Do you weigh yourself every day and are disappointed with the result every day? Don't worry, your weight can fluctuate a lot throughout the day. Even if you're losing weight, the results might show on your body before they show on the scale. "The scale never reflects what we truly are;" sometimes we can see people with the same weight who are completely opposite in physical appearance and health. If we really want to worry about something, we should worry about excess fat.
Your weight is made up of water, fat, muscle, bones, organs, etc., and when we need to lose weight, it should primarily be fat. Losing muscle puts our health at risk. Hence the importance of avoiding miracle diets or magic solutions. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you must change your lifestyle and your approach to food.
Getting rid of body fat alone is difficult. However, you can reach your ideal percentage through a combination of diet, exercise, and habits that will help reduce fat, such as the ones I'm about to present to you.
- Control your portions: We should not overdo any food, no matter how good it is. The first step to start losing fat is to control the amount of food we eat throughout the day. You don't need to weigh or measure every food, but you do need to have some control.
- Make sleep your priority: When you sleep less than 7 hours, your body generates stress, which raises cortisol (the stress hormone). Additionally, the hunger hormone increases, leading to increased appetite and anxiety, and metabolism slows down slightly. This will increase your body fat percentage, and you also run the risk of muscle degradation or loss.
- Train to lose fat: You should have a workout whose main function is lipolysis (the breakdown of fatty acids). How to do it? It's very simple: TRAIN HEAVY. When you train with weights, your hormonal environment improves significantly; growth hormone, testosterone, and adrenaline are secreted, more fat is mobilized, and you will burn it. It's very important to highlight that training heavy will not make you big. When you train heavy and your meal plan is designed for fat loss, your body will become a fat-burning machine as you will have hormones like insulin (a hormone that helps us store fat) under control, and the hormones mentioned earlier will increase, which will help your body oxidize more fat.
- Include compound exercises: these exercises involve several muscles in the same exercise. Some of these include squats with overhead press, lunges with bicep curl, lunge with lateral raise, plank with row, burpees, among others.
- Avoid a sedentary lifestyle: If a sedentary lifestyle is the cause of all evils, you need to be in motion. Exercise at least 3 times a week, and on days you can't, always stay very active throughout the day. Remember that what is not used atrophies, and if we are not moving, we burn fewer calories, metabolism slows down, your hormones will not be optimal for burning fat, and you start to lose muscle mass.
- Control carbohydrate intake: When we want to lose fat, it is very important to control carbohydrate intake, because as long as you have an excess of carbohydrates in your body, it will always prefer to use carbohydrates as an energy source and not fat. This is because it is easier for the body to expend carbohydrates than fat, and for this reason, you have to force it to also burn fat. And how do you achieve this? By lowering the amount of carbohydrates. BE CAREFUL, but don't eliminate them completely.
- Avoid processed foods: These types of foods will only increase your body fat percentage; make sure your foods come from nature and are as natural as possible.
- Avoid high-calorie and sugary drinks: this includes sports or isotonic drinks, tea with sugar, juices. The ideal is to drink water, unsweetened infusions, or natural flavored water.