Most people start exercising with one simple goal – to lose weight. However, most people don’t know what that truly means or why exercising is important in many other aspects of your life. We already looked at how exercising for weight loss is a complicated topic, how our diet or nutritional habits factors into our weight, and even whether weight loss is the best goal. Today, we can take a look at how this all comes together so we can understand better how weight loss actually works.
What is weight loss? This seems like a very obvious question, right? You weigh less than you did before. But what most people don’t take into consideration are the many ways in which you can lose weight. You can lose bone mass, muscle mass, water weight (sweat, etc.), you can have surgery or, to focus more clearly, you can lose fat. Interestingly, when people talk about weight loss, they are mostly focussing on the last of this list, even though they don’t notice. Why are these differentiations important? We need to know how to target our weight loss so that we can have a clear idea of how to properly set our goals.
For this article, we’ll focus primarily on muscle mass and fat loss. The former is not so great unless you are simply trying to meet a target weight for competition or you have an aesthetic dislike of muscle (which is another topic for another day). What we want to target is the fat. To do this, we need to understand a bit better how weight is lost in the first place.
To lose weight, we need to enter a caloric deficit. There are two ways to do this; we can increase our activity level (exercise) or we can decrease our caloric intake (eat less). The latter has to be done carefully, because if you cut too many calories, your body starts to try to find ways to conserve energy, making fat-burning less efficient. The most effective way to lose weight is a combination of the two (for different reasons). In order to target fat, we need to combine the two. If we don’t, you run the risk of the body feeding off of your muscle tissue without you rebuilding it. The human body prefers to “burn” fat, but it is possible for the body to turn to muscle for some needed calories. Additionally, when looking at overall health and fitness gains, you can’t ignore the benefits that exercise provides.
Now that we understand that a little bit better, how much of a caloric deficit (taking in less energy than we expend) do we need? Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the amount of energy (usually measured in kiloCalories, or just Calories) required to live day-to-day. Whatever your current BMR is, you want to look at cutting that by about 500-1000 Calories per day. Think of it this way — 1 lb of fat is 3500 Calories. If you cut 500 a day, you’ll cut 3500 by the end of the week. 1000 a day leads to 7000 a week which is 2 lbs. Why do we want to stick to this range? Research has shown that 2 lbs is a safe rate of weight loss per week. More than that and we risk complications of malnutrition (nutrient deficits, inefficient metabolism, etc.), so better to let it be gradual.
Now that we know that safe weight loss is gradual, we also need to know that it’s not linear. Today you will weigh five pounds more than 2 days ago, and three days from now, you would find that you lost the same five plus an additional three. Eating, sleeping, bathroom, drinking habits can show immediate changes to your weight, so it is better to observe over a long period of time. If you truly want lasting weight loss, you need to be patient and trust the process. Stop looking for quick fixes.
So now we understand what it takes to lose weight and how we should be targeting our weight loss. Aim for a caloric deficit of 500-1000 calories a day and do this with a combination of changing our nutritional habits and increasing activity (through exercise). This combination is more likely to result in safe and lasting weight loss. I hope this helps you refocus your goal and your path to it. Keep training and enjoy. 🙂