Most people that come to me are interested in rapid weight loss and most of the time they will have already tried a range of different diets, from low carb to no carb, Atkins to Weight Watchers. As with all diets, they will lose the weight initially, but keeping it off has always been a problem.
Losing weight is really not rocket science, its basic maths. Output must exceed input, ‘calorifically speaking’. The best and only way to lose weight is to create a calorific deficit, but for this you will need to know what your resting metabolic rate (RMR) is. This is the amount of calories your body needs to function in its present state, this means that if you did nothing but sleep all day, you would still need to consume a set number of calories to live.
Once the RMR is calculated, you can workout how many calories you need to add for the amount of activity or exercise you do. This gives you the number of calories that you need to maintain your body as it is. Obviously the whole point you’re reading this article is because you don’t want to maintain your body in its present condition, you want to trim down. To do this you need to reduce the number of calories appropriately and according to the amount of weight you wish to lose.
As a rule of thumb, to lose 1 pound of bodyweight, you would need to create a calorific deficit of 3500cal as this equates to exactly 1 pound of body weight. This deficit can be created with diet alone, but will place your body into starvation mode and it will start storing the fat. As with most people who do diet, weight gain will be rapid as soon as you start eating healthy again.
The best way to create the deficit is through a good exercise programme and making suitable adjustments to your diet. A healthy rate to lose weight is about 2 pound per week. This in turn means creating a calorific deficit of 7500 cal, so to workout your daily deficit just divide this by 7 (number of days) this gives you 1042 cal per day. This is why you cannot and should not try to create this deficit by food alone. What you should be looking at doing is dropping 60% through diet and 40% through exercise. So reduce the food intake by 626 cal and burn an extra 416 calories per day through exercise. Of course if you’re not in such a rush to lose the weight then you could set a target of losing just 1 pound per week, meaning you only need to create a deficit of 3500 calories.
As mentioned in a previous article, the best way to burn calories is through high intensity exercise (insert hyperlink here), not as many people think by working at the FAT BURNING ZONE (low intensity exercise).
Remember these figures: 3500 calories = 1 pound of body weight.
This is all you need to know to lose weight correctly; it really is not rocket science.