Geschatte leestijd: 6 minutenWhat are the real do’s and don’ts of losing weight? We see many people making mistakes in their attempts to lose weight, often out of ignorance. Everyone has their own way of losing weight. Some people exercise hard, follow a strict diet, or use certain supplements.
In theory, losing weight is not that difficult. When you burn more calories (exercise, movement, metabolism) than you consume (carbohydrates, proteins, fats, alcohol), you lose weight. In practice, it’s often a bit trickier because many people don’t always have the right balance. Nowadays, people try everything: different diets, exercise, supplements, etc. But what are the best options among the many?
The Do’s
Adequate Healthy Nutrition
Almost everyone trying to lose weight also eats less. However, make sure your body still gets the nutrients it needs. When you eat less, it’s harder to get enough minerals and vitamins, for example. So, the trick is to get them more efficiently than you did before. After all, you still need to get enough vitamins and minerals from less food. You might also consider increasing your intake of vegetables since they are rich in vitamins, minerals, and essential fibers.
Try to eat balanced meals and often choose different vegetables. If you have a positive energy balance, you gain weight. This is the case when you consume more calories (eat) than you burn. So, you could choose to eat 500 calories less daily and try to do so by consuming fewer unhealthy snacks or snacks. Don’t eat less healthy products to preserve all the vitamins and minerals in your diet.
A Good Combination of Strength and Cardio Training
Most people who exercise to lose weight mainly do cardio exercises. Cardio burns a lot of calories at the moment, but strength training also stimulates metabolism for a period after training. After strength training, your muscles need to recover, and they need energy for that. This increases your metabolism in the period after your training. So, combining cardio and strength training is very efficient for weight loss.
Regular and Plenty of Exercise
It sounds very logical but is often underestimated. By “exercising a lot,” we don’t just mean intense workouts but also, for example, cycling to work more often. Opt for more active solutions. By moving a bit more, your energy expenditure increases, and your body can recover better from yesterday’s intense training. When you exert yourself a little, it quickly raises your blood pressure. This makes the blood flow faster through your body, allowing essential nutrients to reach your muscles better and faster for better recovery (also called active recovery).
Combine Strength with Cardio Training
Many people think that losing weight is only about cardio training. Long sessions on a treadmill, bike, or elliptical are the result. For many people, this is a good alternative because they can burn a lot of calories fairly quietly after a long time. However, this is not the ideal way to train for weight loss. Strength training is often forgotten but is very effective for weight loss because muscle tissue is more active than body fat, so you burn more calories at rest. Also, your body continues to burn extra calories for a long time after a strong strength training session, which ultimately adds up. In a short but intense cardio session, you burn more glucose than fats, but the number of calories burned from fats after that session is usually higher than when you only train at a low intensity.
Make Healthy Choices
It’s often easy to take the car instead of the bike, take the elevator instead of the stairs, or grab a quick snack instead of preparing a healthy meal. Sometimes this is not a problem, but make sure you usually choose the healthiest option. All these small steps can ultimately contribute to a negative energy balance, helping you lose weight.
Adequate Rest and Sleep
You need energy throughout the day, and when you sleep poorly and/or little, you feel less energetic and are more likely to skip a workout. You also recover well when you sleep. Sleep and rest are important for humans. This is the time for your body to recover. After a good night’s sleep, you can start the day better and feel better. Additionally, feeling tired does not help with making healthy choices.
The Don’ts
Cutting Out Fats
It may seem logical and efficient to eat less fat when you want to lose weight. However, fats are an important source of energy. Moreover, they ensure that the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K can be transported in your body. Instead of drastically cutting your fats, it’s wiser to ensure that you get the right amount of fats in proportion to the number of carbohydrates and proteins. For this, you can, for example, use the nutrition calculator on this site. It’s also important to mainly get the “good fats” such as omega-3 fatty acids and MCTs, as we have extensively written about here.
Stop Eating
Many people choose to eat less. If you’ve always eaten too much and gained weight as a result, this is initially a good choice. But try to reduce unhealthy choices in particular. The danger is that when you eat much less, you also get fewer vitamins and minerals, which certainly doesn’t contribute to better health. It’s also the case that your body needs quite a few calories at rest to perform its daily tasks (metabolism), so don’t immediately go too low and at least give your body the minimum number of calories it needs to perform these bodily functions.
Short-Term Diets for Long-Term Changes
When you’ve decided to tackle your body, it often can’t happen fast enough. There’s nothing wrong with a diet per se. A diet is nothing more than following certain rules when compiling your diet. So, there are diets that you can maintain for your whole life as long as they meet all your necessary energy and nutrient needs. However, a crash diet means drastically reducing food intake.
During these diets, your body adapts to the diet. Your metabolism changes because your body becomes more energy-efficient due to receiving less energy through your diet. When you then return to your old familiar eating pattern after your crash diet, you will quickly fall back into the same state or you may even end up worse because your body is no longer used to your normal diet. Due to the change in your metabolism, you burn fewer calories on average per day. Unless, for example, you want to fit into your wedding dress on your wedding day and then tear it off afterward, you’re better off with a diet that may offer slightly less rapid results but can be maintained in the long term.
Long-Term Cardio Training
Anything with “too” in front of it is usually not good. Too much and too long cardio sessions are not ideal for losing weight. Too long training sessions can slow down muscle recovery and muscle building, mainly due to the increase in stress hormones in the body. Also, usually, with shorter but more intensive cardio sessions, you burn more calories from fats than with longer sessions at a low training intensity. It’s true that you burn a higher percentage of fats at a lower intensity, but due to a low training intensity, you burn fewer calories in total. So, with higher intensity, you ultimately burn more calories from fats.
Fat Burners
People often tend to look for the shortest and easiest way. There are therefore many fat-burning products, such as fat burners, on the market nowadays. Only a few of them really help a little, and they are certainly not miracle cures. They often contain a lot of caffeine or green tea extract, natural sources that make your body more active, so you get more energy, which gives your metabolism a slight boost, causing you to burn a little more. They may help a little, but they are not enough to compensate for a poor diet and lack of nutrition.
Sauna Belts
You may have heard of a so-called sauna belt that can remove local fat. It sounds incredibly beautiful, but as you might guess, there’s nothing to it. A sauna belt can remove some moisture from a specific place for a short period due to the heat, but after a while, the same moisture is back in the same place. A sauna belt, such as Slim Belly, is a belt usually worn around the waist. This creates the impression that you can lose weight in a certain part of the body. This would mean that spot reduction, or localized fat burning, would be possible. However, this is not the case. The body determines where fat is stored and where it is burned. It’s often the case that people lose some weight with the use of this belt, but that’s due to some extra loss of moisture, but mainly because it’s often combined with a certain diet and extra exercise or movement. If you only use the belt, you won’t lose weight at all.
Abdominal Exercises for a Tight Stomach
Doing abdominal exercises to get a flat stomach or even washboard abs is a common mistake. You won’t lose weight locally in the abdominal region but only strengthen the muscles that are under a layer of fat. Good for your so-called “core strength” but not really effective for looking slimmer.
Conclusion
The best way to lose weight is a healthy lifestyle that you can maintain. In other words, a healthy balance of exercise (movement), nutrition, and rest. Diets can make you lose weight quickly, but you often also lose some extra moisture and muscle tissue. Additionally, there’s a high chance of reverting to your old eating habits because you can’t follow the diet for your whole life, unfortunately contributing to the unpleasant yo-yo effect. In short, consume more energy than you consume to lose some weight, and when you’re back at the right body weight, you want to make sure this ratio is balanced again. So, the best way to lose weight is to make a behavioral change towards a healthier lifestyle. This often takes a bit longer but is ultimately the best solution for losing weight for good.
In short, there’s no such thing as a perfect way to lose weight. It’s important to have your diet and exercise pattern in order. So, consider the above points. Like adequate sleep and enough vitamins and minerals. Don’t rush it and give it time.
Good luck!
