As nearly 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, many people are looking for a quick fix for losing that weight. One of the most common ways that people think they should lose weight is to eat less, but that could still leave you with a skinny frame covered with fat. There are many things that can cause you to be skinny fat, so the best way to lose it is to take the problem apart piece by piece.

If you want to ensure you can still eat, have fun, and lose skinny fat, follow these 5 tips.

1. Drink More Water

One of the easiest ways to start burning fat is to start replacing your caloric intake with water. Your body needs water to process and metabolize food, so giving your body more water means giving your metabolism more fuel.

Water is great because it helps fill you up. Drinking cold water actually burns more calories than drinking room temperature water. Your body will burn calories trying to turn ice cold water into something closer to your body temperature.

When you feel like you’re about to reach for a snack, have a glass of water first. Rather than starving yourself, you’ll be able to more fairly assess how hungry you really are. A few glasses of water and a big salad can be just as filling as a burger and fries without water.

2. Change Your Fat Intake

To some shortsighted people, starving yourself might seem like a quick and logical solution to lowering your caloric intake. However, lowering the number of calories you eat will put your body into survival mode. It’ll think winter is coming and the food is getting scarce, so it needs to store up fat to survive.

While this was a useful evolutionary tactic before agriculture, in the era of GrubHub, it works a little differently.

Most people hear “fat-free” or “non-fat” and think that must be the best route to go. If everyone just ate non-fat foods, they could eat as much as they wanted, right?

Unfortunately, those chemicals and sugars added to improve non-fat foods aren’t good for your body. It can’t break them down as easily as it can break down the fat from an avocado, so it ends up storing those calories as fat.

If you have fat, you need to fuel your body to break down the fat you have.

Your body needs fat to keep moving. Fat can be healthy when it’s in the form of nuts, avocado, bananas, and olive oil. It becomes dangerous when it’s derived from chemicals.

Keep healthy fats and whole foods in your life and you’ll be able to enjoy tasty snacks without risking getting skinny fat.

3. No More Juice

Juice has no nutritional value.

Go ahead and read it again: Juice has no nutritional value. Once you strip the fiber away from the fruit, all that you’re left with is sugar.

Your body needs something to fuel your body while it breaks down sugar. Fruit juice without all the pulpy goodness that comes with the fruit doesn’t do your body any good.

Fiber, hand in hand with the sugar and vitamins in fruit, is one of the healthiest components of fruits and vegetables. To add to that, we’re still learning about all of the amazing benefits of the parts of the vegetable that are left out when we don’t eat the whole fruit or vegetable. We’re constantly learning about the health benefits of things like the skin of a tomato, so don’t miss out.

4. Change Your Routine

Eating less without changing your routine is a great way to get skinny fat. Having a thin body doesn’t mean having a healthier body if there’s no muscle or tone to your body. You can be thin with weak bones and high cholesterol.

As the saying goes, “You Don’t Get Permanently Well Unless You Permanently Change”. The best way to get a better body and lose that extra fat is to start finding ways you can change your daily routine. If you’re currently taking a bus to transfer to a train, start walking or taking a bike on one of those parts of your journey. If you commute into the city via train, when you get out to your town, take a bike the rest of the way home.

Instead of taking the elevator, start taking the stairs.

Start normalizing physical activity where it was lacking in your life before. Your daily routine is probably helping to keep you skinny fat. When you add some extra activity to mix it up, you can change your whole perspective.

5. Set Workout Goals

While you don’t need to suddenly become a gym rat, you need to make some space for physical activity in your life. Twenty minutes every day should be doable for anyone. Before you take a shower in the morning, have a glass of water, put the coffee pot on, and do some situps.

After the coffee is out, have a sip, some more water, and start doing some pushups.

While you might find it challenging during the first few weeks, you’ll find it becomes easier very quickly. Set goals for each week. If you did 25 pushups every day last week, push it to 30 this week. Keep going until you can get to 100.

Once you’ve got a high number of reps under your belt of any kind of workout, remember that you have to keep going to get in better shape. Your body will become used to the same reps every time, so find ways to swap out one type of movement for another.

You Can Still Eat And Lose Skinny Fat

The way to lose skinny fat isn’t to stop eating. It’s to start eating the right things. Combined with a healthier lifestyle, you’ll be able to shed pounds and still be happy.

Check out our latest guide to the perfect skinny fat diet plan.