Weight loss is one of the most confusing topics out there.
These days, you’re likely to come across conflicting opinions all the time.
To make it easier for you, we’ve boiled it down to the fundamentals. Below, we’ll go over the three most important things you need to do for easy and effective weight loss.
Let’s see:
- Exercise Regularly
Exercise, according to Fairfax personal trainer Eric Leader, plays a significant role in our weight loss efforts, mostly because it helps us burn calories and achieve a calorie deficit.
Doing a combination of resistance training and cardio will be more beneficial because each offers its unique benefits, and both contribute to our overall results. Plus, variety, as they say, is the spice of life. For example, you can have two cardio and two resistance sessions each week.
Alternatively, you can break your training into small, 10-minute chunks and do it every day – for example, as you get up in the morning. This is a great way to establish a habit of exercise and to begin each day productively.
- Take Care of Your Nutrition
Our nutrition plays a massive role in how well (or poorly) we manage to lose weight. To make it effective, however, we don’t need to put ourselves on an overly-restrictive diet. Instead, we should focus on four things:
- Maintain a small to moderate calorie deficit – somewhere between 200 and 500 below our maintenance level
- Consume enough protein – around 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight each day
- Have plenty of fiber from foods like fruits and veggies
- Emphasize whole and nutritious foods
Weight loss is maths – consuming fewer calories than we burn. Counting calories and using a fitness app such as MyFitnessPal can be incredibly helpful here.
Besides that, we should also focus on nutritious foods that ensure our health, well-being, and vitality.
- Get Enough Sleep
Sleep is an overlooked yet vital factor for effective weight loss for three good reasons:
1) According to some research, sleep deprivation leads to worse fat loss and more significant muscle loss. When subjects slept longer in one crossover study, they lost fat and muscle at a 1:1 ratio. But, when they were sleep-deprived, only a fifth of their total weight loss came from fat.
2) Sleep appears to be vital for metabolic health, and not getting enough of it can slow down our metabolic rate to a degree, thus making us burn fewer calories each day.
3) Sleep deprivation increases levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin. This can make it more challenging to stick with your diet and drastically increases the risk of slipping up and binge eating.
According to most guidelines, we should aim for at least seven hours of sleep per night.
