Imagine this, you just came home from work, tired and looking for a way to relax. You turn on your computer to go through YouTube for some funny cat videos then you see this conspicuous ad.
That reminds you of a wedding that is coming up. You want to lose some size on your waistline and decide to click on it. It then brings you straight into a product landing page. The claims these pills can do sounds too good to be true, yet they expect you to fork out a ridiculous sum of money! Now, is this somewhat relatable? Unfortunately for myself, indeed it is. It’s even worse for some of us that bought the product just to find that it failed to produce the result it claims to.
I can promise you, after reading this article you will no longer fall for these adverts. One thing’s for sure, there is no magic pill, pants or water that can rid you off your fats. Keep that in your head at all times! If anyone tries to sell you that idea, steer clear as fast as possible. If you really want to know the real trick then allow me to enlighten you…
The Real Evidence-based Way to Lose Fats
So, are you ready to finally know what is the true secret to losing weight? Well, I am ready to tell you. The real secret is understanding caloric balance. Sounds very scientific and smart right? Not to worry, I will explain everything as simply as I can.
The most important part of understanding caloric balance is understanding calories and its relationship with our body. Calories are basically energy our body needs to function. Think of it like the oil your car needs to travel. Our body is similar… but just a bit more complex. It needs this “oil” (i.e. calories) to just to keep us alive, moving and so on. However, unlike a car, our body is also smart. It saves the oil in case there are no petrol station (i.e. food supply) nearby. Once we’re not getting enough energy, it will tap into this storage and start to burn fats for calories. That is how caloric balance is maintained!
Simple enough right? The picture below is a quick summary to get you up to speed.
In order to achieve fat loss, what you need to focus is the bottom diagram there. To expend more calories than taking it in. That way, you won’t have an oversupply of fats reserve just sitting there doing nothing. All you need to do is to lose them and to stop taking in too much while doing so!
The Jig is Out. So What Should You Do?
Let’s answer this question, how much less should you be eating then? There are tons of websites that tells you how much food you should consume daily. Along with that, the many different percentages of caloric deficit to attain. This can get quite confusing for a newcomer to even attempt to traverse. Well, here is what I would suggest…
Ignore all of them for now!
One way that has been very effective is to just observe your weight on the scale. Here’s what I mean.
I recommend you to eat as you normally would but do one extra thing. Which is to weigh yourself every week about 3 times in the morning before you eat. After about 2 weeks, you can start to implement some strategies I suggest below and keep monitoring. The goal is to see a general trend downwards on the scale (ignoring a few minor fluctuations).
If you are more of a numbers person, you can start with a net caloric deficit of 500 calories per day. That should be enough for fat loss and not drastically impacting our hunger or energy for the day. 500 calories is something like:
- A McDonalds burger and small fries
- A Burger King Cheeseburger, and chicken nuggets
- About 350g of white rice only
- About 4 cans of coke.
You pick your menu! Obviously, eating healthy can get you throughout the day, unlike a single cheeseburger or 4 cans of coke can. Do this and you’ll successfully cut down (and maintain) on your calorie intake significantly
Make the right lifestyle choices
These 4 strategies are mentioned according to what I believe to be the easiest to implement. So it’s highly recommended to implement them in order. You can always go back to any one of them if you feel the need to improve on them.
- Don’t drink your calories! (i.e. soft drinks, cordials, Bandung, etc.) – This is a good rule of thumb for most of us. It is way too easy to consume calories that are from drinks because we don’t have to chew them and are often not very filling. Hence, I would recommend sticking to good ol’ water. You can always start off with the lite or zero calorie version of your favourite fizzy drinks. Then slowly transition it out with water as you go along.
- Obey the 80/20 rule – The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your food intake should come from minimal processed whole foods while 20% can come from which ever food you enjoy regardless if it is processed or not. In other words, your diet should consists of mainly vegetables, fruits, proteins, and carbohydrates while having only 20% of chocolate bars, sweets, chips etc. Whenever you feel that you’ve passed the 20% mark then compensate it with more healthier choices.
- Walk more! – Walking has been shown to be great at helping people lose fats without putting our body or our wallet on too much stress. You can either try to have a daily step count goal (i.e. 5000 steps/day) or you set a time of the day for walking ( 30 minutes of walking around the neighborhood after work) . The key thing is trying to progress with these, so for the step count goal, try to go to 6000 steps/day after 2 weeks, for the time-based ones, try to go for 40 minutes of walking after 2 weeks and so on.
- Implement resistance training – Resistance training is just a fancy word for adding load to your muscle such as push ups, pull ups and most of the exercises body builders do. Although you are not aiming to become the Hulk, these type of training is very useful for maintaining muscle which I mentioned in my first article to be very important for our overall health.
When starting a fat loss journey, we need to make small changes to our daily lives that we can see ourselves doing it for the long haul. These small changes will be used to generate a caloric deficit which would lead to fat loss over a period of time. I believe these slow and steady paces of fat loss makes it more enjoyable and hence more sustainable for everyone!