How to lose weight fast

How to lose weight FAST

If I capitalize FAST that means its even faster, right?!

Ok I am going to share with you my top tips to help you lose weight fast. But before I get there for you, I have a few disclaimers. Because its important.

1. This is not how I recommend you lose weight if you do not want to yo-yo diet and have the pounds come back on. This is the, in some ways, easier way to lose weight but NOT a long term solution. If you want a more long term solution, hang on with me as I will speak on that too.

2. Being healthy, hitting a goal weight, gaining muscle: these are all lifelong journeys. And what I mean by that is once you hit a goal, the goal post is going to move. When that goal post moves, your habits are going to change- eat more, eat less, move more, move less, workout more, workout less, etc. etc.

3. To lose weight fast, there are a few underlying assumptions. You need to take care of your health in other ways- sleeping well, staying hydrated, reducing stress to name a few. Working out is the tip of the iceberg. Foundational activities, like sleep, nutrition, and stress management are king when it comes to maintaining your goal weight.

Ok so now to the nitty gritty.

To burn one pound of fat, you need to burn an additional 3500 calories on top of what your body burns at rest. To do so, this is usually done between reducing the calories you eat and completing cardiovascular work to burn extra calories. Now, I do want to share very quickly that this 3500 number isn’t hard and fast. What I mean by that is your body is going to burn a different amount than mine. But for the purpose of this article, its a great starting point.

To continue my point about burning calories, it can be misleading using cardiovascular work as a means to create a calorie deficit. What do I mean by that?

1. It can create a negative association with food and exercise.

2. Calories burned through exercise are usually exaggerated and not accurate.

3. What happens when you hit your goal weight while using cardiovascular exercise as a means to create a caloric deficit? Do you want to maintain the quantity of cardiovascular exercise for the rest of your life? Reflect on this question because the answer could be yes or no. But its going to differ based on where you are at with your current goals and body composition.

So let’s say you want to lose 10 pounds. You would want to then burn 35,000 extra calories (that’s from multiplying 10 by 3500). Divide 35,000 by 30. That equals roughly 1,167. This means you would need to burn an EXTRA 1,167 calories EACH day to lose 10 pounds in one month. I will say this- losing about 2 pounds a week is a good goal to have but also challenging. As you can see from the math above, the caloric deficit needed to lose that amount of weight in the time frame of a month is pretty substantial. Impossible? No. Just challenging.

If you want to lose this amount of weight quickly, I would advise you to use cardiovascular work to help get to a higher caloric deficit. However, I again want you to think about the 3 bullet points I spoke about earlier. It’s important that we aren’t making huge sacrifices in the short term that could lead to more detrimental effects in the long term. And I am specifically talking about your relationship with food and exercise. I start getting concerned when friends start to use exercise as punishment for eating habits or restrict food solely because a workout was missed. Losing weight fast with these underlying concerns is a big red flag for progress.

Personally, there are definitely some disordered habits or thoughts I struggle with when it comes to eating. The two I mostly struggle with are having a negative association with a feeling of fullness and eating enough when I skip a workout. At one point, I would use exercise as a means to compensate for my perception of poor eating habits. I would hold myself to rigid unattainable expectations when I felt as though I failed. I would put way too much emphasis on how I looked and the number on the scale. Once I shifted my focus from aesthetics to performance/skill goals it made a huge difference in my outlook on training and how I felt about myself.

Lastly, I want to briefly speak about strength training as a tool to lose weight. Strictly speaking calories in versus calories out, strength training isn’t going to make a big difference. However, once you start building muscle, your body will burn more calories at rest. This is why strength training is such a big deal in terms of weight loss- you aren’t having to do any extra work at rest to burn more calories. It’s a win-win! Furthermore, when you start on a calorie deficit to lose weight, your body isn’t going to pick fat and choose to use that as fuel. Its going to be a mixture of muscle and fat- this is another reason why strength training is so important. I want you to lose fat while maintaining as much muscle as possible.

I hope this article brings some clarification to losing weight and how best to do so. I want to applaud you for reading this far. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help support you!

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