Reduce your caloric intake below your maintenance level.
Work out your TDEE and then adjust your diet. You can measure calories of food by using My Fitness Pal app.
If your maintenance is at 2000 calories and you eat 1600-1700 calories you will lose weight. If you eat 2100-2500-3000 you will GAIN FAT. It is that easy. Exercise will burn more calories so you can either eat more or lose fat quicker.
This is somewhat debated but eating late at night does make you gain weight. Your body doesnât use the energy if you eat close to bedtime. Itâs even worse if you eat a big meal or sugary stuff before sleeping.
high intensity training(burpees, stuff like that.) did the job for me. not long either, about ten minutes after i did some yoga(the yoga does nothing for me fat losing wise but i do it for other benefits.) also eating less and sticking to a plan. having something that wont make you fat to snack on in those moments of late night hunger helped too. its quite easy for me to run to 7 11 and by something unhealthy there. so having some nuts/beans/ salad in the fridge is a good idea.
I agree. If you were to choose just one and only one thing to change, that would be it. My carb intake is considerably lower than (say) the average American, but I still indulge in pizzas, burgers, beer etc when I feel like it (admittedly, it isnât that often). However I add sugar to nothing at all, and eat almost no desserts. That seems to be all thatâs necessary to keep me svelte and model-like.
Exactly. Nobody ever considers this in terms of power (the rate at which energy enters your body, which is mostly determined by chemical dynamics rather than homeostasis) and energy storage limits. If you indulge in a 1000-calorie cheesecake, it does you no good at all to burn 1000 calories on the treadmill six hours later. That cheesecake was pumped into fat storage long ago, and the treadmill workout will burn mostly glycogen.
[quote]Eat less.
Exercise more.[/quote]
Sadly, this doesnât actually work. Itâs kinda depressing that medical science has finally figured out what causes obesity and how to correct it, but opinions from food-supplement journalists and ânutritionistsâ with non-accredited degrees are being preached louder than ever.
A Columbia University online health site deals with many different issues regarding health claims and myths. One of the main points they make about taking in calories late at night involves the time after which the body is most apt to store fat. For example, if you eat the same exact meal at 6 PM or at 10 PM, it doesnât matter because each meal has the same number of calories.
What really matters is the total amount of food and drink you have over the course of a week, month, or longer, and ultimately how much energy you put out in that certain time period. This means that extra calories will be stored as fat over time, regardless of whether they are taken in during the day or night.
Eating a normal sized meal before you sleep is fine if you have stuck to your daily calorie allowance and will not make you gain fat because you âate food 2 hours before bedâ.
How about eating first thing in the morning to get the metabolism fired up and not let your body go into fat storage mode? Itâs my understanding that this is a great way to help with your diet, and itâs something Iâve been doing. Iâve lost a little over 2 kilos in three weeks.
My bet is that HIIT (high intensity interval training) workouts, like the one described by brobonek, also benefit your metabolism in a way that results in weight loss. At the very least, it seems to make sense that you continue to burn calories long after the workout and much longer than if you were to do something moderate for, say, 30 minutes. (I havenât researched this. Just a hunch.)
And as discussed in this thread, gaining some muscle has been proven to increase the rate at which your body burns calories throughout the day (and night).
Those studies were all high-carbohydrate, hypocaloric diets. It should be fairly obvious that a meal eaten at the end of a calorie-deficient day of activity will be used to replace depleted glycogen, so the outcome is not unexpected.
On a eucaloric diet, the outcome is a lot less predictable. It depends on what you eat, how often you eat it, and what youâve been doing, but broadly speaking most adults who have not reduced sweets and starches will end the day with glycogen stores full. Any meal eaten late in the evening will therefore end up as fat; it literally has nowhere else to go.
Finley this thread is about losing weight, which a eucaloric diet is not going to do because youâre eating the same amount of calories that you burn. I am not sure why you mentioned this?
I lost about 16kgs in 5 months to get ready to go train to fight in Thailand. Hereâs what I did to get to 7% body fat.
Walk more, I started to walk everywhere I could and got a xiami miband and made sure I keep track of how much I walk.
Donât snack, eat meals. I never liked snacks but trust me, stop eating in between light meals. Eat real meals that keep you full throughout the day.
Eat anytime you want, donât believe the bs donât eat before you sleep bs. As long as you are eating balanced full meals and not over eating and snacking itâs fine. Donât get caught up with calorie couting, sugar intake, fat intake. Donât be afraid of fat and sugar, your body needs them to function especially if you are working out. but obviously donât drink a bunch of soda and eat mcdonalds full of transfat. All iâm saying is keep it reasonable and not to either side of the extreme.
Obviously exercise, and do it consistently. Train your muscles, most of you wonât get big and bulky as easily like people think. I hear women say this all the time not wanting to look like a Olympic lifter or something. Those people lift all day, almost everyday, you wonât look anything like that. You do however burn more calories easily if you have more lean mass. Most girls that are scared of being muscular have zero muscles in the first place. Itâs really hard to build muscle, takes years.
No junk food and soda.
Have long term goals, donât expect to drop 10kgs in a month of 2. I worked out 2 hours a day almost everyday and I only lost 16kgs in 5 months. Although I gained lean mass but my point is to be consistent. Most people who lose weight gain it right back.
Again, donât do extreme diet and huge calorie deficits. You may lose weight in the beginning, but your body gets used to it and slow your metabolism and youâll stop losing fat and gain it right back once you eat a little more. The trick is to eat enough and exercise to increase your metabolism.
Thatâs great and good work. But if youâre working out two hours every day and itâs intense, in some ways youâre getting into an area where you canât do too much wrong. Phelps, for example, consumed 12,000 calories every day before the Beijing Olympics. I guess he admitted that was a bit of an exaggeration later, but weâre still talking about huge amounts of food for the guy during training with probably around 8% body fat.
Anyway, I think most will agree with just about all you said. I take issue with the sugar statement because so much food already has lots of sugar and we donât need to be buying candy bars, etc. which are just loaded with sugar. We need good sugar (complex carbs) but not the bad sugar (Herseyâs bars).
For most of us with full-time jobs and maybe married with children, weâre talking about 3-4 workouts per week max. And weâre talking getting down to 15% body fat would be an incredible feat. So we need to be very careful about diet (probably the most important part for most of us normal folks).
Thatâs why I said donât expect crazy quick results. It took months of intense training for me so expect maybe 1.5-2kg of fat loss a month not crazy 5-10kg a month cleanse diets.
Iâm saying exactly what you are saying. When I say donât avoid sugar Iâm talking about people that avoid all sugar not eat candy bars.
I disagree, when youâre doing that much your body is in a constant catabolic state. You need to eat enough calories, fats, sugar, carbs, protein. I was extremely careful about getting enough or I would start losing muscle and strength. It may sound easy like oh you can just eat a lot but itâs hard to get all of that daily eating healthy.
Well, you did say [quote=âAndrew0409, post:33, topic:90016â]
Donât get caught up withâŚsugar intake
[/quote]
But if by that you meant what you said directly above, then weâre on the same page. Thereâs an increasing body of evidence that suggests the obesity epidemic in the US can be blamed on sugar (sugar added to everything, for example). I donât know about that, but I do know I have a bit of a gut reaction when people downplay sugar and how it messes with our bodies. Anyway, on a personal level, I know I need to get very caught up with sugar and candy bars and chocolate and cookies and ice cream. Right now, I have cut it all out and so Iâm very caught up with it. I was going to allow myself one candy bar a week but Iâve since decided against that.
Anyway, good for you and your progress. I know you mentioned to do things slowly but then you mention a loss of 16kg in 5 months, which I considered to be pretty intense! For me, my goal is a measly 4 kilos and then I want to maintain that level. No yo-yo this time.
As far as eating what you want, I was commenting on how you can lose weight even with being a bit careless about your intake when youâre working out 2 hours every day. Iâm sure it does take work to lose fat but not muscle, just like it takes work for full-distance triathletes, for example, to gain muscle in the right place and avoid muscle gain in the wrong place (as well as avoiding fat gain), all while eating large quantities of food.
Zapman: one of the biggest myths out there is that you have to starve yourself to lose weight. This is simply not true; Andrew said something similar.
Thatâs not just my say-so; there are literally thousands of experiments which have set out to prove that calorie-deficit high-carbohydrate dieting works, and every single one of them gives the same result: 10% or so get a good result, the majority lose nothing worth mentioning (a kilo over six months, say), and a few people actually gain weight. For some reason this surprises them every time, but thereâs no theoretical reason why it should work.
What you have to do - which should be fairly obvious - is to force your body to burn more fat than it stores over the long term. Eating fewer calories does not do that unless you literally starve yourself (<1200kcal/day). With a modest calorie deficit, your body just slows down your metabolism to conserve what itâs got. The problem is that most people canât starve themselves. Itâs just too horrible.
Itâs a funny thing. Andrew obviously knows what heâs talking about there - the results speak for themselves - but if you put him in a room with a bunch of registered dieticians, theyâd all be arguing with him and telling him heâs doing it wrong. Thereâs a guy I work with who told me heâs a qualified dietician and âeats healthyâ. He looks like any other middle-aged man: barrel-shaped with a belly flopping over his belt. I donât look like Andrew - mainly because I donât have his goals, but partly because Iâm 20 years older than him. OTOH I can see my abs in outline if not in detail, and thatâs good enough for me.
When Iâm deliberately losing fat, thatâs about what I aim for. I went from roughly 80kg to 70kg in four months. I donât care about yo-yoâing; I fluctuate between maybe 69kg and 71kg depending on what mood Iâm in. My opinion is that there is no âidealâ diet. If we were eating what the seasons provide, weâd naturally eat more starches at certain times of year, which means extra bodyfat; at other times, weâd eat a lot more fat and green leaves because thatâs whatâs available. Yo-yoâing, up to a point, is perfectly normal.
âcomplex carbsâ have the same metabolic fate as âbad sugarâ, although my personal experience is that you can eat a modest amount of the former (ie., without getting obsessed about it, as Andrew said) and still not get fat.
You donât need carbs. Nobody ever died of carbohydrate deficiency. Remove the fat or protein from your diet, though, and youâll be seriously ill, or worse.
The number one reason people have a hard time losing weight is the failure of understanding diet. When we think of diets now, itâs some cleanse, huge calorie deficit, eating no fat, avoid all sugar, fad diets eating only fruits or whatever.
I see people go on âdietsâ for a month and itâs painful. They do extremes like say avoiding any sugar. Problem is, glucose is what your body use for energy. Your brain craves it so after a while your body stops working like itâs suppose to and you WILL give in and go on a binge and feel like crap about it and most likely give up or repeat the cycle.
Or they avoid all fat, again your body NEEDs fat to function. Especially if you want to be actually healthy and exercise not just look like skin and bones. So this will backfire
and the worst of all is huge calorie deficit. Hereâs the problem, you eat 1200 calories, your body needs say 2000 in this case. Your body doesnât know you are trying to lose weight, it thinks you are starving and is trying to survive. So it slows your metabolism. You put yourself in a fat storing state. After a while most people give up and eat 2000 cal again, but now your body is trying to store as much fat as possible after starving. So not only do you gain it all back, you probably gain more. And then they repeat this cycle again and again. You mess with your metabolism this way.
yes, this is perfectly normal. I think yo yoing is like losing 5kg and gain 5-7 back. Even I donât keep a perfect diet and keep my weight at 7%bf. Itâs really hard once you get to lower single digits and even unhealthy. I got to 5% at one point and felt like shit. Looks amazing but felt awful and moody. I let myself be around 9-12% bf in normal circumstances. Getting below 10% is only for special reasons.
Well, Iâm not sedentary. Iâve got a 2k open water swim on Saturday and a triathlon on Sunday. You can bet I wonât be avoiding carbohydrates this weekend. I think it could be argued that there would be some danger in that.
