If you want to know how to lose weight fast and safely, you’ve come to the right place.
This article features our top 10 proven tips based on science and experience to reach your weight loss goals quickly.
Because we want to help you as much as possible, Kristin and we’ve created a series of tips on weight loss!
We structured this series so that you can absorb it quickly, find your favorite tips, and use it as a reference.
Remember that implementing just one tip on this list may be a life-changer!
So, let’s begin.
How Weight Loss Works
Before we jump into all of the tips, it’s critical for you to understand the fundamentals of how weight loss works.
You may have heard that you need to cut carbs or exercise every day to lose weight, but the truth is:
Losing weight comes down to calories; how much you eat and burn.
This is known as the calorie balance equation.
One pound of fat contains 3500 calories.1
So you must eat 3500 fewer calories than you burn to lose 1 pound of fat.2
Let’s take Mike who weighs 200 pounds and wants to lose weight fast.
If Mike burns 2500 calories and eats 2000 calories a day, he’ll create a 500 daily calorie deficit:
2,500 calorie burn – 2000 calories eaten = 500 calorie deficit
After 7 days, he’ll have a 3500 calorie deficit, which means he will burn 1 pound of fat. So in one week he has burned one pound of fat. Pretty good.
You may be thinking – “I just need to eat as few calories as possible and burn as many as possible, right?” Kind of.
If you eat too few calories, you may lose muscle and your metabolism can decrease.3 You will also have less energy to exercise. In other words, your body will fight you to conserve energy, burn fewer calories, and make you feel extremely hungry so you eat more.4
In addition, the quality of the calories you eat and your lifestyle choices affect this calorie balance equation by making you more or less hungry and increasing or decreasing the number of calories you burn.
If you want to lose weight fast, you must create a large enough calorie deficit that is sustainable, that allows you to lose only fat (not muscle), keeps your metabolism humming, and energy levels high.
So how much food and what type of foods should you eat? How much exercise and what type should you do?
The following tips will answer these questions and help you determine the best strategy to lose weight fast and safely.
Top 10 Tips To Lose Weight Fast
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 5, the easier it is to control hunger and the more energy you have to exercise. Lack of sleep can cause increased hunger,6 muscle loss, and weight gain.7 We have plenty of tips to help you improve the quality of your sleep in our lifestyle section below.
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.8 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.9
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. For more information, you can check out How Many Calories Should I Eat To Lose Weight? and also How To Calculate Your Calorie Burn.
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.10
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.11 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.12 Find out how much protein you need to build muscle.
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.13
Follow a nutrition plan
You know your target calorie intake and you’ve learned about your current eating habits, now it’s time to create, or find a nutrition plan to follow. You can use the tips from this article to help you craft your own plan, or you can follow one from an experienced nutritionist like our BuiltLean Nutrition Plan. Either way, you know the goal – eat foods that fill you up without providing too many calories so that you hit your target calorie intake each day.14
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.15 You can create your own workout plan using the tips in this article, or you can follow a plan from an experienced fitness coach or trainer, like our BuiltLean Workout Plan.
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.
Be patient
You may have come across this article because you are dying to lose your belly fat fast, but the truth is that losing weight – especially only fat – does not happen overnight. While you can lose 10 pounds in one day simply by dehydrating yourself, it will be almost entirely water weight. On the high-end, you can lose 1.5% of your body weight in fat per week. Much more than that, and it’s more likely you’ll be losing muscle and/or water. So a 200 pound man can lose 3 pounds of pure fat per week,16, 17 which is a hefty 1,500 daily calorie deficit.
Just because you want to lose weight faster, doesn’t mean you should, or you will. Be patient, follow your plan, and the excess weight will come off.
