How To:
LOSE WEIGHT
Snapshot
Losing weight is one of the biggest challenges people face in their lives. It’s commonly one of the top goals people set for themselves and ranks number one among New Year’s resolutions. Losing weight, however, is hard. That’s why people fail at it time and time again. In this article we’ll cover how to lose weight using the right approach and mindset that can last a lifetime. The only thing truly holding you back is knowledge and understanding.
Class is in Session
How to Lose weight
Losing weight is one of the most gratifying feelings you’ll ever have. There is a great sense of accomplishment that goes along with it, in addition to endless compliments that reinforce all your hard work. You look great and feel down right sexy in all of your clothes. There is also a massive shift in mentality.
Your confidence will be booming because of how you look and feel and that will carry over to everything else that you do. Your renewed sense of confidence will carry over to productivity at work, tasks at home, relationships with friends, etc.
Achieving a weight-loss goal puts you on the fast track to maximizing the best version of yourself. This best version of you looks amazing, operates with incredible amounts of confidence and hits on all cylinders. Success follows success and you’ll find that after hitting your weight-loss goal everything else seemly starts to fall into place. It’s amazing how positive changes create positive outlooks, which creates positive mindsets. And positive mindsets change every facet of your day.
But how do you find success losing weight when so many others are failing? Let’s get into it.
Mindset
If you change the way you see things, the things you see will change.
Mindset is everything when it comes to accomplishing anything. It is the strongest factor in determining someone’s success. With the right mindset you’ll have the ability to hurdle any obstacle and refocus if things go awry.
When it comes to dieting and losing weight, nothing is more critical than being mentally ready to take on the challenges. Having the power to turn down diet-destroying foods and break old habits is hard. Really hard. Without the right mindset and 100% willingness to change you will never hit your goal. You have to want to seek healthy behaviors and not just be told to do so. When your drive and motivation reach these levels then you are ready to change. Remember, if nothing changes, nothing changes.
The first step in acquiring the right mind set is figuring out why you want to change. What is pushing you to lose weight? Why do you care? When your reason to change (wedding, health, reunion, vacation, etc.) outweighs everything else, then the right mindset has taken over.
Have a Plan
Plans are saturated with success. You have to have a plan in order to achieve any goal. You can not set out to hit a goal knowing only what you need to do. You know you need to move more, eat better, drink more water, but knowing isn’t doing. You have to have a plan in order to accomplish something as challenging as weight loss. Without a plan you get uncertainty and uncertainty breeds inaction.
Going from nothing, as far as exercise and a disciplined diet are concerned, into a full-fledge effort into weight loss is incredibly challenging. But if you want what you’ve never had you have to do what you’ve never done.
Make a plan every week. Set specific days that you know you will be able to workout. Stay consistent with those days. If you miss a designated workout day then make it up. All too often we have met people that plan on working out set days per week (example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday). They become “busy” on one of those days and don’t workout … and they don’t make it up. The wheels to their plan fall off before they even get on the road.
If you have a plan, stick to it or failure will be sure to follow. Make progress, not excuses. Successful people have a habit of doing things failures don’t like to do.
Set Your Goal
Without a goal you are working towards nothing. A goal gives you the emotional relevance that you need to achieve any goal. Emotional relevance is the reason or desire behind change. If you don’t have emotional relevance then you won’t have the drive to succeed. Your goal answers the most important question: why do you care? The why-do-you-care question pushes you every day. It could be because you’re getting married, you want to improve your health, or because you want to look better naked. Whatever the reason, you must be emotionally charged and be able to answer the question: Why do you care?
Environment
A lot of times your physical environment makes achieving your goal feel like an up-hill battle.
Your environment can have a drastic impact on how you think, feel and act. The conditions that people live and work in can influence how they feel and behave. These environments can influence your successes or contribute to your failures.
Take Action
Line up your behaviors with your goals. Embrace change. Remember that when you first start out you’re working with a resistant mind and resistant body that aren’t used to new patterns and habits. Keep the focus and slowly reshape your new lifestyle.
When you first start out there will be some fear and doubt. Recognize those negative thoughts and reduce them little by little until you have changed your response to them. In other words, if the gym intimidates you, go anyways, but do what you’re comfortable with. This could be as simple as walking on a treadmill or stretching. Do what you’re ready for and build from there. You know what your goal is but you won’t get there overnight. Eliminate your fears and doubts by finding positive ways to exercise. Find things you like to do and use that to improve your confidence and in turn that will improve your response to exercise.
Exercise is key to taking action. It will build a much leaner and healthier version of yourself. However, you may never love exercise … and that’s OK, but you can learn to like it by understanding and appreciating the value of it.
First, find out where you’re at, that is, find what you feel comfortable doing. Figure out what you like and what you know you will do — and do that (walking, workout machines, swimming, sports). Do it for a couple of weeks and then challenge yourself to do a little more, and then a little more. Eventually exercise will become voluntary as you start noticing results and see it as a path to achieving your goal.
Key Factors
Diet
You do not need to exercise to lose weight, but it will make it a whole hell of a lot easier. Not to mention, your body composition will be much better off. Plus, you’ll be much leaner and tighter with some sweet body definition.
Losing weight comes down to this: burn more calories than you consume. In other words, calories in versus calories out determines weight gain and weight loss. However, not every calorie was created equal. Food choices do matter when you are trying to change your body composition. This is important because you want to eat a healthy diet of nutrient-rich foods with plenty of protein, fats and carbohydrates. Nutrients are very important because of their various roles. The food we eat can fundamentally change how our body works.
With that being said, all diets work. Assuming you stick within the parameters of the diet, it will work. This is because diets provide structure, promote a reduction in calories consumed and promote an increase in nutrient-rich foods. These three factors alone go a long way towards helping you shed weight.
Choose a diet that works for you. Something that works with your lifestyle or supports your passions or beliefs. There are many well-designed diets available, just make sure it’s something you know you can follow.
Movement
Activity is such an important part of the human body. We were created to move with balance, coordination and strength (OK, some more than others). But as a society we are doing a lot less moving, and while that may work for people who want sloppy bodies, it won’t work for you if you want to lose weight.
Finding ways to be physically active will have you sprinting (no pun intended) to your goal. It’s the fastest way to any weight-loss goal, while improving your heart health, fitness level and quality of life in the process.
Resistance training is the gold standard for exercise. It is the fountain of youth if there ever was one. Resistance training is physical exercises that improves strength and endurance with the use of weight or any variation of resistance. When you’re trying to lose weight, exercise selection matters and resistance training is number one. If you ever dreamed of having a body like Matthew Mcconaughey, Chris Hemsworth, Gisele Bündchen or Michelle Keegan then you are lifting weights. Those celebrities, as well as anyone else who has a great physique, lifts weights. I’m not talking meathead, bodybuilder crap (which is fine if you’re into that style). I’m talking, real lifts that burn a ton of calories and shape your body in the sexist possible way. There simply isn’t a substitute for squats, deadlifts, press variations (bench) and pull variations (pull-ups). If you want to reshape your body and burn more net calories day in and day out then this is your jam (Mmm, we love jam).
Cardio is terrific for your heart, lungs, mind — and of course — weight loss. The extra weight you’re carrying around is fat and fat is simply stored energy. The more energy you burn during bouts of steady-state cardio such as biking, running, elliptical, stair climber, etc., the better for your weight-loss goal. The downside here is that you’re not going to be changing your body composition much by doing just cardio. The idea of wonderfully defined shoulders, chest, abs, butt, legs, all come from resistance training. Your muscle definition is limited if you’re only doing cardio exercises. A combination of both is the magic elixir.
Walking is massively underrated. Sextillions of pounds of fat have been burned off by merely going for a walk every day. Walking is about as easy as it gets, I mean, you’ve been doing it your whole life. And yet, the most simple form of exercise can also be one of your biggest allies in losing weight. In fact, those who adhere to a walking program show significant improvements in blood pressure, reduction of body fat and body weight, reduced cholesterol, improved depression scores with better quality of life and increased measures of endurance. You won’t win any medals or get a six pack of abs, but going for walks should be an essential part of your fitness journey.
Game Changers
Drink More Water. We know you know. But do you? Drinking water helps suppress your appetite … and it has zero calories. Now that we covered what you do know, let’s talk about what you don’t know.
Most adults need about 96 ounces of water a day. Thirty-two ounces of that will come from your food. However, if you exercise, you’ll need to consume more water – upwards of a gallon or more a day. This is because, in general, you sweat out between 16 ounces and 67 ounces per hour of activity. Fun fact: you’ll start to notice you are getting thirsty after losing 1-2% of your body’s water.
Most people that exercise under two hours a day can follow this general guideline.
16-32 ounces of water during your workout.
16-32 ounces of water after your workout.
16 ounces of water after each meal.
Water is important because it makes up about 55-60% of who you are. Check it out:
- Bones: 22% of water
- Fat tissue: 25% water
- Muscle and brain tissue: 75% water
- Blood: 85% water
- Eyes: 95% water
When you begin to lose even a small percentage of your body’s water crazy things begin to happen:
If you lose .5% of water, you put a strain on your heart. You know that organ that keeps you alive? This is because the lower the water volume in your blood, the harder you heart must work to pump blood through your body.
1-3% and you lose aerobic endurance, muscle endurance, strength.
5-6% physical exhaustion reduced mental capacity, cramping, heatstroke, coma.
10-20% and you’ll be flirting with the afterlife.
Now you know that water is essential in helping your body function at optimal levels. If you aren’t staying hydrated, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Sleep
Better sleep will help you burn fat.
Sleep is one of the largest factors that get overlooked for any fitness goal. There are massive biological benefits of getting good sleep. Hormones control your metabolism and sleep affects your hormones. If you aren’t getting 7-9 hours of sleep a day, you are probably operating at subpar levels. And if you aren’t sleeping well you are not healing well. When you sleep your body releases the vast majority of human growth hormone (HGH) and enzymes that aid in your body’s recovery from exercise.
Human growth hormone (HGH) is a naturally occurring hormone produced in the brain. It is essentially your body’s form of steroids. It’s important for growth, cell regeneration, and cell reproduction. It helps repair muscle tissue after exercise and helps build muscle mass, boost metabolism, and burn fat. Known as the youth hormone, as kids have massive amounts of HGH (this is why they have so much energy), it is one of the main components that help you build bones and create more lean muscle. There have also been studies that suggest that HGH can slow down the signs of aging.
However, as we age, our HGH levels naturally reduce. As such, we must find ways to keep our bodies producing HGH so that we can continuing looking young and healthy. And as science has told us, the most effective ways to significantly raise levels of the human growth hormone is with sleep and exercise.
In addition, when you sleep your body releases melatonin to control your sleep-wake cycle. Melatonin also plays a role in fat loss by helping turn fat into energy. It does this by telling the brown adipose tissue (brown fat), which has calorie-burning properties, to use regular body fat (white fat) as fuel. By getting sleep you are giving your body and its hormones a biological advantage to losing weight.
Lack of sleep has also been tied to overeating because it lowers your levels of the hormone leptin. Leptin is responsible for making you feel full. And we know when you don’t feel full you just keep eating.
Lack of sleep also crushes motivation. The more tired and lethargic you are, the less likely you are to do a workout or perform it with the intensity that you otherwise would have.
Conclusion
So there you have it. The key factors in achieving weight-loss success.
- Set your goal. You must find your emotional relevance for why you are doing this. Why do you care?
- Put yourself in an environment where you will be successful.
- Have a plan where each and every day you execute it to the best of your ability.
- Follow and stay true to a structured diet. Have a cheat day!
- Find time to exercise. Do resistance training if you’re able. Walk if nothing else. Use your energy.
- Drink plenty of water.
- Get your sleep.
These factors give you the best possible shot at having the body you want and fitting into those knockout clothes that hang in the back of your closet. Keep your focus, stay disciplined and live the life of a cheater.
Three Golden Rules
Have a Goal
A goal gives you the emotional relevance that you need to find success. Emotional relevance is the reason or desire behind change. The goal answers the question: why do you care?
Be More Active
Finding ways to be more active will help tremendously towards losing weight. Emphasizing resistance training while sprinkling in cardio creates an excellent recipe for success. Walking should be your minimum effort.
Adhere to a Diet
You can not out-train a bad diet. Calories in versus calories out determines weight loss. If you want to lose weight you must have a diet plan. Diets provide structure, promote a reduction in calories consumed and promote an increase in nutrient-rich foods.
