Lots of people don’t think of natural weight loss as being fast, but doing things the natural and healthy way is actually the quickest way to lose weight. You might be excited to find that learning how to lose weight fast isn’t all about working harder.
I believe in working hard, but I don’t believe that working hard is the answer to everything. I believe in working hard on the right things. Meaning that hard work will give you the best results, when a solid method is in place first.
You can work harder and longer and try all you want… and yes it will increase your results, but if what you’re working hard on isn’t the most important thing, then your results may suffer and you’ll be wasting valuable energy.
But if you support all of the most important pillars of rapid weight loss and your focus goes into the things that make the biggest difference, you’ll have the power to transform yourself as quickly as you want to. In this article you’ll learn these important things, and exactly how to lose weight fast, naturally.
Talking about how to lose weight fast isn’t something that I do often, simply because my main focus is helping others lose weight at a pace that will lead to definite success with low stress. However, with the healthy and natural methods that I teach, rapid weight loss is simply a natural symptom that comes as you make more healthy changes.
That’s the beauty of doing things the healthy way, is that when you’re doing it the right way, you have the ability to turn things up to any level and not go hungry or lose muscle.
Healthy Diet and Exercise Combined
The #1 most effective way to lose weight fast, is to both improve your diet, and to exercise more.
Lots of people consider either diet or exercise as a complete method for weight loss, and debate over which they should choose.
Most will agree that diet is the most important part, but a good weight loss plan, especially one that yields fast results, should include healthy food and regular exercise.
Studies have proven that although one or the other can be used as a stand-alone method to lose weight, both diet and exercise combined are more effective.
If you want to learn about how powerful this combination really is, supported with lots of research, check out my article, “Diet vs Exercise for Weight Loss, (vs Both)“.
But studies aside, the power of these two used together just makes natural sense. As members of our modern society filled with unhealthy food and sedentary lifestyles, we have the opportunity to both increase our physical activity and improve the quality of the food we are eating, both of which lead directly to weight loss and can be stacked on top of each other i.e. used in unison.
Using the combination of both doesn’t just increase your results a little bit, it makes a huge difference. This is because both healthy habits are working with one another, intensifying the effects of each, rather than having a bad diet that works against your workout efforts or vice versa.
In all of my years of trying to lose weight, I have personally experienced trying to succeed in each scenario, with exercise alone, with diet alone, and with both together.
Exercise without diet is slower, and doesn’t address the root cause of weight gain (diet content), which means that your body is always working against your efforts, and ready to gain the weight back.
(Healthy) Dieting without exercising goes slower, as your daily energy expenditure will be low… and you’ll be missing the opportunity to intensify your results and make your body healthier on a whole new level.
But if you transition to a healthy diet and start exercising consistently, you’ll be using more energy, and consuming less calories naturally while getting more nutrients, which will allow you to lose weight very fast without being hungry, and have plenty of energy to workout.
That being said… making changes can be difficult, so if doing both seems too hard to handle all at once, I always recommend starting with one, and then adding the other once you feel comfortable.
When I started my final, successful weight loss journey, I started with healthy diet first, and then quickly added exercise into the mix once I knew that I could stick with it. With both of these habits working towards my goals, I started losing weight very quickly even though my diet and workout routine was far from perfect.
As I added more and more healthy foods into my diet and stepped up my workouts, I continued to raise my rate of fat loss until I had lost 80 pounds.
Doing things gradually doesn’t mean sacrificing results or speed, it means taking a minimal amount of time to assure your long-term success.
If you truly want to lose weight fast, not just for a few days or weeks but to keep it up for good… I suggest ramping up to a high speed gradually, rather than trying to change overnight. Make the ramp as steep as you want but give yourself that little bit of time to get your footing as you make change to your habits, and you’ll master another piece of the puzzle that completes the rapid weight loss picture… and that is, consistency.
Be Consistent
Being consistent may have little to do with how fast your body actually burns fat, but it has everything to do with how quickly you reach your goals over time.
“Consistent” doesn’t mean being perfect, it just means that you are constantly making improvements and moving towards your goals… as compared to gaining/losing weight and starting/stopping all of the time.
Many people who you may have thought were losing weight at a super high rate, were really just being very consistent over time, which adds up to losing weight, “fast.” People who are consistent can see the same results as people who frequently work harder, but with less consistency.
Like the tortoise and the hare… the tortoise wins the race by never getting distracted. Just imagine if the hare had been consistent with his amazing speed!
Focus on eating the healthiest foods
When it comes to healthy food, there is a very wide spectrum from completely unhealthy, to kind of healthy, to super healthy.
Eating the healthiest foods will make a huge difference in the results that you see, and generally the healthiest foods are “whole foods”… foods that naturally grow in nature, and that are unprocessed, unrefined, and unmodified.
Whole foods, are foods like vegetables, fruit, brown rice, nuts, and non-ground meat. However, when eating meat, it’s best to choose very lean cuts, and ideally to choose white meats like chicken or even fish.
Whole foods are low in calories yet very filling and high in nutrients, which allows you to easily satisfy your hunger while keeping your calories consumption low. In addition, healthy foods digest slowly and do not spike your insulin like unhealthy foods do.
If you start eating more of these foods, you’ll replace the unhealthy foods in your diet, and you’ll greatly reduce your daily calorie consumption while feeling full and satisfied, meaning that you will burn fat without feeling hungry.
You can lose a HUGE amount of weight by simply eating MORE whole foods.
The frequently high insulin levels that junk foods cause, encourage the storage of fat and prevent the loss of it.
Conversely, healthy foods keep your insulin low, which allows your body to burn fat, and prevent you from storing it.
The absolute most healthy and best weight loss foods, are vegetables. Vegetables have every quality you can hope for in a weight loss food, in excess. They have tons of good nutrition and take up lots of room you’re your belly while being super low in calories at the same time. Also, insulin response to most vegetables is very minimal.
So if you want to lose weight fast, make sure you fill your diet with lots of healthy foods, and preferably as many super foods as you can.
Work your muscles
Resistance training is extremely powerful for burning fat.
Lifting weights or doing any other exercise that gives enough resistance to work your muscles, has been found in many studies to be as effective or more effective than cardio for weight loss.
You can get a good workout for your muscles by using body-weight exercises as well, but you’ll need to make sure that your workout is intense enough to really work your muscles.
With an intense resistance workout, research has shown that you can actually raise your resting metabolism for a period of up to 2 full days, which means burning fat not just during your workout, but also afterwards as you recover.
In addition to this after-burn effect, any muscle that you gain will naturally burn more calories at all times.
The best exercise routine has a balance of both resistance and cardio.
However, for exercise, I suggest making lifting weights a priority in your weight loss journey, because of how much fat you can burn with resistance training, and also how easy it is compared to cardio exercise.
Weight lifting isn’t just great for men, women can experience all of the powerful fat loss benefits without having to worry that they will get bulky.
Lifting weights for ladies will simply tone you, bring you faster results, keep you from getting “skinny fat”, and flat out make your body sexy.
Even for guys, it takes lots of time and food consumption to get bulky.
So whether you have weights at home or have access to a gym, use weights to your best advantage!
This content was originally written on TheShapeWithin.com
Make BIG changes
To lose weight fast, it will take big changes to assure that your current habits are significantly better than the old ones, and that your body is constantly changing at a rapid rate.
But making big changes doesn’t mean being perfect. It simply means making significant improvements with your healthy diet and exercise activity, and making great forward strides towards your goals, despite the occasional slip backwards.
If you want to transform yourself at a rapid pace, then make big changes in your life, take massive action towards your goals, and always be reaching for the next step.
Get a good honest picture of your current habits, and make a huge improvement in both your diet and your exercise life.
If you’re ready to start your weight loss journey right now, and would like an easy but effective plan to follow for both diet and exercise, join the 8-Week Weight Loss Challenge. It will help you lose weight and start living a healthier life, step by step.
Citations:
Clark, James E. “Diet, Exercise or Diet with Exercise: Comparing the Effectiveness of Treatment Options for Weight-Loss and Changes in Fitness for Adults (18–65 Years Old) Who Are Overfat, or Obese; Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders 14 (2015): 31. PMC. Web. 23 Feb. 2018.
Barbara Strasser and Wolfgang Schobersberger, “Evidence for Resistance Training as a Treatment Therapy in Obesity,” Journal of Obesity, vol. 2011, Article ID 482564, 9 pages, 2011. doi:10.1155/2011/482564
Intensity of Resistance Exercise Determines Adipokine and Resting Energy Expenditure Responses in Overweight Elderly Individuals
Ioannis G. Fatouros, Athanasios Chatzinikolaou, Symeon Tournis, Michalis G.Nikolaidis, Athanasios Z. Jamurtas, Ioannis I. Douroudos, Ioannis Papassotiriou,Petros M. Thomakos, Kyriakos Taxildaris, George Mastorakos, Asimina Mitrakou
Diabetes Care Dec 2009, 32 (12) 2161-2167; DOI: 10.2337/dc08-1994
