I woke up super early today. I got bored and figured I’d write some tips on weight loss. People always seem to ask the same questions about losing weight. I figured I’d try to take a minute to help sum up some stuff I have learned. I’ve been doing this for a year and a half now. I’ve lost around 70lbs down to 170. 5’7” male.
Exercise is unnecessary to shed pounds on the scale. However, if you want that banging summer body you need resistance training at least 3x per week for minimum 30 minutes per session. You’ll be an Adonis!
Cardio is great for increasing caloric burn, but unnecessary for weight loss. It does help if you don’t eat the calories you burn after it. It is good for the heart. I hate cardio. I warm up with a 1 mile jog at a 9-10 minute mile pace before I lift. Why? Solely to keep my heart healthy. I only burn about 200 calories doing that run. For context, a 3 musketeers bar is 240 calories. You have to run over a mile to burn a single 3 musketeers bar off. Not worth it to me. I’d rather just not eat the calories.
Keto, IF, etc. don’t really work. The only reason people are successful on them is because it forces a calorie deficit, but you don’t realize it. Have you ever seen a single serving of rice? Weigh it out and cook just one serving of rice one day. It’s like next to nothing, yet it’s packed with 160-180 calories. Keto makes you lose those carbs, which creates a calorie deficit.
When losing weight do keep your protein high. Protein makes you feel full for longer and preserves muscle mass.
Which leads me to my next note — even ladies want to preserve muscle mass while dieting. What we want is not to lose pounds on the scale, but to lose fat. That’s the real goal. If you lose muscle at a rate equal to or greater than losing fat your body will continue to look fat. You don’t need to look like a ripped sack, all veiny and bulging, but you do need to keep the muscle you have.
Plan to take at least a year to lose any significant amount of weight. It isn’t a quick process.
Tdee calculators are a good tool to help with a starting point. For a beginner, I do not personally recommend starting at 500 calories deficit from tdee. That’s a hard way to start. Gradually cut 100 calories per week off your maintenance tdee until you hit a 500 calorie deficit.
What tdee estimate do you use??? This one was so confusing to me at first. Use the sedentary estimate. Early in my fitness journey I ran a 5k 3 days a week and lifted 3 days a week. I figured I should use a higher tdee. I was wrong. Weight loss was super slow. Even with 6 days a week of vigorous exercise I had to cut back my caloric intake to a deficit under sedentary tdee.
Your body doesn’t look at your consumption over a specific day. I realize this can be confusing. What I mean is to take an average of your caloric intake over a week and use that to determine what you’ve been doing right or wrong. I’m going to use myself as an example. I currently cut with 1600-1700 calories (much lower than someone with significant weight to lose). Some days I might have 2,200 calories or 1,800 or whatever. Watch your weekly average and ensure the average is under your deficit. You’ll be surprised if you open your tracking app and check your average. It could even shed light on why you’ve plateaued.
Spend $15 and buy a kitchen scale off Amazon. This is key. Weigh EVERYTHING you eat. If you don’t do this you will set yourself up to fail. Seriously, it’s $15 and weighing your food takes like 30 seconds. I’m so surprised at how many people reject this idea.
Which brings me to my next point — so many people reject the idea of tracking intake in an app. Use a tracking app. I use MyFitnessPal. It’s free. It caches the foods you log so you can quickly log your commonly eaten foods. I even create recipes in it so I can quickly log the stuff I make from scratch. It takes another 30 seconds to log your food. So a minute per meal if you include weigh time. You can spare 5 minutes a day to weigh and log foods.
Let’s talk about a plateau. Plateaus do happen. They will not last longer than a month. If your plateau does last longer than a month it is not a plateau. It means you’re eating more than you think you are. Redo your tdee, check your weekly average and make adjustments. It is the only way to break it.
“Cheat days”. This is hugely damaging. I hate this term. An entire day of eating whatever you want and however much you want can easily wreck an entire week of work. You can be religious about a 500 calorie deficit and burn 3,000 calories in a week for 6 days. On the 7th “cheat day” you can undo all of it. I’ve personally eaten over 5,000 calories in a day. It’s not that hard to do.
Instead of cheat days have a cheat meal once per week. I do it on Sunday’s. Your cheat meal should still be healthier and lower in calories. For example, I love me some Mexican food. I choose either fish tacos on corn tortillas or chicken fajitas without tortilla shells. Don’t eat the rice and beans. Doing this allows me to still have the foods I love without the diet progress destruction.
Fat in a specific area cannot be targeted. You may want to lose belly or arm fat, but you can’t spot reduce. Your body will lose fat in all the areas it gained it most recently. Like reverse order of when you gained it. You probably will not even have noticed where that was. My lower abdomen was the last spot I lost. Which sucked because it was the spot I wanted gone the quickest.
A week of dieting isn’t going to produce noticeable results. Neither will a month. Hell, I don’t even notice fat loss, or gains, without pics. Take before pics and progress pics. Every 8 weeks for progress pics is a good rule to follow. You will notice results that way.
Don’t get hung up focusing on macros. Lots of people suggest percentages for carbs, proteins and fats. To lose weight you just need that calorie deficit. Again, keep protein high, but having one day at 200g of protein and another at 125g isn’t going to make or break you. Don’t focus super hard on this.
Everyone says that last ten pounds is hard to lose. They’re right. But not because it’s some magical thing. We lose our motivation for losing weight as we approach the end. We get content with our bodies and that motivation we had to lose weight goes away, making it seem impossible to lose that last bit.
Loose skin. It happens. I still have some of mine. Stretch marks happen. They never go away. Accept this. As for the loose skin, that seems to take a long time to go back, but at least it does go back, unlike stretch marks.
Ok, my last little note. Do not go to others and look for positive moral support. That isn’t going to get you results. Seek and accept criticism. You know if you screwed up, don’t ask others to tell you it’s ok. Own up to mistakes you make, and fix them. It’s YOUR weight loss journey, nobody else’s. Be accountable, take responsibility, don’t make excuses and keep grinding every single day.
I think that’s it. These are kinda the basic key points I’ve learned. Hopefully they help people with the same questions I had when first starting out. Feel free to comment if anyone has any other suggestions they’ve learned. I’m not the end all be all.
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