A Sustainable Guide to Fat Loss

As the country returns to normal, the odds are that you will be seeing people for the first time in over a year. Given staying at home meant closed gyms and being surrounded by your kitchen throughout the day, many people either put on body fat or lost muscle during the pandemic. If that is you, there's no reason to worry. This week’s post is to provide a brief overview of the science behind fat loss and and the ways you can achieve your goals, and next week I'll talk about building muscle.

Before I begin, I am aware that a discussion about fat loss may trigger body image issues. As someone who has definitely struggled with that in my past, I understand the perceived pressure for change that might come about. It is very important to love your body in whatever shape it is in. There is no ideal body standard to strive towards. If you are happy where you are, great! If you’re happy where you are but would like to make some changes that would improve your relationship with your body image, also great! There is nothing more important than accepting where you are now. If you can’t, achieving a different physique will not be able to address the underlying issues that are creating your self-loathing.

Fat Loss

Let me clarify here that I said “fat loss” rather than “weight loss.” Why? Most of the time, people only care about losing weight and seeing the scale go down quickly, however, this often involves losing quite a bit of muscle mass. Your goal should be to lose body fat while maintaining as much muscle mass as possible. In order to lose body fat and minimize muscle loss, you must be: in a sustainable caloric deficit, consuming adequate protein, getting regular activity, and resistance training.

Nutrition

In order to lose body fat, you must be in a slight caloric deficit to make your body rely on its stored fat for fuel. In other words, you must be consuming less calories than your body needs to fuel your activity. This can be accomplished through eating less or moving more, but the most realistic approach is to simply eat less. Why? Exercise does not burn nearly as many calories as you think it does, and it’s easier and more sustainable to consume less than exercise for hours to only shed a few calories. Several studies have shown that exercise alone is not an effective tool for weight/fat loss. To achieve a true deficit, for most people, it is necessary to track your calories. To begin this, log everything you eat (including bites, licks, and tastes) into a calorie counting app for two weeks without judgement to see how much you are consuming. If you are consuming an adequate amount, then take away 250-500 calories a day for your new target. You should never be consuming less than 1400 calories a day for women or 2000 calories a day for men. If cutting your calories would put you below this, you must work on increasing your metabolism by building muscle before pursuing fat loss. In this scenario, consult a personal trainer or registered dietitian to work with you to develop a true plan.

Protein is incredibly important to fat loss as it forms the building blocks of muscle. When you lose fat, you need to take precautions to retain muscle mass. Losing muscle will slow down your metabolism and lead to the unfolding of your progress when you return to eating maintenance calories. Consuming a minimum of .5g per pound of lean body mass will help ensure that you hold onto your muscle while the fat rolls off.

Activity

While exercise is not the most important aspect of fat loss, your activity levels still play a role. Your body’s total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is comprised of your basal metabolic rate (BMR), non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), exercise activity, and the thermic effect of food (TEF).

NEAT is the largest portion of your TDEE, and it involves any sort of movement you do such as fidgeting, walking, or even driving. To aid fat loss, you’re going to want to increase this type of activity. It can be measured using an activity tracker as steps, calories, or points depending on the one you have. Start by hitting new step goals that are 500-1000 more steps than your current average. Each week, increase the goal until you are consistently getting a minimum of 10k (an arbitrary number, but it’s a fair aim).

If you enjoy some form of cardio, you can add this to increase your exercise activity burn, but make sure you don’t overcompensate for the activity by overconsuming or moving less. Cardio has a number of health benefits, so consider picking an activity you enjoy for that rather than as a means to burn calories. It is important to avoid developing a disordered approach to exercise that focuses on burning calories rather than enjoyment.

The one way to increase your BMR is to build muscle through resistance training. (I mentioned the importance of resistance training in my Exercise 101 post.) Building muscle requires your body to spend more energy conserving the new muscle, as muscle is a calorically “expensive” tissue. If you build more muscle, you will be able to get the same results with less manual calorie burn.

Measuring Progress

The scale is the most commonly used piece of equipment to measure progress, but it really shouldn’t be. Rather than focus on the scale, progress should be measured through progress photos, body measurements, and body fat percentage. For fat loss, the scale should stay the same or decrease, your progress photos should reveal more definition, most of your measurements should decrease, and of course, your body fat percentage should go down.

Why should the scale stay the same? If the scale stays the same and your body fat percentage is decreasing, that means that you are building muscle while simultaneously losing body fat (also known as body re-composition). If the scale is going up too quickly while trying to build muscle, you are probably gaining body fat. If the scale is going down too quickly while trying to lose body fat, you are probably losing muscle which will actually slow down your metabolism and make the changes only temporary.

Keys to sustainability

The problem with fat loss is that many people can lose weight/fat, but it is very few who are able to keep that off. Here are some tips to help you sustain your progress.

1. Only make changes you could see yourself doing forever

If you can’t see yourself continuing a diet or exercise regimen forever, then that is not the plan for you. To keep weight off and maintain muscle mass, you must be ready to sustain what you did for as long as possible. Too frequently, people adopt fad approaches to lose weight quickly. Ultimately, they end up gaining all the weight back (and more because muscle is often lost and the metabolism slows down) when they resume their normal eating habits. Fall in love with the journey, not the destination.

2. Prioritize whole foods

One of the simplest ways to jumpstart fat loss without tracking calories is through prioritizing whole foods (anything that can be found in nature). Most highly processed foods have been designed to make people overconsume. By reducing these foods and replacing them with whole foods, people tend to consume less and consequently create a deficit.

3. Surround yourself with the change you want to see

If you want to live a healthier lifestyle, surrounding yourself with people or content that encourages that is invaluable. When I decided to lose weight and keep it off forever, I started listening to podcasts about weight loss, health, fitness, and mental health. While most of my friends and family don’t have the same lifestyle I do, listening to these podcasts daily allows me to feel less alone and keep up my good habits.

I hope this post was able to shine some light on achieving your body physique goals. The best way to see results would be to work with a personal trainer who can determine a workout and nutrition program that work for your lifestyle and your goals (#hireme). Please share so others can be informed. As always, let me know if this resonated with you or if you have anything else you would like me to write a post about. Next week, I will be talking about muscle growth and body re-composition. Subscribe to be notified by email each time I post!