3 Simple Tips to Reach Your Fat Loss Goals
- Ben
- Apr 21, 2018
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 21, 2018
Fat loss is often made to appear like a confusing and complicated endeavor with so many different approaches and products offering a quick and easy solution. In reality weight loss doesn’t have to be complicated at all. The fact of the matter is that the “how to” to weight loss has been known for a long time. There is no magic to it and there is nothing new or revolutionary in what I am about to say. Be wary of anyone who claims so because they are most likely trying to sell you something that you don’t need. At the most fundamental level fat loss boils down to energy consumed versus energy spent or calories in versus calories out. Now this may be slightly oversimplified and there’s reasonable evidence to suggest that the source of the calories you consume is important, but that is a discussion for another time. It still comes to reason that at the most basic level if you eat less and move more (in other words spend more energy than you are taking in) you will lose weight. In the same way that a country can run a deficit when they are spending more money than they are collecting, your body runs an energy deficit. So how does someone achieve this “energy deficit”? The short answer (and the only answer) is nutrition and exercise. Let’s take a quick look at where the calories you consume in a given day are spent. The term that dietitians use for this is your total daily energy expenditure or TDEE. Consider that for the average adult the vast majority of your energy expenditure can be accounted for by your basal metabolic rate or BMR (basically the rate of energy expenditure that is required to keep you living at rest). BMR typically makes up about 60-70% of total daily energy expenditure. This leaves the remaining 30% to other things like thermic effect of food or TEF (the energy required to actually break down and metabolize the food you eat which accounts for about 10% of TDEE) and physical activity. Physical activity can be further broken down further into exercise and non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT. NEAT is basically the energy you spend doing daily tasks like washing dishes or walking up a flight of stairs. So you can see that there are a number of different things that our bodies use the energy from what we consume to do. What may be surprising is the small percentage of energy that is spent on exercise. Although we can increase our total energy expenditure by increasing our activity level through exercise, it is not going to be enough by itself. This is where nutritional changes and lifestyle adjustments come into play in helping to achieve a caloric deficit and fat loss. Now I am sure you have heard some version of this before, and like I said earlier, none of this is new or revolutionary. It’s not pretty and unfortunately it takes patience and commitment to see results. But if you have a strategy and take small steps, what seems impossible to accomplish will soon feel very manageable. So here are a few simple tips that you can start incorporating into your weight loss strategy to help make things more manageable.
1) Track your eating, activity and sleep habits
If you are not already doing this, you should start immediately. This may be the single most important thing you can do to help you reach your fat loss goals. Fat loss is all about changing habits and you can’t change what you don’t know. In terms of diet, start writing down things like what you’re eating, when you are heating, how much you are eating, are you eating when you are hungry, how do you feel/ what is your mood after eating certain foods, etc. In terms of activity level ask questions like how much are you exercising, what are you doing when you exercise, how active are you throughout the day, are you forced to sit down for long periods of time and is there a way to break that up, etc. Lastly, in terms of sleep look at whether or not you are getting enough sleep (it is recommended that adults get 7-9 hours per night), do you get high quality sleep (meaning you fall asleep quickly, don’t wake up much during the night, and get deep sleep/ feel rested when you wake up). The more you ask yourself and record, the better. Track your habits for at least a couple of weeks so that you can start to see trends and in all likelihood you might see some changes just from taking the time to write all this down. Once you have gotten a clear picture of your habits you need to ask yourself (and be honest with yourself) about what habits are helping or hindering your progress. From this you need to make actionable steps you can take to start changing and I will discuss later on different ways to do this. Start small and understand that you don’t need to change everything all at once. If you do that you will likely feel overwhelmed and fail to follow through. Continue to make small changes and overtime they will add up. The biggest take away from this point is to have more awareness of your eating and activity level habits so that you know what you need to change.
2) Add more strength training to your exercise regimen if all you are doing is cardio
As mentioned earlier, your BMR is responsible for the vast majority of energy expenditure on a given day. We can increase our total energy expenditure by bumping up our physical activity level and NEAT through exercise and moving around more throughout the day, but what if there was a way to increase our BMR so that we were burning more calories throughout the entire day? Well there is a way to increase BMR and it involves strength training and increasing your lean body mass. Here’s an analogy that works well to describe how this works: imagine a small company is looking to grow and expand their business. The bigger the company becomes the more employees and capital the company needs or in other words the more resources the company needs to continue to run. Your body works in the same way, the more mass you have or the bigger you are, the more resources or energy you need to keep your body running. So how do we increase our need for energy? By strength training we can build more muscle mass and increase our total lean body mass which, in turn, increases our energy requirements. With a larger lean body mass we now require more calories to operate as we shed fat. So, all else being equal, if you just started weight training you would most likely start to see some reduction in your total body fat because your caloric requirements would increase. Now, it’s a little more complicated than that and there is still a need for proper diet and metabolic conditioning, but neglecting any strength training is not going to do you any good if you are looking to lose fat. There are so many other benefits to strength training, but if fat loss is your goal then this might be the most important benefit to you.
3) Change your environment
If you’re someone who feels like they have no control over the temptation of unhealthy food, changing your eating habits and losing fat can feel impossible. Changing a habit is hard and resisting temptation is even harder. There are 3 components related to self-control or the ability to resist a temptation and they are the standards you set for yourself, a way to monitor your behavior, and the ability to change unwanted behavior (1). The last two of these components are pretty self-explanatory but the first one, creating standards, is a little more interesting. The standards that you create can be seen as the foundation to your behavioral changes and without them there is no real direction to where you are going to make changes. Another way to think about this component of self-control is that your standards are the guidelines and goals you create to produce the outcome you desire. What would the behaviors and habits of the person you want to be look like? Once you have established these standards and began monitoring your behavior you will need to find a way to actually change your behavior. This is probably the most intimidating of all three components of self-control and it is where changing your immediate environment comes into play. The changes you make to your environment should enable you to follow your standards more easily by preventing you from doing anything outside of those set guidelines. So how do you do that? Here are a couple different ways to help change your environment and behaviors:
1) Eliminate unhealthy food from your home. By doing this you won’t be able to easily eat unhealthy food when you have an urge to. Making it costly are difficult to regress back to the behavior you are trying to change will make it a lot easier to stick with the new behavior. One thing to think about is creating a master grocery list that you don’t deviate much from with only healthy options. Check out this TED talk about how changing your food environment can help with fat loss:
2) Try to spend more time with people who have similar goals to you or have accomplished what you are trying to accomplish. Being around people that don’t enable you to make poor eating choices will go a long way to your fat loss goals. Social pressure is a powerful thing and being around people who eat like crap will only pressure you to do the same.
3) Lastly, try temptation bundling. This is a behavioral psychology term for dealing with self-control issues where you take a behavior that you should be doing but don’t really want to and pair it with something you enjoy doing. For example, only let yourself watch your favorite TV show if you eat a healthy meal or go to the gym. You can get creative with this, but the idea is that you make yourself more motivated to do the thing you don’t like doing by bundling it with something you do enjoy doing. Check out this Freakonomics podcast episode for more information on temptation bundling and self-control:
Try incorporating some of these three tips into your daily life and see if you start getting closer to your fat loss goals. Remember that change is a slow process so don’t feel bad if you are not making progress as fast as you would like. If you are overwhelmed with all of these different suggestions then break it up and start with one or two of them. Start with small changes and adjustments and keep making small changes. Soon you’ll look back and see that you’ve made a lot more progress than you thought you did. It’s important that you track your progress so that you can see how far you’ve gone. Fat loss is an uphill battle and it isn’t going to be easy. It’s essential that you have patience and a lot of perseverance if you want to reach your ultimate goals.
Feel free to comment with any questions or comments you may have on this topic. If there is anything you want to see me cover on a future post please send me an email at 510strengthconditioning@gmail.com.
References
1) Baumeister, R.F. (2002). Yeilding to temptation: self control failure, impulsive purchasing, and consumer behavior. The Journal of Consumer Research, 28(4), 670-676
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