Learn about how to Lose Weight

<< Learn home

Losing weight seems so complicated!  But when you boil it down, the biology of it is fairly straightforward.  It's the motivation that's hard.

Weight gain and weight loss are primarily determined by one basic calculation: the difference between the calories you consume versus the calories you burn.  If you take in less calories than you use, while always providing your body with the nutrients and vitamins it needs to operate, you'll lose weight.  We all know what happens when the opposite occurs.

Of course, we've all heard a lot of promises for quick fixes - a miracle pill, an exercise machine that targets your one problem area, or a crash diet program.  The fact is that the best way to change your body's composition for good is to lose weight slowly.  Making smart choices about what you eat and increasing your amount of physical activity will change your body for the better.  But you must be prepared to make long-term changes in your life.  It won't happen overnight.

• This information is not a replacement for the advice of a trained medical professional.  You should consult a doctor before starting or undergoing any changes in your diet or exercise programs.
• These instructions are intended for grown adults.  While many of the underlying principles will apply to children as well, a growing body has vastly different requirements.  Particularly for those under 18, you should consult with a doctor before starting or undergoing any changes in your diet or exercise programs.
• Lose weight slowly. Your eating habits and exercise regimen are deeply ingrained in your mind.  You don't want to just stray from your habits for a month only to return, you want to alter the habits themselves.  The slower you lose weight and get in shape, the more likely you'll be able to form new, healthier habits that will serve you for the rest of your life.  If you're losing more than 1-2 pounds per week, you're likely to end up gaining the weight back (though there are, of course, some people who are exceptions).

• Being healthy.  Losing weight helps to reduce your likelihood of encountering heart problems in the future.  Research has shown that excessive body fat is bad for your cardiovascular system and can impact other fundamental processes of your body as well.
• Living longer.  Heart disease is the number one cause of death of American adults (for both men and women).  Getting healthy and losing weight will reduce your risk for heart disease and help you stick around.
• Looking great.  Getting in shape for aesthetic reasons is nothing to be ashamed of!  Rightly or wrongly, we're all judged by how we look to some degree, so getting in shape will have a positive impact on little parts of your daily life.  In addition, having a positive image of your own body has a beneficial impact on the way you approach and interact with other people.

• You will make mistakes!  Everyone who tries to change their dietary and/or exercise habits gets overwhelmed by the temptation to eat a cupcake or misses a scheduled run from time to time.  The difference between people who succeed and those who don't is getting back on the plan as soon as possible.  You can't change what you've done, you can only change what you're doing.  As long as you always get back to your plan, you'll succeed in the long run.
• Staying Motivated.  This is a long-term process and the changes you'll see will happen slowly.  Postponing instantaneous reward to increase your long-term gain is one of the hardest skills to master, but it is also one of the most powerful.  When you're having trouble staying motivated, visualize the end result of your hard work, or get in touch with someone who can provide a shoulder to lean on (the Goalbot community is always happy to help!).

It's pretty easy to eat salad and avoid junk food for one day.  It's not too hard to do half an hour of exercise one time.  Unfortunately, eating right and exercising only one time won't make much of a difference in your weight or level of fitness.  Making big changes in your body means changing your habits for the long run.  So why not go from sedentary to extremely active overnight?  Why not change your diet from junk food to health food instantaneously?  The problem is big changes usually don't stick.  But by gradually increasing the amount of exercise you do, and slowly swapping healthy options for fast food or junk food, you change the expectations of both your body and your mind.

In terms of physical activity, starting (or enhancing) your exercise routine is the most obvious avenue, and exercising 2-5 times per week (start out with more rest days and gradually increase the number of active days) will help you to burn a lot of additional calories.  We'll examine your options for exercise routines in more detail later, but there are a lot of smaller changes you can make in your daily life that will also help you burn calories through increased activity.  For example, walking or bicycling when possible, instead of driving, burns additional calories and let's you enjoy the outdoors.  Taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking at the far end of the parking lot, and walking the dog an extra few blocks each day are all great ways to increase caloric burn and build your leg muscles.  Muscle consumes more calories than fat even when you are at rest, so these activities reward you twice over.  The key is to practice these recommendations every day - make it a part of your daily routine.

On the diet side of the equation, there are changes you can make before you even start looking at your food choices.  First, make sure you are eating breakfast everyday.  You should be eating at least 3 real meals per day.  Many experts recommend smaller meals, eaten more often throughout the day, help to keep your body's metabolism rate high, burning more calories.  This can range from 4-6 meals per day.  Another advantage of a higher frequency meal schedule like this is that it helps to reduce your desire to snack, which can often lead to unhealthy food choices.  Just make sure that as you increase the number of meals you eat, you reduce the amount you eat at each individual meal.  Portion size is critical!

Our hectic schedules are one of the central reasons that so many of us have issues with our weight.  It's easy to put aside taking care of yourself when you're faced with too much to do and not enough time to do it in.  But hectic schedules don't go away.  You won't have plenty of time to eat healthy later.  Instead, you have to figure out ways to make the most of the time you do have, which means planning ahead.

If you don't have healthy food to choose from, you definitely won't be making healthy food choices.  Start out by planning your meals for the week.  You should at least have a general outline of what you're planning to eat for most meals, and at best you should write down a list of healthy options for each meal.   Make sure that the meal options you come up with are things you enjoy!  If you hate your food, you'll never be able to stick with your schedule.

Be realistic in your plans.  You won't always have a lot of time to cook a big meal, but there are some solutions to this problem:

Prepared Ahead
Are there things you can prepare on the weekend so they're ready for the days you won't have time to cook?  Make a list of potential recipes and try to determine how many meals you'll need to prepare in advance (and specifically when in advance you'll be preparing them).

Eating Out
Will you need to eat out (at a restaurant or take-out) at some point?  Try not to eat out more than a couple of times per week, and determine in advance what meals are available from local restaurants that can be prepared in a healthy way.  Don't order foods with heavy sauces or too much salt.  Replace starchy sides (e.g., potatoes, rice, bread) with vegetables.

Quick Fixes
Some healthy meals take a long time to prepare, but some can be put together in just a few minutes.  Having a few quick dishes in your arsenal will help keep you from resorting to fast food or junk food when you're hungry and don't have anything ready. Examples: Egg-white omelette, Mixed greens salad

Once you have an outline of the meals you'll be eating during the week, break the meals down into an ingredients list.  Remember to calculate how much of each item you'll need to buy.  Before you actually go to the store to buy the ingredients, make sure to eat something.  Never shop hungry!  When you're hungry at the store, you'll end up buying lots of junk food - potato chips, sweets, and other empty calories.  Limit (or eliminate) your junk food purchases during your shopping trip and you'll be sure to eat less junk food throughout the week.

Calories In - Calories Burned = Weight Change

There are about 3500 calories in a pound of fat.  This means that to lose the pound, you'll have to alter your caloric equation by 3500 calories - by reducing your caloric intake, by burning additional calories, or through a combination of the two.  To get started, you can figure out what your current caloric equation looks like by keeping track of what you're eating and the activity you're getting.

Calories In
Start by creating a food journal of your eating habits for 4-7 days.  Make sure to include both weekend and weekdays in your journal.  In your journal you should write down everything you eat.  If possible, you should record the portion size and the number of calories (you can find the calorie information in the Nutrition Facts panel or by searching online).  Remember that the portion size on the container is often smaller than the portion size people actually eat.

Calories Out
Create another journal, this one to record the physical activities you take part in.  Write down the type of activity and how long you participated in it.  You can find online calculators that will help you to total up all of the activity and approximate the number of calories you burned from this.

You'll also want to estimate your resting metabolic rate (RMR) and/or basal metabolic rate (BMR).  These figures represent the number of calories you would burn in 24 hours if you didn't participate in any activity.  In other words, this is the number of calories you need to maintain your body's basic operations (like breathing and digestion) at your current weight.  While there are calculators for both online, the RMR is generally considered to give a more accurate estimate of your needs.  Keep in mind, though, that none of these calculators are perfect.  If you want more exact information regarding your caloric burn, contact your doctor.

Adding It All Up
Combining your caloric intake information from your food journal with the caloric burn information from your activity journal and RMR/BMR calculation, you'll end up with a figure representing your net calorie intake.  If you are consuming more calories than you are burning, you'll gain weight.  If you're burning more than you're consuming, you'll lose weight.  Now you can examine your food journal to see where you'll most easily be able to cut out junk and fast foods and supplement your diet with healthy foods.  You can go through your activity journal to determine where to increase your activity levels.  By adjusting your current caloric equation according to the changes you've planned based on your journals, you can estimate the weight loss results you'll see.  Remember that losing the weight slowly will make you more likely to keep it off.

There are a wide variety of diet options today, and no shortage of advice on diet specifics.  While the specifics listed here will help you to gain control of your weight, this is not an exhaustive list.  The good news is that, deep down, you already know what to eat - you just need to listen to yourself and plan carefully to take advantage of what you know.

What to eat (Protein, Vitamins & Nutrients, Complex Carbohydrates)

• Lean meats:  Chicken, Turkey, and Pork all have good amounts of protein and are low in fat.
• Fish:  Like lean meats, fish has protein and is low in saturated fats.  But fish is also high in Omega-3 fatty acids.
• Greens:  Green vegetables like broccoli, spinach, and asparagus are filled with nutrients and vitamins, and are very low in fat.
• Legumes:  Beans, lentils and other legumes help to replace calories you're not consuming from simple carbs with longer lasting complex carbohydrates so you won't be hungry so soon!
• Egg whites:  The cholesterol and fat in an egg is almost entirely in the yolk, so eating egg whites gives you mostly protein.
• Healthy snacks:  You can't avoid snacking all the time, so make sure to have some carrot sticks or other healthy, tasty snacks around for when you need them.
• Drink water:  Staying hydrated helps your body to operate efficiently and clear out waste more rapidly.

What not to eat (Sugars, Simple carbohydrates, Saturated fat, Salt)

• Saturated fat:  Foods high in saturated fat are packed with calories and can lead to heart disease.  Replace saturated fats with polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats for healthier results.
• "White" carbohydrates:  This is a simple rule that covers a lot of unhealthy options like bread, potatoes, and rice.  Even wheat bread is usually 'enriched', which means that it has sugars added (i.e., it's no longer healthy).
• Sugars:  Sugar has many names: glucose, sucrose, fructose, corn syrup, molasses, etc.  All of these add empty calories to your diet.
• Salt:  High salt consumption causes your body to retain water, which makes you look heavier, and prevents you from staying properly hydrated.  It can also lead to medical issues, particularly for people with high blood pressure.
• Soda, fruit juice, sports drinks:  These are all high in sugar and low in nutritional value (despite what fruit juices and sports drinks would like you to believe)
• Fast food & Junk food:  Loaded with all of the above, plus bad cholesterol and other harmful ingredients.

Make sure your meat, fish, and vegetables are prepared in healthy ways.  Eating fried fish is not healthy.  Eating vegetables drowned in ranch dressing won't do it either.  Try grilling more food and using light dressings and sauces.  At the same time, realize that you won't be able to avoid sugars and simple carbohydrates entirely.  Focus on consuming these items in moderation, rather than trying to avoid them entirely. 

Also remember to keep a sharp eye on your total caloric intake!  Reducing your caloric intake too much will leave you with less energy, which often results in people quitting their diets.  Vegetables have a lot less calories by weight than starchy and fatty foods, so be careful to get enough calories from your lean meats, fish, and legumes to make up for some of the losses stemming from avoiding carbohydrates (but not so many calories that you're defeating the purpose dieting in the first place).  Following the instructions in the Caloric Equation section can help you to avoid these problems.

Many health professionals now recommend that people who are trying to lose weight take one day off per week from their diet.  While you shouldn't go overboard, consuming a higher calorie diet one day per week will keep your body from adjusting your metabolic rate downwards, which means you will burn more calories overall.

Most exercise programs are composed of two main components: aerobic exercise and strength training, also called weight training (which is a form of anaerobic exercise).  Ideally, a training program should combine some of both forms of exercise (and, in fact, there are activities which encompass both), but some programs focus only on one.  Equally important, though, are the supplements for any good exercise program: stretching and resting.

Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercise consists of activities which get your heart pumping and you breathing hard for an extended period of time (at least 30 minutes straight to be effective).  Popular examples of aerobic exercise include:

• Running/jogging
• Walking
• Swimming
• Bicycling

Swimming and bicycling can be particular good for people with joint pain, as they are low impact activities. 

A number of sports also provide aerobic benefits, including:

• Basketball
• Soccer
• Tennis
• Football
• Hockey

Whatever form of exercise you choose, you should start out exercising for 25-30 minutes, 2-3 times per week.  Gradually increase both the length of your aerobic workout and the number of days per week on which you are active, but always leave days without exercise to allow your body to recover.

Aerobic exercise is great for your cardiovascular system.  It increases the oxygen capacity of your body, is beneficial for circulation, and reduces the impact of stress.  Aerobic exercise burns calories during the exercise, but typically it does not have much of an impact on basal metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate, which means that your body doesn't burn a lot of extra calories after you've finished exercising (whereas strength training does tend to increase BMR and RMR).

Strength Training
Strength training, also known as weight or resistance training, is exercise which focuses on developing the muscles of your body.  In addition, strength training can increase bone density and improve posture.  Strength training generally consists of using weight machines or lifting free weights like dumbbells or barbells.  For many people, the easiest way to get started with strength training is to join a gym.  Gyms not only have the necessary equipment, but they often can also provide some level of instruction on proper technique (which is particularly critical in strength training).

Women sometimes avoid strength training for fear that they will become overly muscular.  In actuality, women stand to benefit greatly from strength training.  Regular, moderate strength training with low to medium weight helps to build definition in the muscles and bone density without increasing muscle size considerably.  The gender differences in muscle size are due more to genes and hormones, so for the vast majority of women the development of the "bulky" look is next to impossible.

A professional strength training coach can be very important when beginning a strength training program, as they can provide help in using the proper form, as well as finding exercises that work well for you and your goals. 

Generally, for those looking to increase definition and tighten up their muscles, start out doing 3 sets of 8-12 reps at a moderate weight for each exercise (where a rep is one cycle of the exercise, e.g., one pushup down and up, and a set is a collection of reps done in a row).  Over time, gradually increase the weight.  For those looking to build muscle mass, use more weight and less reps (4-8 reps).  To build muscle mass you should use the heaviest weight you can while still following proper form throughout the set.

Stretching
Getting injured is one of the easiest ways to throw a wrench into your exercise plans.  Often an injury will prevent you from exercising properly for 2-3 days, which can be enough to cause a major set back if you don't get back to your plan as soon as you are healthy again. 

Proper stretching helps to prevent injury and takes only a few minutes per day.  You shouldn't stretch when your muscles are cold, it's better to wait until after you've warmed up and started exercising.  Stretching without warming up can actually lead to tightness in your muscles, which can cause cramps or tears.  Whether you're focusing on aerobic or strength training, proper stretching is critical to success.

Rest Days
Similarly, any good exercise program must have rest days to allow your body to recuperate.  Your body is put under stress and strain during the workout itself, and it is actually not until your body is resting that the repair work which results in increased strength and fitness occurs.  With strength training it is best to leave 24-48 hours between workouts on the same muscle group in order to prevent injury.