How to Lose Weight – The Foundations of Fat Loss

If you want to know how to lose weight while also maintaining your sanity, you have come to the right place. While every person’s body is different, there are still certain rules of weight loss that apply. Here are five basic tips that will teach you the basics of fat loss:

  1. Keep a Food Diary for a Week to See How Much and What You Are Really Eating

If you are in denial about your current diet, then it will be very difficult for you to lose weight. You can either take a photo of everything you eat for the next three to seven days or write it down. This will give you an idea of how much you are actually eating and help you figure out where your own difficulties lie when it comes to losing weight.

You can share your photos or food diary with an objective friend or even your doctor or dietitian.

Once you know how much you are really eating, you can figure out ways to adjust your diet or by how much you should reduce your food intake in order to help you lose fat. To burn around half a kilogramme of fat per week, you should try and burn roughly 500 calories more in a day than you consume.

  1. Cut Out Processed Foods and Sugar

While it is true that you need to reduce the amount of calories that you consume in a day to lose fat, what you are eating is just as important.

What you eat has an effect on your hormones, such as insulin, ghrelin, and leptin, which are all involved in the fat-loss process.

  • Ghrelin is the hunger hormone, and when elevated, you will want to eat quite a bit more.
  • Leptin is a hormone that is responsible for telling your body that you are satiated after eating, but when you do not produce enough of it, you will not realise that you are full.
  • Insulin is a hormone that is elevated when your blood glucose levels rise, and this makes it difficult for the body to burn fat when elevated and also triggers fat gain, especially around the midsection.

Following a diet that is low in sugar and processed foods, but contains a good ratio of fat, fibre, and protein is the best way to balance all three of these hormones.

  1. Exercise a Little

Many people just turn to exercise when trying to lose fat, but this is not the best way to do so. Exercise does help you burn more calories during the day and build muscle, which will help support weight loss in the long-term, but people often compensate for the exercise by moving around even less afterwards, so the amount of calories burnt in a day is often not that much more when exercising.

Instead of following a strict workout programme that makes you feel like you are being tortured, and makes you consider just accepting yourself with the extra padding and giving up on exercise, rather find exercises that you love and just focus on moving regularly instead of torturing yourself to help you shed fat. Diet is 80% of the equation when it comes to fat loss, so why not make exercise, which takes up the other 20%, fun.