One of the biggest obstacles to losing weight is making things too complicated. We have a tendency to look for answers in complicated diets, baroque exercise programs and other programs that make things a lot more complex and convoluted than they need to be. But the truth is that all of that just tends to get in the way of our goals.

Losing weight doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t need to change everything in your life to lose a couple of pounds. In fact, the easiest ways to lose weight are often the simplest, and it doesn’t get much simpler than little changes made over time.

If you think about it, this is kind of exactly how people gain weight to begin with. Most people don’t end up overweight because they suddenly changed to an all bacon diet. What happens is that little changes to our diets and our activities over time, until we end up gaining a lot of weight.

Think about it this way; if you eat fifty calories a day more that you need, you’ll end up putting on four pounds or so a year. Over a decade, that’s forty pounds, from what amounts to an extra couple of bites of food. But what if you could reverse the process?

The simplest way to lose weight is to add small things to your daily routine. These don’t have to be big things. In fact, what you want to do is add a lot of small little things to your day, things that you won’t necessarily even notice. You add enough of these to your day and you will end up subtracting the pounds.

Here are a few things that you can do:

Create A Daily List – Not a food journal, or an exercise journal, although these are probably not a bad idea either. No, this is a list you make every day so that you can remember all the little things you want to do. Cross them off as you do them, and make a new list each day.

Walk In Place – Try for at least five minutes or so in the morning. Actually, doing this while you brush your teeth is an excellent way to kill two birds with one stone. If it doesn’t take you five minutes to brush your teeth, well, you can do the rest while eating breakfast.

Eat Soup – Before you eat lunch, have a bowl of soup. There are microwavable ones available, so pick one that’s low in calories that you like. You don’t have to restrict what you eat at lunch, you just need to do this ahead of time. The soup will help you eat less naturally.

Do Other Stuff – Basically, you want to add in small things. Park at the other end of the parking lot. Take the stairs. Do some squats. Do some push ups. All the little things they say you should do that we mostly don’t. The key to these is your list; make sure they’re on it and make sure you do them.