So you want to lose weight? Congratulations! You've already completed the first step. Desire is a big factor in losing weight.
First about this article and me. This will be a collaboration of information I've gathered from other people, other sources, and personal experience. I am not licensed nor have I taken any courses regarding this.
There are three ways a person can lose weight: Diet, Exercise, Diet & Exercise. For the most part, it's pretty much that simple. Either you just eat less than what you burn when you're doing nothing, you kick your own ass in the gym so you can continue to eat the way you are, or you find a happy medium between the two. As to which of those you should pick, it really depends on how fast you want to get to your goal, and how you want to look when you reach your goal.
Diet alone, you'll tend to take longer to get the "toned" look as a direct result of not much muscle under the fat, so you'll have to burn more fat to possibly get your desired look. Exercise alone, while effective, can take longer because you're not adjusting your caloric intake and what you think you're working, may not actually be enough caloric burn. The most effective way is to modify your diet and your workout regime. We'll now delve into those two things (diet and exercise) and see what we can do to get you to your ideal weight.
Diet
People see this word and automatically think the worst. They see a plate half full of lettuce for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That doesn't have to be the case. As stated before, the first part is to decide how fast you want to lost the weight. The faster you want to lose weight, the cleaner, or healthier, your food intake will have to be. One of the pitfalls of wanting to lose weight is trying to do too much too fast that you end up giving up because you can't handle the pace you set yourself. If you are fairly overweight and you want to lose weight, do you think it would be more effective for this person to have a spinach diet or maybe continue to eat their normal foods, but in smaller portions? I personally prefer the latter as you can introduce healthier foods as well as shrink your stomach at a pace that you'd be more willing to keep up with.
I used to (and still do to an extent) love going to Wendy's. When I was at my largest, I would get a Biggie size (largest size they had) Value meal Classic Triple with bacon on it. Biggie Fries and a Biggie Coke. Looking that up, that's 1860 calories in one meal, and I still ate breakfast and lunch. So rather than just give up Wendy's (because I doubt I would have been able to do that), I downsized majorly. I wasn't in a rush so I downsized at a slower rate. I'd start out not getting the Biggie size meal. Then going down to a double, then a single. By doing so, I cut our 1040 calories in dinner. Now when I go, I no longer get fries either and usually don't drink a Coke. That's down to 430 calories total. This allowed me to start cutting down on some major weight. Every once in a while, I'll decide to eat cleaner and go into the chicken + vegetables/fruit with hard boiled eggs. It's a rarity now that I've increased my workout, but this helped me push my weight loss goals even faster.
When dieting, there's no one fix for everyone. Before you start something, know that this should be a lifestyle change. If you make it a "diet" then you're more apt to go out and go back to your bad habits amd bring the weight back on. So pick something you're actually willing to do for the rest of your life.....girls, that means don't swear off chocolate.
The important thing to remember is calories in < calories out. You need to be consuming less calories than you're burning. Do that, and the weight will come off.
Exercise
Now comes the dreaded word. Exercise. You hear that and you picture hours upon hours on a treadmill moving your legs but not going anywhere. Well I'm here to tell you, not only does exercise not need to take that long, but it doesn't need to be that boring, in fact, I'd be glad to tell you to never use a treadmill ever again (but I know people won't do that). There are four effective ways to lose weight through exercise. I will cover them all and state what I feel the pros and cons are. Steady-State, HIIT, Circuit Training, Weight Training.
Steady-State
This is your treadmill cardio. Obviously, you can burn calories doing this. A 150 pound person running at 7.0 mph on a treadmill for a full hour at that pace, will burn 766 calories. Not bad. Let's weigh the exercise.
Pros - Every place, regardless of how small the gym is, has a treadmill. Most people even have a treadmill at home. This makes it a very convenient form of exercise for people to do. Another pro is you can increase the difficuly/caloric burn by adding an incline or speeding up the treadmill. The harder you make it, the more calories you burn.
Cons - With all steady state cardio, once you're done with the workout, you're done burning calories. With the other three types of workouts, you can continue to burn calories between 12 hours and 48 hours AFTER the workout has been completed. Another con is that it does take a while to get to a high level of calories burned when you're doing this. Staedy State cardio is catabolic in nature. What this means is that after a certain point, your body stops burning fat and starts eating muscle. This means it takes longer now to burn calories. This is why all marathon runners look like they have no muscle on them as well.
HIIT
HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. This is basically cardio on steroids (pardon the pun as I would never advocate anyone actually using steroids as a means for exercise). You have a period of moderate physical strain followed by a short period of high physical strain, then back down to that moderate physical strain. A 150 pound person willing to go full effort in this cardio for a full hour will burn 1000 calories. Even better than steady state. However, there's another bonus which we'll mention in the Pros section.
Pros - While I mentioned the calorie count for an hour, the benefit of HIIT, is to get your equal treadmill time in terms of calories, you really can cut 20 minutes off of your workout. So not only are you getting an equivalent workout, but you're spending less time to do it. Also
Studies have
shown that
HIIT burns
calories even after you're done working out. HIIT is also anabolic in nature meaning it maintains your muscles. This is why sprinters can look huge.
Cons - It's hard to do this on a treadmill because the ramp up and ramp down times are significant. A track would be the best place to do this (1/4 lap sprint 1/2 lap jog) but that's not available everywhere either. Unlike treadmill steady state cardio, you have to push yourself because nothing is going to keep the rate for you.
Circuit Training
If HIIT is steady state cardio on steroids, then Circuit Training is HIIT on steroids. Do not confues my terminology with walking around the gym and doing a set of lifts on thos machines in the gym. I'm specifically just talking about hitting all your body parts as quickly as possible. Crossfit training is an excellent example of this. In this example:
you're hitting every major muscle on every rep. A 150 pound person going full effort for a full hour will burn 1200+ calories (depending on the workout.)
Pros - You get the aforementioned post work out caloric burn. You're adding resistance training (whether it's weights or body weight resistance) which can add muscle which causes you to burn more calories. Again, you shorten the amount of time you need to work out to get an equivalent caloric burn. Plus now the amount of fat you need to lose is less because the muscles will show up more easily this getting you that toned look much faster.
Cons - Crossfit can get very expensive very quick. It's hard to push yourself to that intensity without someone being there to push you (be it a trainer, or a workout partner) Depending on your workout, you will actually have to go to a gym to do it.
Weight Training
Ah good ole brute strentgh. You pick things up and then you put them down. This is the epitome of, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn. A 150 pound person doing deadlifts, for example, for 1 hour will burn 510 calories. Obviously, it's the lowest of the caloric burns in all these workouts, but gives you the longest post workout caloric burn as it can take up to 48 hours to recover.
Pros - This workout requires the least amount of fat loss to get the appearance you want in terms of the fat on your body. More muscles means things stand out a lot earlier.
Cons - You're more apt to get injured if you don't learn how to lift properly. Also, and
LADIES PAY ATTENTION TO THIS PART, IT'S IMPORTANT it's hard to put muscle on when you're eating to lose weight. Any muscle you gain is usually called n00b gains until your body hits that equilibrium point. After that, your body can go into a catabolic state thus eating away at muscles. It's because of this, coupled with the lack of many testosterone producing organs, is why women will not get bulky lifting weights. Look at our own resident female lifter
@sizzlinggrace and you can see, she doesn't look musclebound. Remember, you need testosterone to get big.
This pretty much sums up my article now. The important thing is to find the items that work for you and the balance you want to use to get to your fat loss goal. What works best for me is purely a caloric reduction of normal every day foods and some semblance of circuit training. My most effective fat loss was done by already having a decent amount of muscle mass, eating without getting extra size on items, and doing circuit training (which in my case, I did the Insanity workout)
In my next article, I'll write about how to get big or in general weight training.