Tips for healthy weight loss

Weight loss is notorious for being one of the most difficult aspects of fitness and living a healthy lifestyle. With everyone and their dog seemingly throwing out weight loss advice, meal plans and tips left right and center – it’s a struggle to decide who to trust and who to listen to.

The tricky part of weight loss is not that it’s particularly complicated, but that it requires self control, discipline and determination to stick to a diet, complete your training and keep on losing. It’s super simple concept, but a difficult skill to master.

Luckily for you, we’ve swerved the counterfeit claims, trivial tips and false facts to give you our top 7 tips so you can focus on weight loss and less about who’s right and who’s wrong:

1. Keep your diet in check

Our first and coincidentally most important tip is simple. Keep your diet in check. If you’re not already it’s a great idea to go into your day tracking your macronutrients so you know where you are with your food. If you know and have a record of exactly what you’re eating, suddenly it becomes a lot easier to figure out where you’re tripping up while working towards a calorie goal for the day.

You can easily set up a free tracking app such as ‘myfitnesspal’ so you don’t have to do any of the work yourself. The app will also walk your through the macronutrient process, making sure that you’ve got an optimum split of fat, protein and carbohydrates to target for each and every day.

Calorie counting isn’t for everyone – it’s got the marmite effect about it – some people love it and some hate it, but you’ve got to try to find out. We recommend tracking for a minimum of two weeks before making a decision. If you decide it’s not for you then the two weeks of practice will come in more useful than you know with a changed perception of the foods that you’re putting into your body.

Bit of a big tip, but one we fully stand by.

2. Get your protein on point

Protein is king in the world of training as well as in the world of dieting. High protein diets are great for keeping satisfied for longer meaning that you’ll eat less (in theory). Making sure that you’re consuming between 0.8x -1.0x your bodyweight in lbs grams of protein per day is a great start and puts you firmly in the ballpark of optimum nutrition.

E.g. if you weigh 180lbs, aim to consume between 144g and 180g of protein per day.

It doesn’t matter what form it’s in either. Whether it’s chicken, beef, fish or powder – if you’re getting in the p’s the lbs look after themselves.

3. Fill up on fats

Fat is another great focus macronutrient for those of us looking to lose a little with again high satiety compared to their carbohydrate counterpart. Although the idea might be a little confusing for some of us – eat more fat and get less fat – research has shown that a high fat based diet (such as the ketogenic diet) is not only good for weight loss, but for endurance athletes and high focus activities.

If you get a couple of hours to yourself, it’s a great idea to check out the Netflix documentary ‘The Magic Pill’ that discussed the issues further and gives a great perspective into fat within the diet. Trust us, the more fat the better – to an extent anyway.

4. Don’t forget to train

With all this diet talk you might be wondering whether or not you should be training and keeping up an active lifestyle. In short – of course you should be. Training your usual weight routine is a great way to burn calories with the increase of your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).

Treat your training as a way to be able to eat more calories and continue to lose or as a way to burn some extra calories on top of your diet.

5. Cardio isn’t so hardio

Just like your usual weight routine, cardio is a great way to get a move and burn more and more calories through your day. Depending on your height, weight, age and sex, you can burn as much as 1000 calories from an hour of jogging meaning that you’re in with a shot of some serious weight loss.

Whatever your chosen poison – the stepper, the rowing machine, the elliptical, the bike or even just on foot – implementing cardio in your routine is a surefire wire to up the calories burned and drop the lbs.

6. Use the bathroom scales

You’re keeping track of your food and you’re keeping track in the gym, so why not track and keep an eye on your weight too. We’re not interested in the day-to-day variations, but rather the week-to-week changes in your body weight to make a judgement on how to tweak your diet for the better.

If you’re dropping too fast (more than 1.5lbs – 2lbs per week) then it might be time to up the calorie intake to a safer level. If you’re dropping too slow (less 0.5lbs per week) then you’re best off dropping the calories or increasing activity levels to make the most of the journey.

7. Focus on your sleep

Last up, quite fittingly, is to focus on your sleep. Studies have shown that those of us who sleep less are more likely to be overweight and even obese than those that get a full 7-8 hours of sleep per evening.

If that sounds like a distant dream then it might be time to make some lifestyle changes and focus on some time with you and your duvet. Super simple, super effective – just how we like it.

BODYTECH is the most advanced technology in Total Body electro-stimulation EMS to achieve results in fat burning, muscle toning, decreasing volume and improving athletic performance with just a 20 minute weekly session.