Fast Weight Loss Made Simple: How you can lose weight quick.

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Does that sound like your browsing history? If that's the case, I won't judge; I promise this post would be the last place you'll visit to get a clear idea of what you need to do. I'll list be including the basic principles behind losing weight faster, common plateaus during a weight loss plan and how to overcome them, and finally, some actionable steps to stay consistent. Stick tight because we’ll get right in.

General information before losing weight

Our bodies are made up of different kinds of building materials: tissues, bones, muscles, fat, skin, ligaments etc. None of these can be disregarded as less important than the others. We need every one of those materials for proper functioning. During any weight-loss plan, the main aim is to reduce the excess fat in our bodies, without adversely harming the other building materials.

Humans have a certain percentage of body fat that is considered essential; Males 2-5% and Females 10-13%. After this, all the fat stored is used as a reserve fuel. Weight loss aims to reduce the amount of stored fat from unhealthy levels to healthier levels.

Basic terminology

Since some bits can get pretty technical, here are the list of terminologies used in this post.

• BMR: Basal Metabolic Rate. It is the total amount of energy in a day your body uses up for normal functioning of a resting body (ex: for the beating of the heart, contraction of involuntary muscles etc)

• Calorie Deficit: In a weight loss diet, this is the difference created between the amount of calories consumed and amount of calories expended by any means. A useful calorific deficit figure must take into consideration the BMR along with the other forms energy expenditure in terms of workouts.

• Calorie-dense foods: The foods which are HEAVY in terms of calories, i.e. they pack in a lot of calories. For example: Peanut butter is a calorie dense food. A SINGLE tablespoon of peanut butter contains as much calories as 32 strawberries!

The basic idea behind losing weight

Your body, from an evolutionary standpoint, is hardwired to store as much spare food possible. That is why we find that people gain weight more spontaneously rather than lose weight (for a normal, healthy human, of course).

Your body uses up fat during times of deficit, i.e. when your body doesn’t have enough fuel for the amount of work you’re doing. This idea, called Calorie Deficit is what is used to lose weight.

The amount of weight/fat lost is directly proportional to the amount of calorie deficit you create.

How to create and use calorie-deficit for weight loss

From the above image, you see there’s technically two basic ways of creating a deficit. The problem with any one of the ways is that it’s unfeasible for a normal person. For example, there’s no way a person can dedicate hours to expend more than his consumption, nor can he sustainably consume lesser than the body’s requirement.

A good weight loss plan includes a neat composition of eating the right amount and exercising to reach the deficit. This is really simple and I’ll show you exactly how to design your own plan. Bring out a piece of paper or something to write on and we’ll get started.

1. Know your BMR (a rough figure): Head over to this website: calculator.net. Enter your details and note down your BMR. Alternatively, if you wear a smartband/smartwatch which keeps track of your daily calorie expenditure, refer to that respective app and note down your BMR (or resting energy).
   

2. Decide your target weight loss per week, and thus figure out the required calorie deficit for that goal. Generally, a safe target would be 1-2 pounds per week.

• 1 pound= 453g. A pound of fat corresponds to 3500 kcal.

• If your goal is to lose ‘Y’ pounds of weight per week, you need to create Y x 3500 of calorie deficit by the end of the week.

• Split up that deficit evenly across the days of the week.

1. Diet: For a sustainable and healthy weight loss, plan on consuming no more or less than that your BMR. Cut down on proportions until you meet your target calorie count. Try avoiding calorie-dense foods for a meal or a snack. You’d do yourself a favor if you include more fiber into your diet because it’ll keep you feeling full for a longer time and prevent cravings.

2. Exercise: Use exercise as a way to create the deficit. Whatever amount you consumed as your BMR will be utilized by your body for normal functioning of your body. Exercising is the extra energy expenditure that you’re making and this will lead to creating a deficit.

Note your BMR from this website.

Diet for weight loss

Ideally, you should avoid calorie dense foods because they don’t make you feel fuller for the insane amount of calories they pack. In pursuit of feeling full, you’d end up going over your target limit. Here are the list of calorie dense foods you can choose to avoid:

Instead, try to have foods higher in protein. There’s numerous benefits to increasing your protein composition in your weight loss diet:

• Increasing satiety and reducing hunger

• Improving body composition (reducing fat mass and preserving muscle mass)

• Boosting metabolism (because protein takes longer to digest which can lead to increased thermogenesis and temporary increase in metabolism).

• Reduce weight regain. You’re more likely to lose fat and maintain muscle mass, rather than losing muscle and gaining fat.

In the end, the most important thing is to stick to your target and not snack your way to overdo your target and render your weight loss plan useless. Keeping a track of proportions, calories consumed, researching nutritional information are few ways to stick to your diet plan.

Exercise for weight loss

When it comes to weight loss, exercise is almost like an unspoken rule. It’s absolutely essential for a speedy weight loss. It doesn’t matter what exercise you’re doing but the most important thing is to meet your target expenditure per day.

You should be looking to exercise around 4-5 days per week on a minimum. Include a day for rest or if you’re willing to exercise daily, keep it light on the last day to give you time to recover. Exercises can be very broadly grouped under two categories:

• Cardio: Running, walking, cycling, swimming or anything that gets your heartrate up.

• Muscle training: Gym, calisthenics, Yoga, martial arts etc.

Here are the list of exercises and the corresponding amount of calories burnt per hour. Do note that the amount of calories burnt depends heavily on your body type and the intensity with which you perform.

How to ACTUALLY lose weight fast

Losing weight happens at its own pace. Is there a way to make it faster? Yes, absolutely. Quicker weight loss can be achieved by making the process efficient, overcoming common plateaus, and avoiding injuries.

1. Making the process efficient AKA fine-tuning your exercises so you lose more fat. Your body doesn’t burn fat all the time you exercise. It burns a mixture of stored fuel with fat. Now, since fat takes longer to release energy, the mixture of fat used for energy is lesser. If the intensity is too low, you won’t be expending much energy at all in the first place. You need to find the sweet-balance of intensity where the amount of fat burnt is maximum. This intensity is a heart rate zone known as target heart rate zone. Consistently performing your workouts in this optimum intensity helps you speed up fat loss.

2. Overcoming a common plateau. More exercise = more calories burnt right? Well, not really. Here’s where a LOT of people hit a plateau and quit. You see, your body doesn’t use up energy for granted. Energy used to be a scarce resource and every living thing has evolved to conserve as much of it as possible; humans included. When you continue doing the same exercise over and over again for weeks, your body starts adapting to the regime and becomes more efficient. Take an example of running. The initial few days are extremely hard. As you progress, you notice things start becoming easier. Once you used to pant after running only a mile, but now you can run a whole lot more without a break. This is your body becoming efficient and adapting, which should be overcome.

3. Avoiding injuries. This is fairly simple, yet really underrated. If you aren’t athletic or have much experience doing the exercises you planned on doing, there’s a high probability that you might end up injuring yourself by not slowly ramping up the intensity. For example, people who start running as an exercise may develop knee pains, ankle pains and even tendinitis. It is suggested to start slow and slowly ramp up the intensity to avoid injuries - especially the exercises which requires higher intensity and vigor. If running is the exercise, one can start with a mix of walking and running, and slowly build up the running. Strengthening exercises for the knees would also aid in the process to avoid injuries. For beginners, it is always better to go for exercises which have lesser chance of getting injured like swimming, rather than something like HIIT (high intensity interval training).

Finding your target heart rate zone

Here’s how you get your Target Heart Rate:

• Subtract your age from 220.

• Your target range is 60-75% of that number obtained.

Keep in mind, the target zone differs for people according to their resting heart rate etc. If you want a detailed and personalized calculation, visit OmniCalculator

If you’re looking for a generalized picture, here’s a table for you:

How to overcome weight loss plateaus

When your body adapts, it doesn’t require the same amount of effort, and thus lesser energy is needed. This creates a plateau, where you’re working as hard as you were, possibly also getting tired, but not burning the same amount as you used to. This can be tackled by a few ways:

• Increasing the intensity: If you’ve noticed your heart rate is on the lower range of the target zone, try to increase the intensity of your exercise to push it higher. For example, you could run at a faster pace for some time.

• Changing the exercise: Your body has adapted to one exercise. Surprise it by taking on a new one. Pursue the new one till you hit the plateau again and you can always choose to switch back or start a new one.

• Increasing the duration: Even when your body adapts, it’s still using up energy and burning calories - only a bit lesser than it used to. You can also choose to compensate this by increasing the duration of exercise performed.

Closing note

Weight loss is something many people yearn to achieve. Many of them don’t realize that it requires a great deal of perseverance and the right knowledge. In this post, I’ve tried to provide the most fundamental of information to help you/someone you know accomplish their goal. Everyone deserves a body which they’d be happy to have and the sheer amount of people working for it is a testimonial to the same. Well then, that’s it for this blog post. I hope you find it useful. I’ll see you on the next one. Cheers!