Losing weight can absolutely suck. Let’s be honest, we’ve all been in situations where we’ve personally tried to lose weight, gotten bored of the diet, and maybe bounced back harder and put on even more weight. And if it hasn’t happened to us, we’ve all had family members or friends who have struggled for years in managing their weight.

So why do I think in just 24 hours you could be on the road to LOSING and KEEPING off the weight that has bothered you for as long as you can remember.

It’s because most people are using the completely wrong fat loss strategy. In this article, I plan on showing you what you may have been doing wrong to lose body fat, and how to fix it ASAP.

Let’s say we’ve finally mustered up the motivation to change our lives and lose the weight, and we decide the best way to do it is to do it FAST! This leads to people dieting quite hard, typically dropping portion sizes, and eating clean. This can actually be a massive problem and lead to someone eating too little food

When we don’t eat enough food our body needs to get the energy from within itself, this means it will break down both its own body fat and muscle to make up for the lack of dietary energy it’s consuming.

You may be thinking “So what if I lose some muscle if I am losing some fat! That’s the goal right?

Unfortunately, this is the last thing we want when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off. The more lean muscle mass we have, the more energy we burn throughout the day and during workouts.
If we lose muscle mass, our metabolism will actually become slower, meaning it’s even harder to lose weight.

The Katch-Mcardle formula is a formula that calculates some one’s metabolic rate based on their overall weight and body fat percentage. It is one of the best known methods to understand how much energy a person should be consuming.

Let’s say we have two people, both weighing 70kg. One has a body fat percentage of 25% the other has a body fat percentage of 10%. Both are the same WEIGHT, but one has much less muscle and much more fat.

Based on this formula the 10% bodyfat person has a basal metabolic rate of 1700 calories, whereas the 25% individual has a basal metabolic rate of 1500 calories. Both the individuals weigh the same amount yet one burns 200 calories more a day without lifting a finger.

So do you see the problem? If you crash diet and try to lose weight too quickly, you’ll end up losing muscle mass, and then have to eat EVEN LESS food to continue losing weight. This ends up becoming unsustainable and leads to a weight gain rebound.

So you may have done a great job, beating all the cravings and stuck to your diet, and either way you are probably going to fail! Man crash dieting sucks.

So if dieting & eating less doesn’t work, NOW WHAT?

Shift your focus to eating a little more, and focus on getting stronger and building lean muscle mass. This may seem counterintuitive as many of us think that lifting weights make us put on weight, but weight training simply stimulates our muscles, it takes A LOT of eating and A LOT of hard hard work to get ‘too big’ from weight training.

When we lift weights, three magical things happen.

1. We burn energy during the exercise, which will contribute to overall fat loss
2. We build muscle, which increases our metabolism
3. We build strength, which means next time we exercise, we will burn more energy

Doesn’t the above statement make you realise the absolute power of weight training? Not only do you burn fat & energy every session, over time you build muscle mass which means your body burns more energy, and inevitably fat without you trying!

It also means every session you will burn even more energy as the stronger you get, the more energy you burn during training.

I’m not sure if any of you have seen the fit people who can eat ridiculous amounts of food without getting fat? If you have, then now you know their secret is the fact they have a lot of muscle mass and thus have high metabolisms and burn heaps of energy during sessions.

So if you have tried eating less and absolutely hated it, your next step is to get your butt into a gym and start some weight training.

A great approach to begin your weight training, fat loss journey is to choose an exercise for every major muscle group.

Complete 1 Warm up set and 3 working sets of 8 – 12 repetitions, resting 30 sec to 60 sec

Eg Exercises:

• Squat (Targeting Quads, Glutes)
• Push Up (Chest)
• Dumbbell Romanian Deadlift (Hamstrings, Glutes)
• Seated Cable Row (Upper back muscles)

Cycle through circuit for 3 rounds, then choose a similar circuit with the same thought process, a second circuit may look like

• Walking Lunge (Quads, Glutes)
• Dumbbell Shoulder Press (Shoulders, Triceps)
• Fitball Hamstring Curl (Hamstrings)
• Cable Lat Pulldown (Upper back muscles)

Repeat this for another 3 rounds.

Some high-intensity interval training can be performed after this if you aren’t already wiped by this point, but remember our goal in the gym isn’t to create an excessive amount of stress on our bodies, it’s to stimulate all of our muscle groups to make them stronger.

So that’s it for today, change your strategy away from eating less, to DOING more. Make your body stronger, and start to see long-term, sustainable results, instead of yoyo-ing in and out of depressing, energy-sapping diets.

If you are feeling uncertain about where to start or uncomfortable in a gym environment, the Strength & Motion Academy is a gym centered around educating it’s members, whilst providing them with a supportive, non-judgemental environment to support results. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need help with your fat loss journey!

Remember to share to help out your friends and family and help us out too!! And have a great day!