It seems like whenever trainers talk about how to lose belly fat fast they either say it should never be done or they promise a quick fix that just ends with you putting the weight back on. I'm here to tell you there can be a case for fast weight loss sometimes but you need to know the potential dangers going in and how to set things out properly. So today I'm going to explain the positives and negatives of rapid fat loss and let you decide if it's right for you and then gives you a plan to get you the results you want. I help you master your metabolism so you can not only lose the weight but make sure you keep it off long term and end the yo-yo dieting cycle.
All right I know you'll probably be tempted to skip ahead to the part, where I start talking about how to actually lose weight fast and give you the plan. But do not do this because it's super important to educate yourself first because if you skip ahead I can almost guarantee you while you'll probably lose weight pretty fast you're almost guaranteed to put it back on afterward and I don't want that for you I want you to create forever results. So make sure you stick around to the end. So let's go ahead and start with some of the potential benefits of going through a rapid fat loss plan and for the most part, the biggest benefit is gonna come to those who are very obese and have a lot of weight to lose. It doesn't mean this has to be you but it's the person who's gonna benefit the most.
First of all the benefit of just getting a bunch of body fat off your body is gonna outweigh the potential negatives because you are in a really unhealthy position and quite frankly it's dangerous to be where you are. Lowering your body fat is almost guaranteed to help you improve your health markers like cholesterol and blood pressure and things like that and this will reduce some of that danger you're in from being too overweight. Not only are there the health benefits but there are also some mindset benefits because it's gonna help get you excited to see faster results.
The problem with slower weight loss especially if you have a lot of weight to lose can be it can feel like its almost impossible to get to the final goal because if you have a hundred and fifty pounds to lose if you're just losing around a pound a week that gonna seem like it's impossible to ever get there. But when you see fast results now you start to believe that it's possible and just believing worth its weight in gold. Not only do you believe that it's possible but you start to believe in yourself and your abilities and I can't tell you how powerful this is. Because this can improve things like your self-confidence and your self-value which helps you start changing even more of your behavior and it creates this extra buy-in to the process. So doing this and then tapering into something more sustainable later can be right for some people. Now hearing all that can make it sound like rapid fat-loss is the way to go but it doesn't come without negatives. In fact, there are quite a few to consider. Because in order to lose weight quickly you have to do it by eating a very low-calorie diet and possibly also dramatically increasing exercise. And while you may see a slight increase in energy at first especially as you start eating healthier options and get some stress off the body with the reduction and body fat. It won't be long before you start noticing several negatives like being extremely hungry, increased irritability and mood shifts, and lacking energy even for the simplest of tasks. And not to be overlooked is when you go extreme it's going to be harder to stick to the plan for more than just short periods of time.
The problem with a rapid weight loss plan is it's unlikely to be sustainable so you have to think about how you'll transition into something more sustainable after, something few consider. Cause while rapid weight loss is exciting almost everyone who does it ends up putting the weight back on especially if you're just looking for the quick fix. And perhaps the most misunderstood part of fast weight loss is what it does to your metabolism. Unfortunately, most people don't realize that when you do lose weight your body makes some adjustments both hormonally and metabolically to slow down your metabolism as this is basically your body's self-defense mechanism against starvation. And the more extreme you go and the longer you do it the more these adaptations occur which only make it increasingly difficult to see further progress. And this is why weight loss plateaus are unavoidable, to begin with, but the bigger problem with an extremely low-calorie plan is once the body does adapt you have no room to make adjustments to get the process working again. This of course leads you to become stuck and makes you frustrated with the process with your metabolism now running much slower unfortunately it makes it really easy to overshoot previous levels of body fat.
Now the good news is you don't destroy your metabolism like a lot of people think you do from this. Because it can be improved with a process called reverse dieting where you slowly increase your calories over time which will speed your metabolism back up. The problem is very few people understand this and even when you do few people are prepared for what happens to them mentally because of the hormonal changes that do come from the dieting. Your hunger hormones get all messed up and your body starts singling to you that you're extremely hungry and even when you do eat you pretty much never feel full. And when you couple this extreme hunger with the fatigue that's naturally gonna build from the dieting becomes really demotivating. And with your body fighting you this hard while you may have had well and good intentions before you started the process now that you're in the moment it's a totally different ballgame and it's really hard to stick to the plan, placing you in real danger of rapid fat regain. And an even bigger problem is not only is it easy to regain weight but there's research that shows it's possible you could actually create new fat cells if you gain weight too fast post-diet and once you have a fat cell you can never get rid of it. They can be made bigger or smaller but they're there for good which of course will only make it harder and harder to improve your body composition down the road. This is why the slower more sustainable approach is usually the better option.
When you diet in a more sustainable method it ensures you do things in a way that you can continue to do in the long run through actual lifestyle changes so you don't lose all your progress. Because it doesn't matter what you do to lose weight if you can't keep doing it long-term. This way you can enjoy more food including somethings that you enjoy in your diet and you don't feel so restricted. And when you do hit these weight loss plateaus since you're eating more food and doing less activity you can easily make some adjustments to get the process working again and continue to see results. So while faster weight loss, in the beginning, is exciting it often leads to less total weight loss in the long run when your body starts fighting back. That doesn't mean you can't start with quick results and transition into something more sustainable you just have to understand the risk-reward and go in with a well-thought-out plan. Okay, now you know the dangers and don't go anywhere because I'm going to set you up with a good fat loss plan to get things started. Because while the rapid fat loss may not be a great option for many people it is for some and maybe is for you and let's be honest many people are gonna do this anyway whether I warned them to or not so I'd rather go ahead and help you so you at least have a better chance of succeeding in the long run. I'd also like to open this up for discussion, I'm an open-minded person and I want to hear from you.
Do you think that there's a case for rapid fat-loss in some instances or do you think it should be avoided entirely? Do you think that I missed any positives or negatives that we should talk about? Drop your comments below and let's get the discussion started because I love to hear from you. Now before I start giving you the specifics of how to create rapid fat-loss first we need to talk about who this most definitely is NOT for. This plan is not for you if you have a history of eating disorders, an unhealthy relationship with food, or if you already have a history of dieting. This is for someone who could benefit from seeing fast results early who is at the beginning of their fitness journey and another important thing to ask yourself and be really honest about do you want rapid fat-loss in the beginning as a part of a lifelong planner are you just looking for the quick fix? You also need to understand progress will slow down no matter what you can't keep seeing this fast weight loss forever and you need to know this going in or you're gonna be set up for feeling defeated and more likely to give up. So this plan is to get started to get some fat off start building some self-efficacy and help increase the motivation to get you going. It is not a solution. So you only want to do this plan for shorter periods of time start off with maybe 2 to 4 weeks of course that can be longer if you have a lot of weight to lose but overall it should be a shorter plan and I highly recommend that you follow them up with periods of maintenance doing something called a diet break. This not only helps keep your metabolism in a better place but it also helps minimize the suck of dieting when you're able to eat more food and take some breaks both mentally and physically.
Now as far as how much to eat what you want to do first is establish a rough goal weight understanding that whether you get to that weight or whether you look completely different at that weight than you think, which you probably will, it's totally irrelevant this is just to get some starting calories to get you going. And remember that a look and feel much more important than any actual scale weight. So go ahead and figure out what your kind of goal weight is and then what you want to do is multiply that number by eight to ten, maybe seven if you want to get really aggressive. And this will be how many calories you're gonna eat per day. So for instance, if you are currently 300 pounds and you want to get down to about 175pounds you could take 175 x 8 which would give you 1400 and that's the number of calories you're gonna eat daily.
There are many different tracking apps you can use such as My Fitness Pal or Lose It or My Macros Plus or whatever one you prefer is fine. It just makes things much simpler because you can even scan foods that have barcodes and just enter in all your information so you don't have to do it manually.
Now within those calories I also want you to eat a good amount of protein I would recommend if possible to eat roughly around your goal weight in protein but if you can't eat that much because you're not used to it that's fine just get in as much as you can while staying within your calories and there are a few reasons why you want to eat plenty of protein.
For one it's the most filling macronutrient so its gonna help you feel full on these lower calories. For two it has the highest thermic effect of food by far which basically means how many calories your body burns naturally just processing the food. And for three it's what helps build and maintain muscle mass and the more muscle you have the faster your metabolism will be and the more calories you'll burn naturally. Now I don necessarily want you to concern yourself with how much you should eat with regards to fat and carbs not only because research has been pretty clear that as long as calories and protein are equated whether you prefer more carbs or fats as irrelevant so I want to help you be a little bit more flexible and enjoy your diet more. Plus as you just get started here I want to keep things as simple as possible for you and not overwhelm you.
Ok, keep reading because there are more things we need to discuss to make sure you're set up for success and that starts with exercise. Personally, I suggest you start going for walks here just a half-hour to an hour daily walks can make a big difference especially if you're starting from nothing. Really we just want to get you moving here and one of the benefits of walking too is that your body preferentially uses fat for fuel during that exercise. But not only that is this is easy to recover from when you're on these low calories you're not gonna have a lot of energy, but recovery is gonna also below, so I honestly don't recommend a lot of intense exercises and keep things lighter.
Do not get trapped in the "no pain, no gain" mentality. That has little chance of working well for you as its unnecessary at best and unsafe at worst especially when you're starting from doing nothing you don't want to just jump into the most extreme thing you can find. Now that being said I do recommend doing some strength training here as well really only two to three times a week is plenty as this will not only help you build or at least maintain your muscle mass which again that helps with metabolism, but you also get the benefit of something called EPOC which stands for excess post-exercise oxygen consumption which basically means that your body continues to burn more calories as it recovers from that training stimulus and this can even last for up to about 48 hours. But you do have to keep in mind here that there's a difference between weight loss and fat loss which if you're building muscle early on which is difficult to do on such low calories, but if you're coming from a completely brand-new starting point you possibly can, muscle does have weight so you could be seeing a good amount of fat loss just not as much weight loss. So pay attention to other things like measurements and how your clothes are fitting and pictures.
All right, you may have noticed that I haven't really said much about belly fat. The reason for this is that's because what most people want but unfortunately we cannot spot-reduce fat. You lose fat by being in a calorie deficit and it's gonna come off wherever the body decides and oftentimes belly fat is kind of last to go. So you may lose a lot from other areas and before you start losing a lot of belly fat and that's okay. You just have to have patience and understand that you're still burning fat and eventually you'll get there.
Even more importantly, more important than anything honestly, is to make sure you don't fall into the yo-yo dieting behavior. This is what absolutely kills people and it keeps their metabolism running really slow and creates a lifetime of frustration. And when you finish your diet whether that's because you've reached your goal or you just don't feel like dieting anymore make sure you slowly increase your calories with a reverse diet which will allow your metabolism to speed back up without storing a bunch of extra body fat.
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