Eating a well balanced meal and exercising regularly are a thing of the past. Why waste your time sweating it out and depriving yourself of the food you love when there are so many other calorie burning tactics to try? Laughing, breathing, and stuffing your face are just a few of the ways people have tried to lose the weight without altering their lifestyle. Do these tricks really work or are they just wishful thinking? It’s up to you decide.
Eat a Grapefruit
Eating half a grapefruit with every meal is believed to increase the rate at which your body burns fat. This powerful fruit can block enzymes related to fat and carbohydrate storage and help your body burn calories while you eat. Amazing! Not in the mood for eating a tart fruit before chow time? Try an eight ounce glass of grapefruit juice instead of your normal beverage.
Drink Cold Water
A tall glass of water is not only refreshing, it’s an easy way to burn calories and stay hydrated. Water in general is good for your body, but the key to burning calories is to drink it on an empty stomach. Drinking cold water on an empty stomach will make your body work to heat it up to body temperature for processing. The more you drink, the more you burn. Bottoms up.
Don a Thermal Suit
This trash bag like suit will increase your body temperature so that you can sweat out all the toxins and melt away the pounds. Originally worn by wrestlers and other athletes looking to drop weight, the suit has since become popular among the average individual looking to slim down. Put it on before you exercise and prepare to sweat! Be sure to drink plenty of water during and after you exercise in order to stray hydrated.
Add a Little Spice to Your Diet
Eating spicy food can kick-start your metabolism and leave you with a healthy glow. Try a dish made with chili pepper or mustard seed, both of which contain a calorie burning compound called capsaicin. Spicy Indian curry, Thai papaya salad, or a little extra wasabi with your sushi are just a few spicy eats that will clear your sinuses and leave you feeling all warm and tingly inside.
Breathe
Pranayama is a powerful breathing technique used by yogis to clear and cleanse the mind and body. It can also help you burn a few calories as it massages and tones the internal organs, all while heating your body and stimulating your metabolism. All this from breathing! Try Ujjayi breath. This is done by constricting the back of the throat until your breath begins to sound like the ocean. Be sure to slow down your breathing and really draw out your inhales and exhales.
Eat Standing Up
According to the Mayo Clinic, standing up while eating burns more calories than sitting down. Instead of sitting at your desk or at a low table, try standing around a high table or at a counter. Standing is also a good way to stretch your spine and give your body a break from sitting behind a desk all day.
Fly a Kite
For every 30 minutes you spend flying a kite you’ll burn 80 calories. Spend an afternoon in the park and you could burn up to 500 calories! Sound too good to be true? You won’t know until you try. For maximum calorie burning you may want to try running with your kite. Pack a light lunch and plenty of water to refuel, and don’t forget your grapefruit.
Laugh
A hearty chuckle can indeed burn calories, as well as alter your mood and reduce stress and tension. Join a laughter yoga group and you’re guaranteed to spend a full 60 minutes laughing each time you meet. Laughter yoga uses the breath and the energy of others to keep laughter going. You’ll make funny faces and engage in a childlike playfulness you thought you left behind long ago.
Stuff Your Face
One theory suggests that careful eaters splurge once every 2 to 3 weeks. The belief behind this idea is that once your body gets used to eating a restricted amount of calories your metabolism will eventually slow down. Spend one day amassing as many calories as possible and you’ll reset your metabolism and start the calorie burning process all over again.
Sleep Naked
Sleeping naked isn’t just for lovers. Slumbering in the buff puts your body to work so that you can stay warm. Pajamas trap heat and keep your body temperature high, so that your body doesn’t have to work as hard. Peel off the layers and keep the blankets to a minimum and you’ll be dropping pounds in no time.
Take a Seat
Chairs are nice, but if you really want to make yourself work, replace the chair with an exercise ball. Turn your work day into a workout day by balancing yourself on an exercise ball while sitting at your desk. Using a ball will improve your posture and work your core as you keep your muscles engaged and focus on maintaining your balance.
Window Shop
When you’re longing for a shopping spree, but lacking the cash, window shopping is the next best thing. Get a quick fix of new items while walking it out and eliminating calories. While normal shopping requires you to stop and wait in lines, window shopping keeps you moving, so that you can maximize the burn without spending a dime.
Eat Garlic
Eating a few cloves of garlic a day can increase your metabolism and break down fat stored in your body. This stinking rose contains oils that promote peristalsis, which helps your body to loosen fat and flush it out. Eating garlic also increases your body’s temperature so that you can maximize its fat burning potential.
Vibrate
The Vibration Plate claims to vibrate the calories away, making exercise a thing of the past. The machine has a vibrating plate that you stand on in different positions to target different areas of your body. There’s no need to move, the machine does all the work for you. Just 10 minutes a day can increase your metabolism and your bone density, plus help you shed pounds and tone up.
Go Raw
A growing number of people believe eating only raw foods is the best way to burn calories and cleanse your system. Those who follow the raw food diet believe that heating food above 116 degrees F destroys enzymes in the food that can aid in absorption and digestion. If you’re looking to go raw stick to unprocessed, whole foods such as: fruits and vegetables, nuts, beans, seeds, grains, legumes, and seaweed.
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I'm so glad you told me to breathe, I would have forgotten otherwise.
Seriously though you should be ashamed of yourself for promoting such garbage. 'Vibrate'? Yeah companies looking to fool, well, fools out of their money sell that crap. The key to losing weight is *expending* energy, which causes your body to break down the fat stores on your body to burn as fuel, producing sweat. (Imagine your body is a car, your fat stores are the gasoline and your sweat is the exhaust. If you're not burning your gasoline off, you're not losing weight.)
Capsaicin may increase your metabolism but your body also corrects for it by *dropping* your metabolism, because your body wants to maintain as much fat as possible.
Don't think you can lose weight by changing your tactics, the only way to lose weight is to SWEAT IT OFF!
Not 100% true, phillydrifter– exercise plays roughly 30%-40% in diet management. The other 60%-70% comes from food intake. Not to say you shouldn't exercise– but it's no good exercising even 5 hours a day if you're going to spend the other 11 waking hours eating cake, fries, burgers and ice-cream.
In fact, the best way to lose weight is to simply put down the fork once in a while and choose healthier options overall. Instead of eating 2500-3000 calories, try to eat 1800-2000. You're losing calories to the equivalent of about 3 hours of exercise. Combine that with exercise, and you'll lose weight faster.
I completely agree with you on the garbage, though– most of this is complete nonsense. Vibrating? How would that work, exactly? To extend your metaphor, philly, if you put a car on a conveyor belt and wiggle it around, it does not use fuel. Why? Because the conveyor belt is expending the energy, not the car. Same with humans on a vibration machine.
The only tips which have any scientific merit are kite flying, which is a very mild form of exercise, window shopping, which of course is just walking with stores around you, sleeping naked (assuming it's cold enough) since your body works much harder keeping you warm (but the increase in calorie intake in winter would easily negate any effects of increased metabolism), and of course the whole sitting on a exercise ball thing, which is a form of exercise in its own right– if you've ever sit on those, you know how much effort it takes to keep yourself up-right. Can't see if being beneficial in a work environment.
Not 100% true, SwartzePeet. the car / conveyor belt comparison does not work.
standing on a vibrating plate would burn calories, although it's still just gimick non-sense. The constant, albeit small, changes in direction caused by the plate would require core balance muscles to respond accordingly. on a long enough time line the effort would produce some measure of calorie expenditure.
same theory as what the shake-weight uses.
The idea of the Vibrating Machine is to increase your blood circulation, this will in turn help you flush out toxins that may be building up. Unlike our Blood that has our heart to pump is around our body, our Toxins rely soley on our movement to be pushed through our lymphatic system. You're not just standing on the machine doing nothing!!! You are doing squat etc…I personally don't think they are very effective, but many people think they're great. I use Toning Tables as my form of exercise amongst other things. SwartzePeet is correct in saying that weight loss is predominantly dependant on what goes in our mouths.
Look at the science behind the theories and you'll see the purpose!
Research before you label it as a gimmick – I work in the industry where we use non conventional tactics to lose weight….they work….
Hey phillydrifter –
Yes, I agree that a lot of these methods are ridiculous – although I do enjoy a good long belly laugh each day. Not sure how many calories it burns, though. It is just funny to see that these methods have been promoted by different sources – we at DailyBurn believe in exercise and proper diet to burn calories, not window shopping!
I've lost over 100# by being COMMITTED to my body and future, and realizing it's not going to happen over night, or by purchasing quick solutions…. It absolutely takes diet modification and increasing activity levels, but I think mostly it's in the head- take responsibility for what you put in your body, and how often you sweat.
Wow, are you serious? I assumed that the "Source" links would be to articles explaining these random factoids, not the source of the image. While it's nice they are actually giving proper credit to the photographers it would be better to actually back up these claims with some…, you know, what do you call them? Oh yeah, facts.
These are hilarious… I actually know a couple people who were on raw foods diet and they looked so sickly! They're now on a more normal vegan diet.
Not just barking mad but potentially dangerous too. Grapefruit is off the menu for people taking statins to lower cholesterol as grapefruit contains enzymes which block the statins.
a well balanced raw diet is NOT unhealthy. however, it is important to note that many people eat too much fruit and nuts on a raw diet, which IS unhealthy. raw dieters who eat/drink mainly greens don't look sickly at all. i wonder if ticktock's friends were in the middle of detoxing (during which time a raw foodist can feel/look sick) when they switched off.
grapefruit can also interact with a number of medications, including MAOIs. one would hope that folks read the info on their prescriptions though.
While many folks would like to chalk up raw foods weight loss power to the unaltered enzymes and antioxidants, a more relevant factor may be that a large portion of uncooked food calories pass through the digestive system unmetabolized. There is a good article in Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=... discussing how human evolution is maybe tied to cooked foods.
I like reading the little tips, and I'm sure there's truth to each one….
In our house, we call this stuff "Fat Lady Exercise". This is the types of stuff really lazy people will boast about when their exercise and eating habits are discussed. When we park at the back of the parking lot, because I'm too impatient to WAIT for a closer spot, my teenagers both will exclaim, "Oh, we're getting fat lady exercise today, huh mom?" …I don't think this stuff counts as real exercise, but If I already know that the only exercise I'm going to get in a day, is "fat lady exercise", for whatever reason, I'll do it, but I won't log it.
I use a vibration plate at the chiropractor's office. I do exercises on it, I don't know about weight loss but it can help improve posture, balance and flexibility.
my favorite one from that list has to be to fly a kite! i never knew!!!! kite flying is sooo much fun, I am almost surprised we dont do it more. The vibrate thing is kinda interesting too
lol
Ugh if I hear one more thing about "flushing" or "removing" toxins from one's body I'll puke up a whole load of toxin free stomach acid. This is one of the biggest frauds in modern quack-o psuedo alternative medicine out there. #1, our bodies are not normally filled with toxins, #2, if we get toxins our body has amazing abilities to flush them out all on their own (e.g. liver and kidney), and finally #3 if we get some persistent toxin in us, its very likely pocketed away in some fat cells and can't be "flushed" out using any vibration, cardio, or quack herb.
Like dioxin, eh? Oh wait…
Great Tips for everyone! I even recommend some for my friends! Thanks!