If you want to lose weight really fast, you can easily get into the quick fixes like the fad diet that assure a flat belly within days. The thought of losing weight generally strikes you after a festive season and for most of us, it is in the month of January. When you have had so much of poultry and desserts; you start thinking about fitting into your bikini for the summer holiday. If you can relate to it, we have got of something of great help.
In this blog, we have discussed the fastest ways of losing weight. However, these might not be as quick as you expect them to be, but we guarantee you will see results. Check out the amazing ways to lose weight without much stress; it is doable.
Fastest ways to lose weight
The best way to lose weight depends on a lot of things, like your starting point, the desired goal and your lifestyle. Here are ten effective strategies that can help you achieve your end goal. Just follow the steady and manageable plan.
Achieve a calorie deficit
To answer in brief about how to lose weight fast is achieving the consistent calorie deficit. You need to burn more calories than your daily calorie intake.
Suppose, you eat 2500 calories in a day, the normal recommended daily amount for humans. It basically depends on various factors like your height, body frame and weight. You need to burn 3000 calories in a day to get into the calorie deficit.
If you burn 3000 calories but have had a calorie intake of 3500 throughout the day, you are not in a calorie deficit. Doesn’t matter if you work out hard to burn those calories! It doesn’t work that way.
So, you need to make sure that you eat the right food, do the correct exercises and feel completely satisfied even after consuming fewer calories than the amount you burn.
Decrease the calorie intake with diet changes
The most common mistake we make while trying to lose weight fast is that we think the more we exercise, the more we need to eat to match our energy levels. Well, this isn’t true. Now you know why it never worked for you. We would recommend you to adapt a healthier diet to get the maximum benefit from the calories you consume.
Different food types have different energy levels. For example, fruits, whole grains, vegetables have low energy density, which indicates you feel fuller faster than the consuming food with high energy densities.
Jenna Hope, a nutritionist says, “Proteins and healthy fats promote more stable blood glucose levels, keeping you fuller across a time period and less likely to crave sugar or over eat.” So, you must include foods with lower energy density in your diet to get most of your calories.
Taking the same or lesser amount of calories, but absorbing more nutritional value from those foods well ensure you stay fuller for long and shed off the extra weight faster.
Don’t skip any single food group completely
We know that there are food groups which are healthier than other food groups. It is important that you consume all the types of food in your diet. So where does the problem lie? It is in the inconsistent amount of food we eat. You need to maintain a proper balance of the foods you consume in a day.
Isabel Butler, a nutritionist at Spoon Guru suggests that, “the best way to reduce weight and maintain the weight loss is by simply eating a balanced and healthy diet, without refusing yourself particular foods… If you do cut out foods, you need to make sure your diet is still balanced and you are getting the nutrients your body needs from other sources.”
Unless you want to be a weightlifter, there is no problem in consuming carbs. However, when it is about disturbing the weight loss process, simple carbohydrates is the food type to blame. In comparison of the complex carbohydrates like whole grains, beans and vegetables, which releases and break down energy slowly, making you feel energized and full, simple carbs like starchy and sugar foods break down into sugars, which leaves you wanting more. The same is the case with spuds and pasta.
The basic thing you need to understand here is the more simple carbs you consume, the more you will over-eat, disturbing the balance of the calorie deficit.
A simple trick to follow in this case is to replace carbs like rice or white pasta with vegetable noodles or courgetti. This can make a curry, an arrabiata or stir fry lower in calories. You might not notice the difference while you eat it but you will feel fuller for long, even after eating fewer calories.
Go for a food substitute
Sometimes it gets really hard to reduce your calorie intake or tracking them. So, you are constantly trying to lose weight but are unable to have a count of calorie intake. You make the best efforts in cooking fresh using ingredients with no clear break down of its nutrients in the label. These situations make it more difficult to track calories.
To make sure you are consuming a balanced intake of nutrients and protein, you can try a food substitute in your diet. Doing this can successfully help you count the calories. However, you must talk to your health and fitness expert or doctor before making the diet change.
Get into intermittent fasting
One of the most common weight loss diet plan is intermittent fasting. People are happy with results without much ado. You can cut down your calorie intake by going into complete fasting for a few hours of the day or a couple of days in a week and eat normally for the rest of the time.
The most popular type of intermittent fasting is the 5:2 diet plan. In this diet plan, you eat the usual diet for five days of a week and restricting your calorie intake to 600 for the rest two days of a week.
You can also try the 16:8 diet plan of intermittent fasting, which talks about fasting for 16 hours in a day and eating normally for the rest 8 hours. You can only drink water during the 16-hour fasting period. The suggested time to eat food is between 10:00am and 6:00pm. However, you can keep a flexible time as per your lifestyle. Your daily meal timings are some of the important factors to consider while planning an intermittent diet. Just make sure you eat within the 8 year window.
The main benefit of intermittent fasting is the time period your body runs out of carbohydrates when you are on fast. Your body starts taking energy from the stored fat in your body, thus burning the belly fat completely.
Drink sufficient water and less alcohol
Drinking more water is important, mainly before meals, helps you feel fuller. Thereafter, making you eat sooner and take fewer calories than you normally do.
When you replace fizzy drinks, fruit juices, coffee and even tea with water, you save up your calorie space for the good food that fills you up. This way, you can control your calorie intake everyday by reducing the hundreds of extra calories you otherwise take.
To do this successfully, have a reusable bottle of water with you handy and avoid other drink. It might be difficult at the start but gets easier eventually as you maintain the zero calorie drink throughout the day.
You should reduce the alcohol amount you drink to get maximum benefits. You might not know but alcohol are high in calorie, so drinking less alcohol means drinking less calorie. It’s that simple!
Drinking alcohol boosts your appetite and you end up eating more, which obviously isn’t a help for weight loss. Moreover, drinking incites the urge to eat bad stuff, like the cheesy dips that only adds to your calorie intake.
The day after the night you drink heavily, you don’t get the feeling to hit the gym, no matter how much you want to. Drinking high amount of alcohol not only affects your calorie intake but the functioning of the body and making healthy choices the following day as well.
Increase your calorie output by with exercise
Now that we have managed to understand diet and nutrition, we should talk about the importance of exercise in losing weight fast.
Even if you eat healthy and have an active daily life, it is not possible to lose weight as desired without that additional workout session. Be it running, crossfit, gym, cycling, team sports or any other kinds of exercise.
Working out regularly makes you feel and look better and once that starts happening, you put in more efforts in improving your diet. So, make sure the right exercise to help getting into the desired shape. The main factor to consider while choosing your exercise is understand what you enjoy doing. Do not force yourself to run, when you know you will stop in 10 minutes.
Focus on weight training along with cardio
Two main types of exercise include cardio training and weight training. Both the type help in burning calories, the only difference is cardio burns high amount of calories while you are at it and weight training keeps burning calories after the session.
Weight training involves building muscles and muscle burns faster while you carry out your daily tasks. In short, the higher is your muscle:fat ratio, the more calories you will burn, no matter if you are standing still.
Weight training might seem scary at first, but you need to gather the courage to hit the gym everyday and face the squats right away. You can also do many weight training exercises at home using simple equipment like kettlebells, dumbbells and balls to rope.
Change the intensity of your workouts
While doing both weight training and cardio, it is important to change the intensity of your exercise to see the desired results.
In a week, you must exercise aerobically (like going a bit out of breath but not actually gasping) and anaerobically (like when running for a bus).
In case of aerobic exercises, it needs moderate exertion while requiring oxygen to maintain muscle energy. Some examples of aerobic exercise include cycling, running and swimming
It is an essential part of losing weight faster as it uses both fat and sugar as energy source. But in order to burn fat, you should continue it for long enough to get your sugar stores burning.
Talking about anaerobic exercise, it uses sugar as the fuel. That doesn’t indicate that it’s bad for weight loss. Anaerobic exercise promotes building muscle, which helps you burn calories even when you are not working out. These are mostly high intensity exercises., like weight lifting and sprinting.
A fitness tracker or running watch can help you determine your intensity of workout, with its built-in heart rate trackers. It shows how hard you are exercising and notify you when it’s time to push harder.
Track your calorie input and calorie output
You must measure your success by tracking the results consistently. It is important to understand the fluctuations because of water retention and digestive contents.
The best way to do this is wearing a running watch, which tracks your progress and keeps you motivated throughout the process. It tracks everything from your weight, resting heart rate, activity level, BMI and calories.
There are some fitness trackers that has advanced metrics, but watches are still better than the bands of fitness trackers.
Alternatively, an old method of tracking your results is weighing frequently. Give your body some time to lose weight as sometimes even when you are on a calorie deficit, you gain weight because of the denser muscles.
The Bottom Line
You can lose weight faster when using the right technique with right knowledge of the process. So, when you start adapting the fastest ways of losing weight, talk to a health and fitness expert about these tested weight loss ways and see which of these can help you in the best way. Set an end goal, start working out to achieve it and keep tracking the process to attain results faster.
