The best way to lose weight, as we’ve all heard by now, isn’t really the fastest way or the most efficient. It’s not even really the best way to lose weight if you want to keep it off. It’s really about what you do before you do it, and what you do after you do it.
When we talk about effective weight loss, we’re usually talking about losing pounds of fat. Most people want to be able to drop the rest of their body weight through diet and exercise. If that’s your goal, then you need to learn about some new strategies for how to eat and exercise to burn fat while preserving muscle.
Diet and exercise are important, but so is the way you choose to spread your caloric intake. To reach your weight loss goals, you’ll need to eat less calories than your body uses. When you eat fewer calories, you’ll also eat fewer calories after your body needs them. To keep yourself from eating too much, you’ll need to burn more than you consume. The best way to do that is to have a consistent larger deficit (reduce your consumption slightly) than you have at present. Your body will still crave food, but it will get the nutrition it needs in small amounts.
There are two types of diet: calorie-controlled, or maintenance, diets and heavy, intelligent, strength-focused weight training and dieting. Maintenance diets are designed to maintain your current body size. They are based on eating less and exercising more. In other words, you eat less calories but do the opposite of what you’ve been doing. Heavy, intelligent, strength-focused diets are designed to create an energy deficit – i.e., you eat more calories than your body needs to function but burn more than you take in. You use this additional energy to increase your body’s metabolic rate so that you burn more calories while you’re resting.
To develop the best way to lose weight, you have to consider your body’s primary energy source – muscle. If you are skinny, you probably lack muscle mass. If you are overweight, you probably have too much muscle mass. To lose weight, you need to eat more calories than you burn, and you need to do this without increasing your body fat percentage. In other words, you need to work hard but you should also work smarter. You won’t burn very many calories by focusing on increasing muscle size and not simply burning off excess body fat.
When people make unrealistic expectations of fast weight loss, they often give up or they go back to the old ways of eating and exercising. For example, if someone’s weight loss goals are to drop one dress size, they often set unrealistic expectations for healthy daily nutrition. If they don’t reduce their body fat percentage, they will often still be eating fast food restaurants and eating junk food. To lose weight quickly, you need to be in a state of metabolism shock – that is, your body will be burning calories at an unbelievable rate even though you are eating very few calories. By adhering to unrealistic expectations, you will only be setting yourself up for failure.
The best way to lose weight involves interval training, which is also known as high intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT consists of short bursts of high intensity aerobic exercise followed by a period of low intensity, aerobic exercise. During the interval between the high intensity exercise sessions, your body will be working at a higher metabolic rate. This increased metabolic rate, together with your increased muscle mass, will help you burn more calories, resulting in faster weight loss.
When you eat real world food, we need a certain number of calories to fuel our daily activity. This is called your basal metabolic rate. If you eat less calories than your basal metabolic rate, then you will have to burn off even more calories to maintain your current size. By eating fewer calories than your calorie level, you can lose weight, but only if you eat real world food.
