6 Non-Surgical Weight Loss Treatments To Try

It’s extremely common to struggle with losing weight. We’re surrounded by sugary and high-calorie foods, we lead stressful lives, and there’s a lot of competing advice to be found that can make it hard to tell what you’re supposed to be doing.

Because of this, many overweight people pursue weight loss surgery as a solution — but if you’re having a difficult time shedding the pounds, don’t start thinking about something as drastic as surgery until you’ve exhausted all the alternatives.

Here are 6 non-surgical weight loss treatments you should try:

Yoga

If you don’t much like the prospect of taking your weight loss efforts outside or doing anything too strenuous, why not give yoga a try? In recent years, yoga has really shed a lot of negative perceptions and become widely recognised as a fantastic and versatile form of exercise.

The beauty of yoga is that you don’t need much space or equipment to try it, and your level of fitness when you start doesn’t matter. At its slowest, it can be a great tool for meditation, helping you to improve your flexibility and settle your mind so you can more calmly pursue your goals — but it’s entirely possible to take a more intense approach to yoga and make it a truly pulse-quickening activity that can burn fat and greatly strengthen your core.

If you can clear a floor area (and pick up a mat for comfort), you can begin. Even if you can only do some very simple stretches at first, keep at it, because even short regular sessions will leave you feeling revitalised in no time.

You never know: once you’ve moved on to more advanced yoga, you may even find yourself wanting to try other forms of exercise as well!

HIIT

Some people just aren’t suited to sedate options like yoga. They find regular exercise boring and slow and don’t want to spend hours at a time working on their fitness. If you’re that sort of person, you might just find that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is something worth trying.

While it can be applied to just about any type of exercise, HIIT is essentially cardio, and the principle is very simple. You do a short burst of intense exercise, wait, and then do another burst. Some people do sprints or lift weights, or even do star jumps. The whole point is to do away with the filler in standard exercise and get results in the least possible time.

Exercise is often a frustrating drawn-out process where it’s hard to tell what any given part of it is doing for you. You can get halfway through a set of light curls and feel that you’re wasting the time, which then leads your mind to drift to more fun activities like eating junk food. This doesn’t happen with HIIT: you’re either resting or you’re going 100% with your heart racing and your endorphins flowing.

If you’re in very poor shape but HIIT sounds like something you’d be interested in, be sure to consult a medical professional before you give it a try. You’ll probably need to be very careful with your approach, to begin with, so you don’t end up hurting yourself.

Intermittent Fasting

Starving yourself is never a good option for losing weight because you’ll completely ruin your mood, damage your health, and most likely end up binge-eating and gaining back any weight you lost — but fasting isn’t starving, and intermittent fasting can be an extremely powerful tool in your weight loss journey.

Intermittent fasting, as the name suggests, is about introducing varying stretches of fasting to your normal eating schedule. A lot of people swear by the 5:2 method in which you significantly reduce your caloric intake on 2 days of the week but eat as you normally would on the other 5, while others decide their fasting periods on the fly depending on the circumstances.

If you’ve only ever tried a broad alteration to your eating habits, try intermittent fasting instead. By keeping your diet the same most of the time, and simply taking advantage of times when you have more self-control, you can save a lot of calories without struggling too much.

Whilst adopting a 5:2 diet, it is very important to eat a varied diet and drink plenty to avoid nutritional deficiencies, dehydration and overeating on non-fasting days.

Cutting Sugars & Processed Foods

You’ve probably heard about the paleo diet by now, and possibly seen it referred to as a fad by some and a miracle by others. Well, though experts differ in how healthy they think different versions of paleo living are in the long run, they all agree that it is viable as a weight-loss strategy, and it’s largely less processed food, as well as less high-fat and high-sugar foods.

A review of paleo diet studies carried out in 2015 showed some evidence of moderate short-term health improvements and weight loss in those following forms of the paleo diet.

Though it may seem extremely challenging to massively reduce the presence of sugars and carbs in your diet, bear in mind that it isn’t just about calories and you can replace most of what you remove. Instead of just one doughnut, you can have meat, vegetables, fruit, and nuts; foods that will be much more satiating once you’re used to them. Protein is the most satisfying macronutrient, after all, and your body has to work harder to digest it. Bear in mind that current advice from the Department of Health advocates eating no more than 70g of cooked meat per day so you will need to get your extra protein from other sources, like beans and pulses.

Even if you can’t fully adopt a paleo diet, simply raising the protein and vegetables in your diet and swapping out high-sugar and high-fat items for healthier replacements will help you significantly.

Ultrasound Cavitation

If you need some extra help beyond diet or exercise, then ultrasound cavitation is an option for those looking for non-surgical procedures. It uses low-frequency sound waves to essentially ‘melt’ fat cells, causing them to turn to liquid and filter into the bloodstream to be processed as waste, and the best part is that it is completely non-invasive.

It’s still a drastic option, of course. Treatment is costly, you’ll likely want multiple courses, and results can vary significantly from person to person — but it’s far preferable to drastic surgical alternatives.

Ultrasound cavitation might be a great option for you if you’ve already made a lot of progress in your weight loss journey and are looking for something to help you get even closer to your goals in the face of diminishing returns from diet or exercise changes. Consult a doctor for more information before you make a decision.

Orlistat

As the only diet pill reliable and safe enough to be prescribed by doctors, Orlistat is a weight loss treatment that prevents enzymes in your digestive system from absorbing all of the fat in your diet. While taking Orlistat, a significant percentage of the fat you consume will go unabsorbed and eventually be excreted as waste.

Because prescription weight loss pills have strict guidelines on their use, Orlistat is only prescribed when someone has a body mass index (BMI) of more than 30, or if someone with a BMI between 28 and 30 has a serious health issue that makes weight loss even more important.

Orlistat definitely isn’t a magic bullet, and taking it won’t mean that you’ll be able to eat anything you want. Instead, it’s something to use in combination with changes to your diet and exercise habits to help you get faster results and give you a modest buffer against occasional overeating.

You can read Orlistat reviews here.

If you think Orlistat could be justified in your case and you meet the criteria, then you can begin a free consultation with one of our GPs and buy Orlistat from us with next-day delivery.

Losing weight can be incredibly difficult, but surgery isn’t the only option if you’re finding it hard to make any progress. Try these dietary changes and exercise options, and consider the non-invasive treatments if you still find no success — you can get there, so don’t give up.