Losing weight cannot be achieved overnight. Losing weight is a result of series of methodical efforts. I will talk about the series of efforts and steps I followed in my fitness journey of losing 30kg. There were four main steps that controlled the entire process and I will be approaching each step thoroughly in this article. I managed to lose 30kg from 5 months by following these steps and so can you.
1. Mentality
Painful days are inevitable during this process. There will be
days where you would want to give up because the results aren’t visible yet.
There will be times you would want to throw the entire work plan away because
you are losing confidence on it. It is important to have faith in your process
as much as in yourself. Your
thoughts cultivate into your actions. productive behavior stems from productive
thought patterns vice versa. The moment you decide to doubt yourself and your
progress, the snowball effect will take over your thought process and will bring
you to the ground. Do not stop taking care of your mental health while you are
chasing this goal. In other words, do not stop indulging in activities that
kept your mind sane just because now your goal is to lose weight.
2. My eating habits
This defines whether we will lose weight or gain more.
Before we talk about good eating habits, let me cover some important jargon that
I will probably use while I break down how I changed my eating habits for the
better.
Calorie — A unit of measure for the amount of energy
released when the body breaks down food.
Fat — Organic compounds that are made up of carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen, it is the body’s most concentrated source of energy. Like
protein and carbohydrates, fat is a principal and essential component of the
diet.
BMI (Body Mass Index) — This is a very common method
of evaluating individual people to see if they are under or overweight. It
involves comparing their weight to their height by dividing the weight
measurement (expressed in kilograms) by the square of the height (expressed in
meters). A BMI of below 18.5 is underweight, between 18.5 and 25 is an
indication of healthy weight, 25 to 30 is overweight, a BMI of over 30 is
referred to as obese, over 35 is known as morbid obesity, and over 40 indicates
extreme obesity.
Nutrients — All substances from food and drink that
the body uses for energy, growth, upkeep and repair.
Metabolism — is the chemical reactions in the body’s cells that change food into energy ( the most important thing when it comes to losing weight)
Plateau — A fitness plateau happens when the progress
you have been making, such as losing weight, toning up, or getting stronger,
has stopped even though you continue to live a healthy and clean lifestyle.
Now back to the topic at hand
Our bodies require a specific number of calories to feed our bodies to function. When we provide ourselves with extra calories, It gets stored as fat. The only way to lose weight is by consuming less calories than our bodies require. We should do it with proper guidance or else bad side effects might ensure. How do we know how much calories our bodies need? We can google a calorie intake tool figure that out. ( https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html )
Calculate the amount of calories you consume for a day
and compare it with the required calories your body need.
Let’s assume you consume around 3000 calories for a
day but your body only needs 2200 calories to function. The body stores the 800
(3000-2200) calories which we consider as fat.
We cannot cut down the 800 calories abruptly and highly advise you to
not to do it. We have to do it gradually for a sustainable weight loss program.
How we can do it? I will explain that in the next step.
3. How to burn calories and lose weight
A ) By increasing metabolism
There are few factors that play into burning calories and our metabolism is highly important. High metabolism will burn more calories hence why some people can eat more without gaining weight since their metabolism is “High”. Can we increase the metabolism rate?
Absolutely.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-ways-to-boost-metabolism#TOC_TITLE_HDR_8
B) By indulging in exercise
Our bodies produce the energy to exercise by burning stored
fat. If your body has never been exposed to any physical exertion, do not worry.
There are several variations of exercises that are convenient for beginners.
I would recommend you circuit training due to it’s effectiveness
while being easier to perform.
https://www.healthline.com/health/what-exercise-burns-the-most-calories#calorie-burning-exercises
C) Dieting
Dieting doesn’t mean cutting off food unnecessarily.
Our bodies need nutrients and we receive them through what we eat. Removing
those needed nutrients would make it difficult to function at an optimum level.
Dieting is regulating the food to match the purpose of our goal. If you goal is
to lose weight, find a diet that will help you achieve it. There are several diet
types are available and finding the proper one that suits your body is important.
If you consume too much carbs for a day,
Starting a low carb diet would help you regulate the carb intake.
There are few more weight loss friendly diet plans are
available and you can find them here.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/9-weight-loss-diets-reviewed
D) Fasting
Fasting can be beneficial for the mind and the body
when it’s performed correctly. Since this article is about losing weight and my
experience, I will talk about strictly “Intermittent Fasting” since it was one I
found tremendously to be helpful. Not just it would help you to lose weight, It
would bring you many more health benefits. Intermittent fasting takes around 60%
of credit for my weight loss and I highly recommend you to dig deeper with it if
you are interested. I will post few articles
about it below and you would be able to find more content regarding this with
couple of google searches.
Now you know what goes behind the curtains when we
lose weight. You are aware of how you gain weight and how to stop it, you are familiar
with metabolism, diets, intermittent fasting and types of exercises you can do.
The next step is to stick to these in a regular basis and being consistent with
it. Consistency of your efforts will determine the success of weight loss program.
It may take few weeks for you to see results and even a month could be possible
depending on your metabolism. The certain thing is you will lose weight if you
simply follow these steps consistently.
let me know below in the comments whether you found
this helpful or how I could have made this better.
Best of luck!
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