Weight loss is much more simple than it is often advertised as. Here is a list of the 7 most important steps to take on your weight loss journey.
If losing weight is your primary fitness goal, there are many methods that people will tell you you must follow. The truth is weight loss can often seem more complicated than it needs to be, but if you know what you need to do beforehand, this process can actually be incredibly simple.
Understand the Science
Understand that the only task you need to accomplish to lose weight is to be in a caloric deficit. This means that you must burn more calories than you add through food. The specifics of how to best accomplish this over a period of time may be more complicated, but if you burn more calories than you eat, you will lose weight, regardless of the content of what you eat.
Start Drinking More Water
To help sustain a caloric deficit, we will need to cut calories out of our diet. It is much easier to do this if there is a more constant feeling of fullness and satisfaction. Drinking a lot of water can help with this as it assists digestion and leaves us feeling full for longer, despite containing zero calories
Avoid Drinking Calories
Although water will be incredibly beneficial along your weight-loss journey, a good place to start looking for calories to cut would be through what you drink. Drinks like sodas, sports drinks, and teas often contain more calories than you would realize, despite a lack of making you feel full and satisfied. There is a chance that cutting these calories from your diet actually could be the main step you need to take to reach a caloric deficit and start losing weight.
Focus on Resistance Training over Cardio
This is not to say that you shouldn’t do cardio at all, but it is worth noting that the best way to create a caloric deficit is through diet rather than cardio, as it takes a tremendous amount of effort to just burn a few hundred calories through cardio. However, you should focus on weight or resistance training tremendously. When building muscle, your body will actually burn more nonactive calories when not working out by improving your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). This leads to better weight loss results over a long period of time.
Protein is your Best Friend
With building muscle being so important to burning calories, eating protein is important to building muscles, making it an ideal nutrient to change your body composition. In addition to that, protein is also beneficial in staying below or at your calorie goal in terms of food, as foods high in protein tend to be more satisfying to leave you full longer despite maybe not having as many calories.
Track Your Calories
Sometimes it is difficult to determine how many calories we are actually consuming daily. To make matters worse, we often eat more calories than we initially realize. This is why it is a great idea to start keeping track of your calories (apps such as MyFitnessPal and more make this simple). You should then be able to realize where the bulk of your calories are coming in and where you can begin cutting some out of your diet. Just make sure, to be honest with yourself and track all of your calories.
Don’t Adhere to an Incredibly Strict Diet
This may be the most controversial pointer on this list, but I believe it is truly the correct call. It is a good idea to be more mindful of what you eat and to make healthy substitutions where you can. However, it is important to realize there is no magic diet for weight loss, especially when your goal is to build a healthier lifestyle over time. Many diets can help you lose weight quickly, but you will likely succumb to your cravings over time and end up putting the weight right back on. Your best bet is to make small changes and create a lifestyle that is sustainable for yourself so that you can make significant progress over time and then never look back.