If you’re seeking safe and speedy weight loss, you’re in luck. This post outlines our top 10 tried-and-true tips, which are grounded in scientific research and real-life success stories, to help you achieve your weight loss objectives efficiently.
Remember that even adopting just one of these tips can make a significant difference in your life and bring you closer to your goals. Let’s get started!
1. Get 7-9 hours of quality sleep per night
Sleep may be the most important habit of all to help you lose weight fast.
The more quality sleep you get, the easier it is to control hunger and the more energy you have to exercise.
Lack of sleep can cause increased hunger, muscle loss, and weight gain.
2. Log your food intake in a journal, or app for 3 days
When you track your eating habits with a food journal, or calorie tracking app even for a few days, it will be an eye-opening experience that can increase your body awareness and help you change your habits.
You will learn how many calories you are eating each day, and also the calories in the foods you normally eat.
Understanding your current habits will make changing them much more manageable, and can help you keep weight off long-term.
3. Calculate your target daily calorie intake
Once you have a sense of your eating habits, you can calculate your target calorie intake to ensure you create a calorie deficit.
Remember, if you don’t eat fewer calories than you burn, you will not lose weight.
Our recommendation is to multiply your bodyweight by 10. If you’re a man with over 25% body fat, or a woman with over 30%, subtract 200 calories from the target calorie number.
4. Replace processed foods with whole foods
Obesity has many causes, but the root cause is arguably the rise of processed foods.
Food that is processed, like cereal, cake, donuts, and french fries to name a few, provide significant calories without filling you up.
Even worse, your hunger levels can increase shortly after eating these foods, causing a vicious cycle of weight gain.
Eating foods in their natural state, or as close to their natural state as possible like apples, fish, lettuce, yams, eggs, etc. will help fill you up and stabilize your energy levels, so that you maintain that large calorie deficit.
5. Eat protein with every meal
While nutritionists may argue about whether low carb diets are best, one thing is for certain – a high protein diet helps you lose weight faster.
Foods and meals that are high in protein help fill you up without providing too many calories.
While 1 gram of fat has 9 calories, 1 gram of protein and carbs has only 4.
That’s not to say dietary fat is bad, it’s just that protein, especially lean protein sources, will help satisfy your hunger more.
6. Drink 8-12 cups of water per day
Drinking plenty of water is strongly associated with improved weight loss.
Staying hydrated can help increase satiety, especially if you drink a cup of water before each meal.
7. Follow a workout plan
Over 200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin advised, “If you fail to plan you are planning to fail”.
Clearly, if you have a great workout plan to follow, the likelihood of losing weight increases substantially.
8. Do full-body workouts 3x per week
Training your entire body each workout will help increase your metabolism and calorie burn while preventing muscle loss.
Focus on multi-joint exercises that challenge large muscle groups like squats, lunges, push-ups, and pull-ups to help maximize calorie burn.