First, don’t think of going on a diet, but making a healthy lifestyle change. How can you lose weight and keep it off, if after a few weeks of dieting you revert back to your old habits? You’ll regain the weight right back. So it’s best too change how you eat – permanently. This means changing your lifestyle by adopting permanent healthy nutrition practices.
In terms of losing weight, you can create a negative energy balance, just by decreasing the amount of calories you eat. However, by combining both diet and exercise, you get additive, and even synergistic, results.
Cardio helps burn calories, and has a positive impact on your heart health and lung function, as well helping to reduce the risk of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attack, and some cancers.
Weight training will help maintain muscle mass, instead of losing it, as occurs during weight loss, and helps build bone density and improves mental health. In other words, the exercise and diet combo is a no-brainer!
Fast Weight Loss
Fat loss occurs slowly and steadily. Losing more than 2 pounds of weight per week means that you are likely losing a lot of water weight or muscle tissue, and less body fat. If weight is lost any more rapidly than this, it is most likely a sign that you need to eat more.
To lose weight permanently, lose weight slowly and steadily.Weight loss should be between 1 – 2lbs a week. Fast weight loss is generally to be avoided.
There are 3500 calories in 1lbs. (0.45kg) of fat. Therefore, to lose 1 lbs. of fat per week you’ll need to burn 500 calories more than you consume each day through a combination of nutrition and regular exercise.
500 calories x 7 days = 3500 calories/ week (1lbs of weight loss/ week)
I’ve been trying to lose fat for ages with no success as I was just losing water weight. You said that to lose 1lb of fat a week you have to lose 500 calories a day but how do you lose 500 calories from fat (not normal calories) when the average women is supposed to eat 630 calories from fat a day. And also when I jog on the treadmill it takes almost 40 minutes to just burn 140kcal (the amount of calories from fat in my breakfast) and I probably didn’t even burn 100% fat so I don’t understand how its possible to lost 1lb of fat a week, especially two weeks.
Hi Jessica,
You’re talking about two things here – dietary fat and body fat. It’s easy to confuse them because they’re both often simply referred to as fat. To lose weight/ body fat you need to focus on your total daily calorie intake (how many calories you eat and drink every day) – not dietary fat only. To lose weight you need to reduce your total calorie intake to create a calorie deficit, you can use this calorie calculator to get an idea of how many calories you need to 1) maintain your current weight 2) lose weight. Reducing your calorie intake by 500 calories (for example from 1900 calories a day to 1400 calories) applies to your total calorie intake (dietary fat, protein and carbs), not just dietary fat.
This article explains more about 3,500 calories equating to 1lb of fat.
With regards to exercise, yes, it’s much harder to lose weight with just exercise. You have to exercise a lot to burn a significant amount of calories. It’s easier to create a large calorie deficit with diet than exercise. But exercise serves a purpose greater than just calorie burning. Exercise can help counter some of the negative side effects of cutting calories. For example, cutting calories can slow metabolism, exercise helps boost metabolism. Cutting calories can cause the loss of muscle, exercise can build muscle. Also, research suggests that people who diet and exercise are more likely to successfully keep the weight off than people who just diet. So don’t be discouraged by the the calories you’re burning from exercise. Hope this helps!
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