose one pound. So if someone needs to eat 2,000 calories to maintain their current weight and they only eat 1,500 calories, that is calorie deficit of 500 calories. A daily calorie deficit of 500 calories, means a weight loss of 1 pound in 7 days. If that daily deficit is continued, that will be 4 pound weight loss a month. As a person loses weight, every so often, they will need to calculate their daily calorie needs again, since the calorie amount will change. It takes less calories to maintain a new lower weight. Medications, hormonal contraceptives and toxins will likely interfere with this metabolic process.
Some people are careful only on weekdays to eat less than the calories needed to maintain their current weight and then on weekends their daily calorie intake is higher than the amount needed to maintain their current weight, so they do not lose weight. It is important to make sure that there is a calorie deficit every day.
Get enough sleep
Sleep loss creates a hormone imbalance in the body that can cause overeating and weight gain. Leptin and ghrelin are hormones that regulate appetite, and when you are not getting enough sleep, the production of these hormones is altered in a way that creates increased feelings of hunger. Insufficient sleep can also impair your metabolism of food.
Say a one line prayer everyday
Say out loud in the morning, a one line request to G-d, that you have the resolve to stay away from addictive, processed foods and that your body can perform the complex metabolic task to lose weight. In addition to asking for Divine assistance, this request also helps focus a person’s inner resolve to make the right decisions on what to eat that day.
Hacks
Breathing in straight from the bottle or diffusing grapefruit essential oil or eating a grapefruit can take away an appetite. While someone is getting off sugar and processed foods and has cravings for them, this can help a person push through.
An apple, celery sticks, raw carrots and cooked chick peas make great, healthy and filling snacks.
