Trying to lose body fat? Exercise and diet are crucial for achieving your weight loss goals.
I'm sure this isn't the first time you've heard those words. Everyone's a fitness guru and it's all becoming a blur, right?
OK, so let's cut through all the 🐮💩 and get straight into it.
DISCLAIMER: This is general information. My background is in fitness, anatomy, and nutrition, but I am not a doctor and cannot advise you on your exact circumstances. Always check with your GP before starting any new exercise or weight loss strategies.
Nutrition and Exercise ≈ The Facts
Why is taking control of your exercise and diet crucial to achieving long-lasting fat loss?
And how can you make them both work together to maximise effect - not only in the short term, but forever?
- You can't outrun a bad diet
- How big should my kilojoule deficit be?
- Burn fat, not carbs
- Really cool bonus stuff you didn't know about
- Food addiction and mind-games
- Forgive yourself
NOTE: I use the word 'diet' to refer to your dietary or nutritional intake, which should be a rounded balance of proteins, good fats, whole grains, and complex carbohydrates.
You can't outrun a bad diet
I'm sure you've heard that quote before too, but it's absolutely true. You physically cannot outrun or out-exercise an excessive amount of kilojoules.
So exercise isn't important? I'm not saying that, and I'll expand on that subject shortly, but food definitely needs to be your number one priority.
You CAN lose body fat without exercise, but you CANNOT lose body fat without a kilojoule deficit, i.e. you need to eat less kilojoules than your body burns off.
Only in a deficit state, will your metabolic processes turn to your body fat reserves for the energy they need.
How big should my kilojoule deficit be?
One kg of body fat is approximately 37,000 kilojoules, so if you want to lose half a kilogram of fat per week, eat 2400 kJ less than your recommended daily intake.
Don't try to lose more than half a kilogram per week. Faster weight reduction can impact your hormone levels, including testosterone, and that opens up another can of worms.
Too-rapid weight loss also leads to unsightly skin folds due to the elastin in your skin failing to keep up with your shrinking circumference.
That's why a lot of people who take Ozempic or have gastric sleeve surgery end up depressed. The inability to eat coupled with huge skin folds is a common cause of buyer's remorse.
Burn fat, not carbs
When people think of exercising to burn fat, their first thought is typically cardio, something to get the heart pumping.
Please don't. Limit yourself to moderate exercise, at least until your body begins to yield good results from your healthy eating habits.
There are two reasons for this:
- Cardio burns lots of carbs and very little fat.
- You'll be hungry afterwards and likely undo all your gains.
Instead, set aside an hour of moderate activity. Walking or cycling at a moderate pace is great.
Moderate paced exercise burns fat, especially after 30 minutes. This is why aiming for at least one hour is ideal. If you want to exercise longer, that's even better as long as you're physically capable.
An effective pace for walking for fat loss is 4 to 5 kilometres in an hour. For cycling, aim for 15 to 20 kilometres.
At these speeds, your heart rate should stay at a moderate pace. You should be able to hold a conversation without panting. If you find that unmanageable, then slow your pace to a level where you can.
It's important that you don't push your heart rate too high, or your body will begin to use carbohydrates for ATP production (its energy needs) instead of fat.
I also recommend you start doing weight or resistance training. Again, start off slow. Lean skeletal muscle uses energy, which again dips into your body fat reserves.
As your fitness increases, you'll find that you can walk or ride faster and harder without elevating your heart rate too high.
Really cool bonus stuff you didn't know about
We all like free gifts, right? Well, if you follow my tips and combine healthy eating with moderate exercise and weights/resistance training, you'll hit turbo mode. Here's the cool stuff you'll start to see happening to your body.
Your whole body shape starts to change
You've got fat distributed all over your body, but you can't target just one area. It generally goes from your most distal body parts first, i.e. face, neck, calves, hands, and forearms.
Over the weeks and months that follow, you'll continue to notice the fat loss moving towards your core - your stomach, back fat, and butt.
Number twos become regular and firmer
Your toilet habits will change. With less zero-value high-kilojoule food in your diet - pasta, sugars, flour - you'll have less poo to drop in the loo.
Your digestive system becomes less clogged AND super efficient at extracting valuable macro nutrients, vitamins, and minerals.
Your skin will regain much of its vitality
Your skin releases lots of waste, salts, even dead blood and skin cells. It does this by naturally shedding dead skin and when you sweat.
It follows that if you have less toxins in your blood and lymphatic vessels, you'll have less waste collecting in the connective tissue between your muscles and skin, which in turn creates a healthier environment for new collagen and elastin to grow.
Food addiction and mind-games
Your body likes its addictions. It really, really loves them, and will constantly tempt you to give in to those yummy foods you've reduced or given up altogether.
I'll share my experience because it's noteworthy.
Around six months into my fat loss journey, I decided to take things up a notch and give up sugar. I threw out all the sugar, honey, syrup etc in the house, switching to sugar-free alternatives like aspartame for my coffee.
This wasn't a big leap for me. I've always like Diet Coke, so the transition worked fine.
But then a week later, I woke up in the middle of the night craving a cigarette. I'd given up smoking a decade earlier and hadn't even thought about smoking for years. But there it was.
It took a minute or so for the craving to pass, but the experience made me acutely aware of the lengths my brain would go to make me give in.
My body didn't like that I was giving up another addiction. I love sugar, I always have, but after this, it doubled my resolve to beat my addictions.
A year later, every so often, I'll allow myself a small lapse and eat something unnecessarily sweet (and then I'll go cycle a hundred kilometres) 😁
A little trick I use a lot for staying on track, is reminding myself that it's far easier to not eat excess kilojoules than to burn them off.
It's even easier once you start liking the changes you see in the mirror as new muscles show or you need to go buy smaller shorts.
Forgive yourself
You're going to fail.
I'm not saying this to demotivate you, but to prepare you, because one day, you're going to have a binge. Something will trigger it. A bad day, a sad mood, whatever. You'll give in and your addictions will win.
And do you know what? That's OK. I give you permission to fail. As I mentioned above, I do it myself. A good bakery is my evil nemesis. I'm not perfect, no one is. And with this understanding, you have to forgive yourself too.
This is such an important mindset to adopt, because 99% of people get it wrong. They'll have their binge or relapse and NOT forgive themselves. Instead, they'll view it as failure and completely give up, and all their hard work will be wasted.
Please don't let that be you. OK, you fell over, you had some cake or pizza, maybe two days in a row. It wiped out weeks of progress. But it didn't wipe out months.
Find a photo of yourself from way back when you started this journey. Now look at yourself in the mirror. Despite your stuff-up, your skin is healthier, your smile more relaxed and natural.
Good food and exercise did that. Look at how far you've come. You're not a failure, you're a winner. Good on you, mate, well done.
So take a deep breath, dust yourself off, and go do your 10,000 steps. You always feel better when you do.
