The quickest way to lose weight and how to keep it off

Key Factors for Successful Change. A guide to success.

There are many factors that affect changing your life to becoming overall healthier, stronger and fitter. Whatever your goal is, these six things will have the strongest impact. Here is the quickest way to lose weight and keep it off.

Without going into a massive amount of detail on each, I’m going to outline why these factors are the key to being successful in whatever goal you set yourself, and small changes you can implement in relation to each that will help you succeed.

The key factors are as follows.

• Sleep:
  • The quality and quantity of your sleep will have a massive impact on the entire outlined list.
• Nutrition:
  • Second to sleep, if you’re diet isn’t conducive to your goal, you won’t be successful.
• Training:
  • Training is the foundation you set for your goal, quality will dictate the outcome.
• Stress:
  • Left unmanaged, stress wreaks havoc on our bodies.
• Habits:
  • The small things we do without thinking on a daily basis have a massive impact on our lives.
• Lifestyle:
  • What you do with your 168 hours a week.

Nutrition:

There is a hierarchy to nutrition, however, the main things to focus on are calories – Macro Nutrients – Micronutrients – Meal timing – Supplements

Calories – If you want to gain weight, you need to eat more calories than you burn daily if you want to lose weight, reverse that. It isn’t much more complicated than that, however, if you’re unaware of the number of calories you’re taking in, it can be difficult to decrease that amount (an increase is usually easier), read the Diet Management Guide for calorie reduction tips.

Macro Nutrients – Protein, Carbohydrates, Fat. Protein and Carbs have 4 calories per gram, fat has 9. Aim for 2g per kg of body weight for protein, the rest of your diet should then be comprised of some carbohydrates and some fats from a lot of fruit, vegetables, and salads. If you can, try to avoid excessively processed food.

Micronutrients – Vitamins and Minerals, so long as you’re eating a balanced diet, you should be safe, supplements are rarely necessary except in very specific situations like pregnancy.

Meal timing / Frequency – How often you eat can have an impact on the number of calories you take in if you’re trying to gain or lose weight, depending on those meals. However, that impact is minuscule, eating every 2 hours compared to eating 3 meals a day will have no difference if accumulatively you’ve eaten 2000 calories as an example. 3 – 4 meals with small snacking to avoid long periods of hunger is most effective.

Supplements – This includes things like multivitamins, protein shakes, creatine and other non-food source products. If the first 3 tiers of your diets aren’t correct, supplements are a massive waste of money, and if they are in order, the gains you will receive from supplementation are minimal apart from creatine which can have some benefits to building muscle.

Sleep:

When you are asleep, your body is recovering from damage and stress that was taken on during the day. Everyone knows the effects of poor sleep, from feeling week to mentally foggy, sleep effects every single process in our body. Maximizing our sleep quality is vital for successfully reaching any goal, fitness related or not. Go for too long without sleep, and you’ll die, which highlights its importance.

Quality vs Quantity:

Staying in bed for 12 hours a night and waking up tired is a sure sign that something isn’t right about your sleep. There are a few things that determine your sleep quality. From the environment, you sleep in, to the process before going to sleep.

Sleep in as dark a room as possible, with a moderate room temperature that isn’t too warm. An ideal temperature is 18^c-21^c, sweating during the night decreases sleep quality as you’re more likely to wake as well as an elevated heart rate during the night.

Don’t watch TV in bed, don’t read in bed, and don’t look at your phone in bed.
This links into habits, if you associate your bed with a level of alertness that you assign to texting, reading or watching TV, it can become more difficult to mentally shut off and fall asleep.

Aim to go to bed 15-30 minutes before you plan on sleeping, if you want to sleep at 23:00, go to bed at 22:40, with the lights off, curtains closed and settled in bed, if you’re falling asleep in less than 5 minutes of going to bed, you’re overtired. This 15-30 minute period gives your brain a chance to ease out of whatever task you were doing before, which for a lot of people will most likely be watching TV. 

Training:

Training or more commonly known as exercise is fundamental to losing weight and maintaining your health at every age, we are moving incredibly early in life before we’re even born. Movement is fundamental to health and wellbeing, it’s strongly linked with both physiology and psychology.

Cardio and Resistance Training:

Your training should always be a mixture of both resistance training and cardio, there is no perfect exercise. If you enjoy going to classes or lifting weights, whether it’s normal gym training, CrossFit, callisthenics (bodyweight training), powerlifting, then do that. If you like long runs, sprinting, or quick walks, pick whichever suits you best and do it often.

I would recommend a ratio of 3/2, 3 resistance training sessions and 2 cardio sessions weekly, these don’t have to be 100% effort all the time, there will be a lot of times where you won’t want to exercise at all, even as a personal trainer I get that feeling at least once a month. The most important thing is simply consistency, set long term goals and stick to them.

Avoid becoming dogmatic in whatever form of exercise you like, as there is always merit to each method of training that can be learned and applied to your own training. Focus on not getting injured, and exercising for your health. Exercising for aesthetics is completely acceptable as well, so long as it doesn’t have a negative impact on your overall health.

Stress:

Stress is a natural response in the human body brought on by a number of stimuli, in modern society, our stress response has partially been hijacked by a vast number of technological and social advances that lead to an adverse response to stress, and a constantly heightened flight or fight response. This often results in mild to extreme anxiety, as well as depression and other psychological and physical negative symptoms.

Fight or Flight vs Rest and Digest:

As advanced as we are, are nervous system is millions of years old and the process of evolution found in many animals. Our autonomic nervous system splits into two pathways, sympathetic, and parasympathetic, autonomic meaning out of our direct control. The sympathetic nervous system is more commonly known as the flight or fight response, a natural response to what we instinctively as dangerous, or stressful situations. While the parasympathetic, or rest and digest, is often completely unheard of.

Training and life will usually push us into a sympathetic state, while recovery after training we usually return to parasympathetic. Issues start to occur when other factors excessively overactive our sympathetic nervous system.

Cold showers – Meditation – Slow Controlled Breathing – Sleep
These are some effective ways to mediate stress and influence (not control) your nervous system.

Habits:

Habits are essentially learned behaviours over a period of time, without them, life would be an incredibly difficult mind game, even now as I’m typing this out, if I had to look at each key and think about it, it would take hours, they speed up our daily processes and decrease neural demands. This can be both a positive and negative, depending on the ingrained behaviours. We usually refer to habits as good and bad, although this is slightly misleading as habits themselves are a very good thing, the particular behaviour and outcome tends to be where the issue lies.

Changing habits:

If you’ve ever tried to stop doing something that is a habit, you’re already aware of how difficult it is, habits are made up of a reminder, a routine, and a reward.
You see your gym gear, you go to the gym to train, and you feel good after. This is a positive habit and has a benefit to your health.
You see chocolate in a shop, you buy the chocolate, and you go home and eat it. This can be both positive and negative, if this becomes a chronic, unchecked habit, it will lead to weight gain.

Oversimplified, but the key to changing our habits is first identifying the reminder, then modifying the routine. Due to the background nature of habits, we tend to do this process on autopilot, being present and aware of our triggers/reminders is fundamental to changing habits.

As for building new habits, like exercise more often, the key is tracking our progress, keeping note of successful and unsuccessful days. I use an app for this called HabitBull.

Lifestyle:

Although is probably already clear, changing your health and fitness usually revolves around an entire modification of lifestyle. What’s normally portrayed on social media, magazines and the internet, in general, is on the extreme end of the spectrum, it’s completely unsustainable and can potentially be detrimental in making overall progress if chased.

For most people, going to the gym 5 times a week, prepping all your meals into Tupperware, spending hundreds a month on supplements, health products and juices is a terrible life choice. That’s an oversimplified and glorified approach.

Leading a balanced lifestyle is more about the day to day choices we make, taking stairs instead of the elevator, parking further from the shop door, walking instead of driving if you can, trying out new sports and hobbies at any age and finding ways to be more active on a constant basis. The key is always longevity.

Humans are naturally social, it’s difficult to make change on your own, social media has arguably thousands of support groups you could join, as being a part of a group does give a sense of purpose to the changes you need to implement, as well as being able to compare experience and gain new ideas. Finding local groups can be even more beneficial and can suit some people better, this also gives the potential of finding training partners, friends and a whole host of benefits.

Try to spent time with like-minded people who are aiming to improve their health and fitness or who have already done so.