f it seems that no matter how hard you try to lose weight with diets or exercise, then let me share something with you.
Even when you’ve tried a lot and haven’t seen the results you want (or keep them), losing fat is simpler than you think.
Here’s why.
You’ve probably heard a lot of times that yo need to exercise more and/or eat less to lose weight, but…
you’ve tried that and simply didn’t work for you.
Well, what if I told you that in reality it wasn’t because they don’t work for you or there’s something more complicated than that…
but because you weren’t in a real deficit?
Let me show you what I mean.
For you to lose weight, you need to create a caloric deficit (nothing more or less complicated than that), but if you did some type of restriction yet didn’t see results it was for one of two reasons:
- You weren’t in a real deficit (meaning, what you thought it was or what it once was a deficit for you it no longer is the case)
- You overestimated how much exercise you did, you underestimated how much you ate – or both.
For you to know which one it was and how to deal with it, here’s a simple way of doing it.
Start by calculating how many calories you need to eat per day (based on your Total Energy Daily Expenditure – TDEE) and stick to it at least for 2 weeks.
If you keep the same weight (which you should, as that’s the idea), it means your calories in theory match your real calories.
But you can guess what’s going to happen in the other situations.
If you gain some weight, it could be one of the 2 scenarios I mentioned above (and the only way to get accurate would be by weighing your food)… so you want to adjust and lower your real calories until you stop gaining weight.
And in case you lose some weight (assuming you were tracking accurately), then it was because your real calories are a little bit over from the predicted… so you’d have to increase your calories until you also get to your real calories.
From there, you’d know 2 important things:
- Your current and real maintenance calories
- How to get over the inaccuracy of overeating or undereating.
That leaves you only with the option that’s most important.
How to lose weight.
And with a caloric deficit (it can be somewhat aggressive only at first), you’d then be in a position where losing weight is almost guaranteed.
To put this with numbers, if you were to eat 2,300kcal as maintenance and you’d then cut 500kcal, you’d then start eating 1,800kcal a day…
which should be enough to lose fat and not get stuck for 3-4 weeks.
Then, all you have to do is keep tweaking your diet (or increase exercise activity – or both) so you break past those moments where you feel stuck.
And that’s really it.
Of course, this is a general overview of something that can get pretty detailed and there can be a lot of nuances, but from there…
there’s not much I could add on what you need to do to lose weight for good.
Now, all you have to do is go out there and start doing it.
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Ivan @ Fitnessthetic