The Key to Weight Loss

Weight loss is a funny thing. Everyone wants to do it, yet only a small proportion know how to do it, and even more, how to do it without unreasonable struggle. Hey, in this day and age where fast food is at every corner, who blames you? It's no secret that trimming down is possibly as hard as ever. Anyway, enough rambling, you came here to learn how to lose weight, so here it is...

1. Resistance Training

Resistance training is what most people refer to as "weights." These weights are not going to make you look like Dwayne Johnson (sorry guys), but they will make you look like a better version of yourself. The first step to losing weight I believe is just starting a resistance training program. Don't know where to start? I do, and it's here. This is a simple, easy way to make your way of that treadmill and onto the gym floor.

2. Know what you're eating.

Take some time and educate yourself about how many CALORIES are in the foods that you eat. Losing weight is actually very simple, and you may have heard this before—be in a CALORIE DEFICIT. When you put food into to your mouth, and hopefully chew and swallow it, the body does this awesome thing called digest the food. When the body digests what you've eaten, it registers how much "energy" or "calories" are in the food. At the end of the day, if your body has been given less food, or less calories than it requires, it will use other tissues (muscle, fat) to stabilise this deficit. Did I just lose you? I hope not. If I did, all you need to know is to lose weight, essentially all you need to do is eat less than what you're body wants. The good thing is there are many ways to do this. Resistance training is one, as it makes the muscles want food, increasing the amount of food your body wants, and therefore increasing how much food you can eat and still be in a calorie deficit. The unfortunate thing is not everyone is the same. You all have that friend that chows down on anything and everything, however, has not an ounce of fat on them. That's because their body wants a lot of food, and therefore for them to sit at that threshold (for them to maintain their weight) they have to eat a lot. There next point is another way to do this, without too much stress.

3. Eat foods high in protein.

Protein makes you big and bulky, and look like a bodybuilder. Yuck. I don't want to look like that so I won't eat protein. WRONG. Protein is responsible for this beauty called muscle protein synthesis, meaning if you train super hard and eat a crazy amount of food, then maybe you could look like the Hulk. However, for you and me, that isn't the reality. What is true about protein is it is the super satiating, meaning it makes you full without many calories and keeps you full for longer. Protein also does this cool thing in the body, known as dietary induced thermogenesis. All this means is that when you eat protein, your body uses a lot of energy (way more than fat or carbs) to digest it, and again this use of energy means you can eat more and still lose weight.

4. Protein, Carbs, or Fats

This highly correlates with step two, and I wouldn't recommend reading this if you haven't already read that. With your newfound ability to know roughly how many calories are in what you're eating, you would have learned that a gram of fat has nine calories, compared to carbs and protein each having four. When you're deciding what to eat, I would highly recommend doing this—having a meal that contains a good source of protein, and also a good source of carbs OR fats (along with veggies, of course). This will keep your "calorie balance" in check, greatly helping with your weight loss journey.

Let me know what you want to read next or any questions you have, I'm all for answering them. Last but not least, good luck!