It may seem like losing weight has everything to do with what you eat and how often you move your body. However, it turns out that there may be ways to get your brain in on the action in order to achieve a lean and healthy body.

Dr. Ellen Albertson, a registered dietician, nutritionist, and psychologist, as well as the author of ROCK YOUR MIDLIFE: 7 Steps to Transform Yourself and Make Your Next Chapter Your Best Chapter, offers the following three ways to “reprogram your brain for weight loss.”

Keep reading to discover and adapt her tips, and next, don’t miss these 10 Weight Loss Recipes People Are Obsessed With.

First, it’s key to “manage stress/cortisol effectively so you don’t turn to comfort food to feel better,” Dr. Albertson explains.

Susan Bowerman, M.S., R.D., CSSD, CSOWM, FAND, and the Senior Director of Worldwide Nutrition Education and Training, confirms to Eat This, Not That!: “A big key to weight loss is behavior modification, which is a sort of reprogramming if you will.”

“To effectively lose weight and keep it off, it’s critical to focus on the behaviors that are getting in the way of progress, and learn to modify those behaviors in order to reach goals.”

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Beyond that, you need to nourish your microbiome. “Research shows that not only does having a healthy microbiome support weight loss, it can also boost your immune system and mood,” Dr. Albertson explains.

Related: One Major Effect Gut Health Has on Your Blood Pressure, New Study Says

According to Dr. Alberston, the third way to reprogram your brain for weight loss is to “use self-compassion to regulate your emotions so you don’t eat your feelings.”

Indeed, Holli Rovenger, a dietitian and wellness professional couldn’t agree more with Dr. Albertson’s tips. While noting that Dr. Albertson’s suggestions “have all been studied and proven successful,” Rovenger tells Eat This, Not That!: “In my opinion and experience, reprogramming your brain, along with retraining your taste buds and using behavior modification, is the way to long-term weight loss. If it was just about the food, people would not be enrolling and re-enrolling in all the large weight loss programs.”

Related: The #1 Best Food to Crush Hunger Cravings and Lose Weight Fast

However, Rovenger also adds this one important tip to Dr. Alberston’s list: take your time.  “Reprogramming your brain along with behavior modification should be done in a slow, steady, and consistent process to be successful,” Rovenger says.

To find out more about ways to achieve a lean body for good, be sure to read 200 Best Weight Loss Tips.

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More than two decades of Western diet wisdom have advised us of one rule of thumb: If you want to lose weight, just cut your carbs, and increase protein. However, a revolutionary new study by a team of metabolism and endocrinology researchers has led to the discovery of another aspect of diet that, as the scientists say, “had the most potent effect” on speeding up metabolism… and, as they suggest, this one change in the foods you eat might even help you live longer.

Dr. Dudley Lamming is a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism. His latest study’s press release states that in 2014, Lamming was reading about an Australian study that had come upon something remarkable: The mice that had been fed the least amount of protein were the healthiest.

RELATED: 15 Underrated Weight Loss Tips That Actually Work

This went against what our culture has preached about nutrition and wellness, but Lamming was aware there was more science behind the low-protein effect. Since then, he and graduate students in his laboratory “have discovered a little-known but robust pattern across both animal models and humans,” according to their new study’s release—that is: “Diets high in the three branched chain amino acids, BCAAs, are associated with diabetes, obesity and other metabolic illnesses.” The three BCAAs are leucine, isoleucine, and valine, all which humans cannot make on our own and therefore must obtain by consuming them in the foods we eat.

Therefore, Lamming and his team believed, reducing leucine, isoleucine, and valine “can counter these metabolic ailments and even extend the healthy lifespan of rodents.”

Read on to see what happened when the researchers adjusted the proteins the mice in their laboratory ate—and, don’t miss Secret Exercise Tricks for a Better Body After 40, Say Experts.

They went ahead to test their hypothesis, feeding mice with a high-fat, high-sugar, classic Western diet for a few months.

After the mice became obese, Lamming and his team switched up the mice’s diets. They recognized that by restricting the branch chain amino acid isoleucine, “the mice began to eat more food but nonetheless lost weight.” Why? They state: “The weight loss was primarily caused by a faster metabolism, where the body burns more calories as heat while resting.”

Further, they found that “mice fed low-isoleucine diets were leaner and demonstrated healthier blood sugar metabolism.”

RELATED: The Surprising Effect Reducing Sodium May Have on Your Blood Sugar, New Study Says

Since, according to Medical News Today, isoleucine is abundant in foods like meat, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, lentils, nuts, and seeds—most of these which are encouraged in low-carb diets like keto (like Kourtney Kardashian follows) or paleo—limiting our intake of these might prove to help us lose weight. Further, that’s not only because of the higher fat content in some of these foods, but because of the presence of isoleucine.

Meanwhile, “valine-restricted diets had similar, but weaker, effects” to isoleucine restriction. Valine is found in foods like sweet potatoes, asparagus, spinach, peas, mushrooms, and peanuts.

RELATED: This Food Is Becoming a Bigger Allergy Threat Than Nuts, Data Says

Finally, the researchers stated that reducing levels of leucine “had no benefit and may even be detrimental” to metabolism. High-leucine foods include dairy, soy, beans, and legumes.

Lamming says this discovery presents an opportunity to rethink diets because “evidence from animal models suggests that low-protein diets help shed fat even with normal caloric intake by reprogramming metabolism,” according to the study’s release.

RELATED: One Major Effect of Drinking Milk, New Study Says

Interestingly, this goes deeper to reveal that these amino acids also affect males and females differently, due perhaps to our hormonal reaction to them. One of the department’s graduate students, Nicole Richardson, also “tested a diet in mice that contained just one-third the normal amount of BCAAs. It wasn’t a calorie-restricted diet; the animals could eat as much as they wanted.”

The finding from Richardson’s experiment was that “male mice who ate the diet their entire lives lived about 30% longer on average—roughly eight more months” than female mice. Lamming and his team suggest that because much endocrinological and metabolic research in the past has been conducted on male mice, it may be time to consider how the effects of diet, protein, and amino acids vary based on gender. (One example—check out One Major Side Effect of Being Overweight for Men, New Study Says.)

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