Weight Loss Simplified

There’s a huge amount of confusing and conflicting information out there around how you should go about losing weight. I hope this post simultaneously strips it back to its simplest form but also gives you all the tools you need to go about losing weight in a sensible, sustainable way.

The single most important thing weight loss comes down to, is being in a calorific deficit. You must be burning more calories than you are consuming.

Once that fundamental truth is understood, a few other questions usually pop up….

How do I know how many calories I’m burning in a day?

How do I track how many calories I’m consuming?

How much of a calorific deficit should I even be in?
 
First of all, you need to calculate roughly how many calories you are burning in a day, this is called your TDEE – Total Daily Energy Expenditure. The easiest way to do this, is to use a calorie calculator (I like the ‘If It Fits Your Macros’ one – put ‘IIFYM TDEE Calculator’ into google). The calculator takes in to account a variety of things including sex, height, weight, and activity levels. It will then spew out an ESTIMATE of the number of calories you burn in a day.

Secondly, you need to track your daily calorie intake. These days there are hundreds of websites and apps that enable you to do this and by far the most popular is MyFitnessPal. Though it has its limitations, it’s gigantic database of food and the fact that you can customise and save your favourite meals makes it super helpful. It also has an inbuilt bar code scanner for certain packaged foods. Just be careful with serving size, this is where people can lose accuracy. The difference between a large avocado and a small one can be 160 calories, a few little mistakes in serving size throughout the day can lead to a large discrepancy between the calories you think you’re consuming and what you actually are. 

When it comes to the calorific deficit there can be too much of a good thing. You want to be around the 15% calorie deficit mark for your body to utilise fat as a fuel. If you want to be super aggressive 20% is fine, but you’d be better off going for 15% and actually sticking to it in the long term. Often people get impatient when losing weight and end up trying to cut more and more calories. This can result in your body utilising protein as a fuel source, leading to muscle atrophy (breakdown of muscle) and the slowing of your metabolism. As you lose weight your body will require less calories. This means as you progress you’ll need to enter your new details into the TDEE calculator to work out a new calorie intake and deficit.

Here’s an example of what this process may look like:

Using the calorie calculator, you determine that your TDEE is 1800 Calories

To achieve a 15% calorie deficit of that, you need to be consuming 1800kcal – 15% = 1530kcal

You track your calorie consumption so that you consume 1530kcal.

Hey presto, you steadily lose weight.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking, do I really want to be tracking every single calorie that I consume for the rest of my life? Probably not, and that’s not what I’m suggesting. Track your calories for a short period of time, until you understand what you’re consuming on a regular basis, once you’ve achieved that, then fuck tracking them unless you significantly change your diet.
 
Hope you found this helpful, any questions drop em below or message me.