Losing fat really is not that hard. In fact, it’s downright easy! The funny thing is that I see people struggling with it, presumably because of the great deal of misinformation that’s out there.
The truth is that losing fat is simple. You don’t need to be a nutrition expert and you don’t need fad diets. All you need to do is follow a one step process:
1) Eat less calories.
That’s it. Seriously.
Simply put, the number of calories (energy units contained in food) determine the energy your body uses or stores. If there’s too much extra, it sticks around as fat.
My wife Candace and I both have lost weight by applying knowledge of calories. You can do it too. It’s easy! Candace has gone from 150 pounds to 142 pounds in around two months. That’s without drastic diet modifications and with little exercise. Just choosing foods that are lower in calories and eating appropriate portions. I’ve lost 3.5 pounds in a month and a half without any effort at all, though my focus is primarily on gaining weight by building muscle from weightlifting.
It’s quite trivial to have simple, sustainable weight loss. Here’s how I recommend you proceed:
1: Decide to lose fat
While it’s not hard to lose fat, it’s commonly perceived to be a difficult thing to do. Don’t fall into this trap. Make up your mind to lose weight. You can do it. If you do things right, I don’t believe you can fail at it because it’s a biological process. It’s like driving a car: if you start the car and press the gas pedal, it’s going to go forward.
If you want to lose fat, commit to it and do it. It’s not hard. In 14 days (if not 7) of eating right you will have lost weight. If you lose a single pound you’ve proven to yourself that you can do it, and from then on it’s simply repetition.
2: Determine your daily caloric target
There are roughly 3500 calories per pound of fat. Therefore, if you put yourself in a 500 calorie deficit each day for a week you’ll lose one pound of fat. (500 calories * 7 days = 3,500 calories or one pound of fat)
So, find your “maintenance level” (the amount of calories you would need to eat to stay at your current weight) using an online calculator and then subtract 500 calories from it. Then eat around that amount every day. We use Shapefit’s calculator.
3: Track everything you eat
Get yourself a calorie counting program. I use CRONoMeter, which is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux and is free and open source.
Now, if you’re thinking “Oh man, now I need to count calories? That’s so tedious!” you’re totally on the wrong track. If you can’t spend an extra 2-3 minutes per day on your health, you should probably stop reading this article and go be fat and do something else. It’s a trivial investment for something worth having.
In CRONoMeter (or your calorie-tracking software of choice) you can enter any raw ingredient (bananas, for example) or you can create your own recipes by combining ingredients and weighing and measuring the portion you ate. For example, the first time I made my bean chili I added the beans, peppers, spices, tomatoes, and all the ingredients and created the recipe. Then I just measure the serving of that recipe I ate and the program finds how many calories were in that portion and adds them to my daily total.
Using a nutrition-tracking program is actually quite simple, and once you get in the habit of doing it it becomes second nature. You can then look at the calories you ate for the day and feel good about what a positive change you’re making in your life.
4: measure your results
Weigh yourself once per week. Many people, including myself, consider morning the best time for this since you haven’t eaten yet. So, Saturday morning (or whatever morning you like) hop on the scale and record your weight. Remove your clothing or always wear something that weighs the same amount.
Keep it a weekly event. Weighing yourself daily is unnecessary. There’s no need to worry about daily fluctuations in weight. Log your weight using a spreadsheet program. I recommend OpenOffice, which comes with a spreadsheet app called Calc, but you could even do it in a text program if you wanted.
Set up each day’s row like this:
date – exercise performed – calories burned – calories consumed – caloric result – notes
This lets you track any calories you burned through exercise, if any. Add the number of calories you ate, then subtract any calories you burned from the calories you consumed to get your caloric result. Add in notes of how you felt or any positive changes you made that day. Keeping daily records reinforces within yourself that you are doing something, and you can look back over the log and feel proud and see the great changes you’ve made.
Create another sheet for your weekly results. Find the average number of calories you ate per day and put it next to the weight you lost for the week. This can help you to find the optimum amount of caloric input for sustained weight loss.
5: refine your approach as needed
If you follow the steps above you should be averaging a pound per week in fat loss. This can change from week to week if you’ve exercised or there have been variations in your diet, but don’t worry about it too much. The important thing is to achieve sustainable weight loss. The time is going to pass anyway, so you might as well feel great and lose weight all the time.
If you go two weeks without losing any weight, you should examine your approach because there’s something you could be doing better.
Optional steps:
Eat 4-6 meals per day
If you’ve researched weight loss you’ll probably have encountered the “4-6 meals per day” idea. There’s no science that backs up any biological advantage to this approach. Your metabolic rate does not increase if you eat more often.
However, I personally use this approach as a motivational/attitude tool. In order to feel full enough to make it to the next of only three meals in a day, I have to stuff myself until I feel terrible. Perhaps my metabolism is fast, but I simply feel better if I’m not stuffing myself and feeling bloated every time I eat. Additionally, I love food, and there’s nothing better than eating a small, well-portioned meal, feeling great about myself, and knowing that the next indulgence is only two and a half hours away. It seems like my body’s natural ideal eating schedule. Try it out and see if it works for you.
Take one day off per week
Candace and I take Saturdays off and eat whatever we want. I recommend this step if you feel good about it. It makes eating in a controlled, healthy manner the rest of the week doable if you’re not used to it, and it feels great to eat some ice cream or fried food with a clean conscience knowing that you earned it. If you can eat clean and healthy six days out of seven you’ll be in great shape in no time.
Exercise
Exercise is OPTIONAL? Yes, that’s right. Exercise is an inefficient way to burn calories. It’s much easier to eat 500 less calories every day than it is to burn 500 calories through exercise. For example, in twenty minutes of running I burn around 200 calories. At least for me, it’s a lot of work to run for twenty minutes. I personally feel that time is better spent lifting weights because it makes me look better in addition to improving my health and making me feel manly. In addition, more muscle means your basal metabolic rate increases and you burn more calories in a resting state.
If you have a form of exercise you enjoy or think you would like to get into, go ahead and do it as a part of your new paradigm of fat loss, but don’t worry about it too much if you don’t want to. I’ll cover exercise in future articles.
Tips:
Watch out for fried/sauteed food. Olive oil has 119.3 calories per tablespoon, so make sure if you’re sauteeing you use the minimum amount of oil.
- Put everything (I mean it) into your calorie tracking program. Calories hide everywhere and you need to count them all if you are serious about succeeding in losing fat.
- You’ll quickly discover which are higher-calorie foods to watch out for: certain cheeses, refined carbohydrate foods, and the like
- Don’t eat until you’re full. By then it’s too late and you’ve eaten more than you need. Just eat until you’re no longer hungry.
- Eat as many whole foods as you can. Breakfast cereal, packaged products, and things like that contain lots of sugar and fake ingredients.
- Generally, eating well is cheaper and healthier than eating fake processed foods.
Sustainable fat loss is trivial to accomplish and is well worth the minimal time and effort it takes to learn to eat better. Go for it, and look forward to the time when your clothes no longer fit right 