Losing body fat is simple. It is all about being consistent. That’s not to say it is easy – it isn’t. Losing weight (hopefully in the form of fat) is difficult. But, I believe people can make it easier – and increase their odds of success – by focusing on what matters, and ignoring what doesn’t.
First, a disclaimer: I’m not your doctor. I’m not a doctor at all. I’m just a regular guy who is trying to shed fat and keep it off. Before you begin any weight loss or exercise program, you should consult your physician.
Eat at a caloric deficit
In some sense, this is the only thing that really matters for most people – barring some extreme medical condition, most people just need to eat at a caloric deficit to lose weight. What is a caloric deficit? It is when you eat fewer calories than your body uses to stay alive. If you eat 1,800 calories per day but your body uses 2,300 calories per day, it has to get 500 calories from some other source. That other source is your body fat.
Finding your caloric deficit is just a matter of figuring out how fast you want to lose weight and how much energy your body uses.
The first thing to do is figure out how many calories you need to eat every day to maintain your body weight. I recommend the calculator over at tdeecalculator.net to get a baseline of your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. That’s just a fancy way of saying how many calories your body burns every day to stay alive. When filling that out, be sure to select ‘sedentary’ as your activity level. People tend to overestimate their activity level, and get a calorie target that is too high as a result.
When I fill that out, I get an estimate of 2,278 calories per day.
Next, you need to figure out how quickly you’d like to lose weight. The name of this blog is Get Thin Slowly for a reason – I advocate achievable, sustainable goals. My goal is to lose around one pound per week of body fat from diet. Since a pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, that means I need to eat 500 calories per day less than my body burns. 2,278 - 500 = 1,778 calories per day. That’s my target. Yours may be a bit different, but the math formula always stays the same:
Total Daily Energy Expenditure - Calorie Deficit = Daily Calorie Budget
Don’t go crazy
It is easy to start a diet with enthusiasm and a goal to lose a large amount of weight quickly. I urge you to consider setting a moderate goal that you can maintain over time. For me, I’m not looking to have more than a 500 calorie deficit over my baseline. I can tell you from personal experience that trying to maintain 1,000 calorie/day deficit is difficult and not easy to maintain. This is a situation where slow and steady wins the race. Don’t burn out.
It’s OK to ease into this
I think it’s ok – and even a good idea – to ease into your calorie deficit over a period of a few weeks, especially if the adjustment is drastic. Lets say you’ve been eating 4,000 calories or more per day and, like me, you have a daily energy expenditure of around 2,300 calories. Going from 4,000 calories per day to 1,800 (a 500 calorie deficit) is quite an abrupt change. Going from 4,000 to 3,500 in week one, then 3,500 to 3,000 in week two, and so on until you hit your target is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and will make it easier to adjust to eating less food.
Track your calories. (All of them. No exceptions)
People are terrible at guestimating the calorie content of their food. This is worse for some foods than others, but all of the available evidence I’ve seen (and my own personal experience) is that we tend to drastically underestimate the amount of food we eat. I use and recommend two tools to combat this:
Get a food tracking app for your phone
The only way to know how many calories you’re eating is to record everything. I use and recommend Lose It, although other apps will work as well.
Get a food scale for your kitchen
When making homemade food, you have to measure your portions. It is too easy to underestimate, especially with calorie dense foods. So, get a food scale if you don’t already have one. There are a bunch of practically identical scales on Amazon – at the time of this writing, the cheapest variant of the one I use is here
Weigh yourself, once a week
When you lose weight, other people will tend to notice it before you can see the results. Not fair, ehh? We need something a little more objective anyway to know if our plan is working – so we can adjust it if it isn’t – that something is the weekly weigh-in.
Practically any scale that is reliable and capable of measuring your body weight will work, but I do recommend spending a little extra and getting a smart scale. It will make it easier to track your progress over time, and these days, the smart scales aren’t that expensive. I use the Withings Body Smart scale.
I don’t recommend weighing yourself more frequently than once per week, for two reasons: first, it is easy to obsess over the number that shows up and second, the number on the scale is going to fluctuate up and down a lot (due to water retention and other factors beyond your control.)
The purpose of the weekly weigh-in is to track your progress and establish a trendline, without getting too focused on daily fluctuations that you can’t control.
Learn your triggers, and make a plan to avoid them
This is more of an ongoing process, but the idea is to identify what behaviors and factors cause us to overeat, and then come up with a way to avoid those behaviors. Some examples are:
- Drinking alcohol
- Stress
- Having a routine that involves snacking
- Going to a restaurant without a plan
I know that if I drink alcohol that, in addition to the calories from the alcohol, I’ll tend to overeat. So, I try to avoid situations where I’ll drink.
I also know that I like to go to Starbucks in the mid-afternoon, and that in addition to getting a cup of coffee, I’ll usually cave and get a pasty. So, instead of going to Starbucks, I get a cup of cold brew coffee at home.
If I go to a restaurant without looking at the menu ahead of time, I’ll tend to order more food than I really should. So, before going out, I look at the menu and decide what I want to order before I get there.
I’m not saying you need to do these specific things (although the restaurant thing is a good idea for anybody,) just that over time, recognize what triggers you to overeat and come up with strategies to counteract that. The specific triggers will be different for everyone.
Get some exercise
This is last on the list because, frankly, it is going to have the least impact on your success and has the greatest potential to derail your weight loss plan. How so? First, just as people tend to drastically underestimate the calories they eat from food, people tend to drastically overestimate the number of calories they burn via exercise. Exercising hard for an hour might only burn four or five hundred calories.
Especially if you are significantly overweight (I was 340 pounds at my heaviest,) doing intense exercise is probably not realistic. But, you can do things like walk. I recommend starting there – walking – and gradually increasing your intensity over time as you lose weight and build strength.
Still, in addition to being good for your health, walking will burn some extra calories and can pretty easily give you an extra 1/2 pound to 1 pound a week of fat loss.
If you do exercise, I recommend one more gadget: a fitness tracker. I use a Garmin Instinct Solar 2, but most any tracker, like a Fitbit, will work just fine.
Ignore what doesn’t matter
The above is my complete list of Important Things to pay attention to while losing fat. If you do the things above, you’re practically guaranteed to lose weight. If you keep doing them, you’ll keep the weight off. Unfortunately, there is a lot of noise in the diet and weight loss world and, as a result, it can be easy to lose focus. Here are a few things I don’t think you should worry about:
- A particular diet, especially a fad diet (exception: limiting sugar is a really good idea, in my opinion.) Don’t worry too much about keto, carnivore, intermittent fasting, time restricted feeding, commercial programs, etc. Eating a variety of healthy food at a caloric deficit is what’s important.
- A particular exercise routine. Don’t get me wrong – get some exercise – but, do what you like and will continue to do. There’s no “targeting” fat loss on a particular part of your body, or anything like that. Claims that a specific exercise will “supercharge” your weightloss is mostly a bunch of nonsense.
- Getting lost in data. There are an seemingly endless array of smart gadgets that will help you quantify and track your fat loss progress. Most of these are a waste of time. Other than a food tracking app, a food scale, a body weight scale, and an exercise tracking watch or wearable, I don’t think you really need to buy a bunch of stuff or track a bunch of data points to lose weight.