Keys to Successful Weight Loss

For the past five years, I have been constantly working out and trying to improve my physique. I started out as a chubby person, and managed to turn myself into an amateur bodybuilder. I lift weights and do bodybuilding for the pleasure of feeling good about yourself that it brings. Having a large knowledge of nutrition and fitness, I decided that I want to help other people to achieve their goals and overcome the dissatisfaction of their bodies. In this article, I will talk about what matter the most when trying to lose weight, what you should do and what you should not. I will provide you with my personal experience on certain things as well, as I have plenty of it. After reading this article, hopefully, you will find yourself having more knowledge about fat loss that will lead you closer to your fitness goals.

Many people think that in order to lose weight, one needs to just do some cardio exercises, such as running, three times a week and the transformation will automatically happen. Unfortunately, that is not true. While cardio three times a week, might give you sudden fat loss, but that would probably just be the result of the shock your body receives, since you have not been working out before. So what should you do to lose weight? Diet! Dieting is what matters the most in burning fat off your body. I am one of those people who would say that it is 80% nutrition and 20% exercises. Why does dieting matter so much? The reason why people gain fat, in the first place, is that they eat more (consume more calories) than their bodies need to keep the body fully functioning.Therefore, in order to lose fat, one needs to eat less calories than their total daily caloric needs. Obviously, exercising increases your total caloric needs, but even without any kind of activities one could shed some unnecessary fat off one's body. So how should you diet? That's what I am going to talk about next...

As I mentioned before, proper nutrition is the number one key to your fat loss goals. Unfortunately, it is not that obvious about what one should eat. Everybody knows that to lose fat one needs to cut out candy, cookies and other kind of sweet stuff. However, keeping in mind that you are probably a beginner in weight loss, I will talk a "calories in vs. calories out" approach (there are many approaches to weight loss, but I will talk about them in my future articles). "Calories in vs. calories out" approach pretty much means what it says. In order to lose weight, you should consume less calories than your body needs. To find out how many calories you need, you can visit the caloric needs calculator above. It is recommended that out eat 500 calories less than your caloric needs to keep losing fat in a healthy manner (without losing any muscle). That way you could lose about a pound a week, as one pound consists of 3500 calories. Of course, you could eat even less to lose weight even faster, but, in that case, there would be a high chance that you would end up losing muscle mass.

OK, so what should you eat? Technically, you could eat McDonald's and still lose weight if you eat less calories a day than you need. However, you would not be losing any fat. What you would be losing is, indeed, muscle mass. To prevent muscle loss, in general, you need to eat mostly protein throughout the day. The reason for that is that protein is what builds muscle, as well as keeps muscle from being destroyed. Additionally, protein foods are perfect diet food because to digest 100 calories of protein, your body will use 25 calories, resulting in 75 net calories to be absorbed by the body. In the mean time, carbohydrates require 6 calories to process 100 calories, and fats - 3 calories to process 100 kcal of fats. Do you see now why protein is so important in successful fat loss?

Another important point to notice is that, although you could be eating burgers every day and still experience weight loss, you should not forget that you there is such thing as macro-nutrients (protein, carbohydrate, fats), and you should take that into consideration. There are different ways on how to split them. Ideally, I like doing 20% of fats, 30% of carbs, and 50% of protein. What does that mean? If you are on 1800 calories a day diet, you should be eating 40g of fats, 135g of carbs, and 225g of protein. However, you can change these ratios significantly and still experience good results. There is one thing I do not recommend doing is going less than 20% of fats a day, as fats is what makes your brain work. Additionally, when calculating the macro nutrients intake, keep in mind that 1 gram of fat has 9 calories, while 1 gram of carbohydrate or protein has 4 calories.

Now, let's talk briefly how exercising is related to weight loss. As I mentioned before, what matters in weight loss is "calories in vs. calories out," and the way exercising helps is you burn more calories while doing some kind of exercise. Therefore, you can either eat more, and still have 500 calories deficit, or eat the same amount and have larger caloric deficit. It is entirely up to you what you choose to do with the deficit of the calories. In the link above, you will find how much calories do various activities burn. Calculating calories in weight loss process is very important!

Another question that might be bugging you, is how much you should exercise, and how often? Again, it is entirely up to you - perfect fat loss program would consists of exercising at least 5 times a week, mixing both cardio and weight lifting. Weight lifting is extremely important in weight loss process, because the more muscle you have the more calories you burn. Also, weight lifting increases your metabolic rate in the long term, while cardio only increases it in the short term(less than a day).

In my personal opinion, it does not matter what kind of exercises you will do, you should be experiencing weight loss, as long as you are eating less calories than you need to keep you body running at its full capacity.

This article is just overview of the basics of the weight loss. In the near future I will write some articles that go more deeply into the ideas of weight loss nutrition, exercising, diet supplements, and even bust some myths surrounding concepts of weight loss. I would love to hear your comments and feedback about this article. My main goal is to help you guys lose weight and be confident about your bodies. Thank you for reading!