Fat loss is at the top of the list of fitness goals. Even though Fat loss is just one component of fitness, for most people fitness is synonymous with fat loss.
Why not? Everybody wants to look good. Regular people don’t have to care if they can run a marathon, sprint 100m under 10 seconds or squat with 200 kilos on their back.
But most people would like to have six-pack abs. It looks so good!
If not a six-pack, at least a flat tummy with an overall nice and strong lean body would be great to have. Everyone will go for that. Anyways, we don’t always roam around shirtless so that we can show off the six-packs.
Whether you want 6-packs or not, you can always lose some fat, look good and feel better about yourself. This article will help you do just that.
I can assure you that fat loss is a very good place to start taking your fitness seriously. Further it will also definitely cast a positive affect all other components of fitness. This is how I started and you can too.
Do you really need to lose Body fat?
The first place to start is your mirror. If you don’t like how you look, you definitely need to take steps to change your body.
May be you need to lose a lot of fat, or lose a little fat and put on some muscle mass to look exceptional. It is all subjective how you see yourself. And how you feel looking at the mirror keeps changing, no matter how good you get.
For the sake of simplicity and objectivity, let’s rely on the body fat percentage. Like the name suggests, it is the body fat expressed as a percentage of body weight.
A body fat range of 8-20% for men and 18-25% for women is considered healthy normal range. Lower down the range is more and more aesthetic, depending on the total muscle mass. A person at 8% BF and very little muscle is meant to be skinny.
Go ahead and calculate your Body Fat percentage using this calculator used by the US Navy.
This calculator is not a very accurate way to arrive at the BF% but the most practical one. It is easy, it is free and you can use it right away.
It will serve us as a good indicator, rather than an accurate tool. You can keep going back to the calculator once you start losing your body fat.
How to lose body fat?
Fat gain/loss is influenced by one and the only factor- ENERGY BALANCE!!
Energy Balance is the energy we consume (food) minus the energy we burn on an average for a give time period.
We can and will lose body fat if we maintain a negative energy balance for a certain period of time. It usually takes few weeks to see visible results.
Now, to be simple, we have to eat less and burn more energy for a few weeks to achieve a visible fat loss.
These are the five steps you can follow to maintain a negative energy balance and achieve fat loss
Step 1:Eat less
That’s very simple, but needs a lot of time and effort to count calories and carbohydrates, protein and fats. It will also result in you being hungry all the time. It is really impossible to get rid of hunger. But, you can still manage hunger while eating fewer calories by following these steps-
- Use minimum oil for all your cooking. Like teaspoons instead of table spoons. Avoid all deep fried food items and high fat processed food. This is because fat contains almost double the calories compared to carbohydrates and proteins (9cal/gram vs 4cal/gram). Just stick to small quantities of good fats from nuts and dairy.
- Go for smaller portions of high carb-low protein food items like rice, poha, idly, dosa, chapatti, roti etc. Do some google to find the carb, protein and fat content of any food item.
- Start eating high protein food items with every meal. The idea is to choose high protein food items over low protein food items. Or having comparatively bigger portions of such food items. For example, add sprouts to your breakfast and reduce to portion of the idly/dosa.
- In order to make up for the reduced food volume, go big on vegetables and salads and fruits. All vegetables and most fruits are pretty low calorie while being more filling.
- Having fruit as dessert is especially very fulfilling. You can also replace your regular snack with a piece of fruit.
- Eliminate high sugar drinks like cold drinks and packaged juices. These are just empty calories, low on nutrition and easy to over consume. You can also go a step further with sugarless coffee and tea. Or you can use zero calorie sweeteners.
- Drink upwards of 4-5 liters of water throughout the day.
Step 2: Exercise
Exercise is easily the best way to increase your energy expenditure. It brings along, good health and fitness and feeling of high energy and alertness.
The most efficient way to lose body fat, while retaining the muscle mass is through strength training combined with a combination of cardio.
Strength training can happen through lifting weights in a gym or body weight exercises at home. It will stimulate your muscles to grow and also burn a lot of energy.
Cardio exercises include activities like walking, hiking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming etc. Cardio improves your cardiovascular fitness while burning the most energy per given time.
For starting, 15-20 min of body weight exercise of walking will also get results. It is important to be consistent and form a daily habit of exercising.
Once you make a habit of it, results start to show boosting your motivation to do more. And even if you are pressed for time, which is an excuse in most cases, you will find a way to make time for exercise.
Eventually, results slow down or completely stall. Then you need to shift the energy balance more and more towards negative to keep making progress. For that you need to gradually increase your exercise or eat less and less.
Step 3: Increase your Activity
We spend a major chunk of our energy in daily activities like moving around at home and office, talking, sitting, standing, thinking, eating and everything else we do throughout the day.
All of that energy spent is combined into a term called NEAT-(Non-Exercise Activity Thermo genesis). There can be surprisingly high fluctuation in your NEAT and that of different people. Studies have found it to be as high as 2000 calories between people at extreme ends.
NEAT is regulated by your brain without even you noticing it. For example, you tend to move less when you are in negative energy balance.
So it is important to be mindful of your activity levels. You have to make conscious effort to keep it high and engage in more movement and physical work. Those sign boards near elevators suggesting you to take stairs, as based on this factor. Start following those.
Step 4: Rest and Recover well
Rest and recovery is the most important part of our health & fitness. We are in constant process of breaking and building our bodies. If we stop the building or the rest and recovery, we will die soon.
The process of breaking our body is especially heightened during negative energy balance and exercising. And if we don’t build it back equally, we stay a little broken each time. It starts accumulating over days and eventually we will be forced to give up.
A major part of our rest and recovery is a good night’s sleep. Our body is actually building back itself when we are sleeping. Furthermore, proper sleep also determines a healthy balance of all our hormones.
Our stress, hunger and satiety are all regulated by hormones. A healthy hormonal balance is necessary for general feeling of health and well being to keep us moving.
So, stop watching TV or wasting time on Facebook and make sleeping 7-8 hrs every night a priority. Also when you are not trying to lose body fat!
Step 5: Keep track of your progress
Last, but not the least, it is important to manage your motivation to keep going for longer duration. Motivation is very volatile. It can be there this moment and completely gone the next moment.
Seeing progress is a powerful motivator to keep working towards your goals. Seeing progress in fat loss is no possible in a couple of weeks, forget about days.
But progress can be measures. You can also kind of see it if you put it on a piece of paper or an excel sheet.
You can see your progress this way-
- Note down your weight every day first thing in the morning. It keeps fluctuating daily. So calculate average weight at the end of each week, to compare with the previous week.
- Take body measurements like waistline, hip line etc every week on the same time under same conditions.
- Calculate body fat % every 2-4 weeks
I like to maintain this data in an excel sheet, so that I can see my numbers for 3-4 weeks all at once on the screen. It works as a strong visual feedback to my motivation.
Speaking of visual feedback, you can also take pictures of yourself every 2nd week to see your body changing. It’s a wonderful feeling and it is extremely powerful motivation. I still keep seeing my pictures from 3 yr back to feed my motivation.
Lastly, even if you fail to see results or your progress stops suddenly, you know something went wrong. It is very easy to figure out further steps if you have been consistent with your diet, exercise and activities.
What gets measured, gets managed!!
This is not a definitive guide to take you all the way to six-packs, but it will definitely help you start and take you very close.