5 Keys to Weight Loss

1. Eat Less

This is the number one rule if you want to lose weight! It doesn’t matter how much you exercise, if you do not eat fewer calories than you expend during the day, it is impossible to lose weight. Now this doesn’t mean you have to starve yourself. The best thing to do is to keep a food journal for a few days. Write down everything you eat, how much, when, and why you ate it. This will be useful not only for discovering extra calories that might be slipping in, it will also show you if you are an emotion eater- eating when you are sad, tired, bored, etc. With this information, you can also find a program that will calculate how many calories you eat; I recommend FitDay. Once you know how much you eat, look for ways to cut out 300-500 calories each day, and this will be the first step to dropping those pounds.

2. Eat Better

While eating less is surely important, you are most likely not trying to lose weight just to have a lower number on the scale. You want to be healthy! So another key ingredient to not only losing weight, but being in overall better shape is to change the way you eat. Incidentally, healthy foods also tend to be lower in calories! (Fat has 9 calories per gram while Carbohydrates and Protein only have 4). So what foods do we need to focus on? Well, I hate to be cliché, but fruits and vegetables are a good place to start. Very few people get enough, if any, of these most important food groups in their diet, yet they are vital to having a fully functioning body. Add in some lean meat (turkey, chicken breast, lean beef), whole grains (whole grain bread, brown rice, oatmeal), and some good quality fat (olive oil, avocados, fish), and you’re ready to go. This can be a major change for some people, so take it slow. Try adding a salad in with dinner, or having a piece of fruit for a snack. It all starts at the store, so start shopping healthily. If you don’t buy it, you can’t eat it! A good rule of thumb is to stay on the perimeter of the store; here are all your plants, produce, and dairy. When you start getting into the middle, you run into processed food that is full of unhealthy fats, refined carbohydrates, and sugar. If you can start shopping healthily, and slowly integrate healthy foods into the diet, you’ll be one step closer to achieving your desired weight and lifestyle.

3. HIIT it hard

There has been a long standing myth that long slow endurance training is best for fat burning. This was based on the fact that at lower levels of exertion, your body burns a higher percentage of fat compared to carbs. With this logic, however, the most ideal way to burn fat would be to do nothing at all, because the highest percentage of fat would be burned at rest! So we can see that a change in philosophy is in order. What we know now is twofold. First, to burn fat and lose weight, we need to work at higher intensities to have the most overall calories consumed. Second, because most fat calories are consumed at rest, we want to increase what is called our excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). EPOC is basically the elevation of the body’s metabolism after exercise. So while we were burning calories during exercise, now we are also burning them as we recover from exercise. So how do we utilize these two components? We HIIT it hard. HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) has been shown to have the greatest effects on increasing metabolism and in turn increasing fat loss. This method of training involves working at a very high intensity, ideally for a minute, and then dropping down the intensity for recovery. This recovery period can be anywhere from twice to half as long as the interval itself, decreasing as you become more fit. Don’t jump right into this however; if you have not been running / cycling / rowing, try working on maintaining a good pace for 20-30 minutes before you try out HIIT. You don’t want to overdo it.

4. Weight train

Weight training will help with weight loss in two ways. First, it is great exercise, and can work in a similar fashion as HIIT- increasing metabolism and burning calories during the work out. The other major factor in weight training is that as you build muscle mass, your body’s resting metabolism will increase. This is no longer part of EPOC, this is your metabolism the rest of the day, including while you sleep. So now we are burning more calories throughout the day! And don’t worry ladies, I know that having big muscles is the opposite of what you are looking for, so be assured by this: women cannot build muscle in the same way men do. As women build muscle, the fibers form in a much more dense fashion than in men, so while the size increase is less than men, the strength and metabolic affects are still there! This doesn’t mean that women cannot build muscle size, however, so hypertrophy training (8-12 reps) may not be for you. If you are worried about this, stick to endurance type training (15-20 rep range). This will still increase the amount of muscle fibers but will have less of an effect on muscle size.

5. Don’t obsess

The final rule to weight loss is to not obsess. Too many people become overly conscious of when and how they eat and exercises. What I always say is that nutrition and exercises should not be seen or treated like a program. They should be treated as part of your life. Yes there are certain things we can focus on here or there, but the goal is to make these lifestyle choices sustainable. If you really love chocolate chip cookies, don’t give them up forever, but just enjoy them as a special treat instead of having a box ready to go for your nightly snack. If you hate running, try out swimming or biking. And if you are feeling worn out from a long week but only had two days at the gym, it’s ok to let your body rest and recover rather than forcing yourself to get in that third day. Ten years from now, you want to be a healthy, balanced individual, not someone that tried to get in shape once but found it to be just too hard.

I hope these suggestions can help someone out there. Good luck and happy fitness!

-Colin