If you’re looking to lose weight, perhaps for the upcoming summer months, a wedding, a social gathering, a holiday, or simply to prolong and improve your quality of life, then you won’t need anybody to tell you just how complex and frustrating the entire experience actually is. To begin with, weight loss isn’t the correct term and is actually quite misleading. We could for example, go from lifting weights and building muscle to completely stopping training and building muscle altogether, and so naturally our muscles would shrink and become smaller, thus leading to us losing weight. Yes we will have lost weight, but not the weight we wanted. The phrase we’re looking for in this instance is “fat loss”. Fat is unsightly, unattractive, unwanted, and extremely unhealthy, at least too much of it is. If you’re looking to burn fat, you will probably have been told something different every time you spoke to a so-called “expert” on the subject. Some people will advise you to eat low protein diets, whilst others will advise you to eat high protein diets. Some will say that you can eat as much junk food as you like, providing it’s below your daily calorie requirements, whilst others will tell you to steer clear of anything other than a piece of fruit or steamed vegetables. Some have even go on record as saying that so long as you’re exercising enough, you can eat what you want. In theory this is true, but it isn’t practical, it isn’t healthy, and it’s extremely difficult. This does however, beg the question of just how important diet actually is for fat loss.
Fat loss and your diet
To begin with, on paper, losing fat really is as simple as consuming less calories than your body requires to maintain itself. Say for example, your recommended daily intake of calories is 2000. If you were to consume 1600 calories per day, you would be creating a calorie deficit of 400 and as a result, the body would fear that it was starving. The reason why we store body fat in the first place, is all thanks to our ancient caveman ancestors back in paleolithic times. Back then, we were built for spells of feast or famine. The foods we ate had to be hunted or foraged as there were no shops or processed foods back then. For this reason, we’d go for days at a time without eating, and when we were able to kill an animal, or find a stash of nuts or fruit, we’d eat and eat until we couldn’t consume any more. We’d consume far more calories than we needed to maintain our current body weight, and so the body would take any remaining calories, convert them into body fat, and store them as an emergency energy source for a later date. This is almost the equivalent of storing fire wood during the summer to be burnt during the winter. Once we began burning calories again however, we still needed energy to survive and so the body would then tap into our emergency fat stores and use them as energy. To this day, we still store body fat in the same fashion, the only difference is that most of us are never truly in danger of starving, and so we don’t actually need to store body fat in this way. When we do consume less calories than required however, our bodies revert back to their old ways and use fat for fuel, which is how we lose fat. The more calories we burn, the more fat we lose.
The best foods to consume
We’re living in an age in which food is often processed and pumped full of fat, salt, sugar, and other harmful ingredients and chemicals that cause us no end of troubles. When you’re looking to lose weight, by far the safest, most efficient, and most practical method of losing weight is to simply follow a healthy and balanced diet, combined with regular spells of physical activity. Avoid frozen ready meals and processed foods pumped full of preservatives and other nastiness and instead opt for fresh and healthy foods instead. Go for lean meats such as chicken breast, rump steak or turkey. Eat plenty of seafood such as oily fish, haddock, tuna, etc. Get your carbohydrate sources from complex sources such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and wholegrain rice and pasta. Make sure you consume a little healthy fats such as salmon, mackerel, avocado, or olive oil, and finally, get plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables as they are packed full of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other nutrients that the body thrives upon.
