Losing weight is generally not that hard. If you’re disciplined, you will burn fat. But, how do you keep it off? That’s where the problems come in.

We often hear the term ‘all diets fail’, or ‘diets don’t work’. Diets do work, it’s our approach that is the problem, often learning on quick fix solutions and trying to lose the weight as soon as possible. Other issues are; 

• We don’t intend on maintaining what we are doing once the diet is ‘over’
• We simply can’t’ maintain what we are doing once it’s over
• We lost more weight than we needed to, and now the body is concerned about your safety (a competition prep, for example), or
• We didn’t work on the underlying issues whilst doing the diet, so the behaviour comes back as soon as the diet is done. 

So the problem is not in the diet, as diets do work. The problem is perpetual dieting, a lack of personal growth and leaning on quick-fix solutions that add more stress to the body overall. 

Now that you know why they ‘don’t work’, let’s cover what is essential for all fat-loss processes to be successful. 

We will start with how to lose weight if you’re just aiming for general weight loss – that is, you just want to be smaller, and are not concerned with muscularity in the end. 

If you are concerned with looking lean and muscular, as in, you want to build a body that looks strong and fit, then all these principles apply, but there are an additional two tips I will cover at the end of this article. For a video version, follow the link below;

So, what do we need to focus on if we wish to burn fat (and keep it off?) 

• A healthy metabolism

This is the number one thing – your metabolism needs to be healthy. Without a healthy metabolism, fat loss is impossible and if it is, a metabolism can turn on your body goals and cause you to put all the weight back on if it is not taken care of! 

There are two ways you can ‘damage’ a metabolism; 

• Excessive dieting, and
• Excessive stress

If you have dieted your whole life, then it is likely that your body believes itself to be in a famine, that is – undernourished and starving for food. This can also happen if your diet is high in junk food, as you aren’t getting your essential proteins and fats (not I didn’t say essential carbs, as I hate to break it to you, they aren’t essential.  

If you have excessive stress, this disrupts your hormones, which include hunger and satiety hormones, and can imapct your gut. When in stress, the blood is focussed on your arms and legs so you can run, and your digestion takes a back seat. 

Excessive stress also means excessive cortisol, and this hormone blocks fat loss when it is chronically high. It also makes adherence difficult, as it upregartultes your desire to eat carbs, and disrupts your sleep. 

Additionally, trauma can impact how you metabolise food, and in particular, carbohydrates. 

So, you want to have healthy stress levels and resilience in order to have a healthy metabolism. And you want to stop dieting and eat at maintenance calories for a while if you’re someone who is chronically dieting. This signals to your body that it is safe, so when you go on a deficit, which is the next point I am going to highlight, the body does not freak out. 

• Calorie deficit

Secondly, you must be in a calorie deficit. This means you must eat less food than you burn off per day. A 400-500 calorie per day deficit is enough to trigger fat loss, but this number can’t be dropping below what your body perceives to be essential to your survival. 

Note that the lengths you can push a body into fat loss depends on your genetics, but also how much your body knows about the process. A body that diets for the first time will not have a conditioned response to the activity, so it is likely you will be able to push it further. ONce it works it out though, you’re toast, and it will become harder each time if you don’t take a structured and measured approach. 

You must also know your maintenance calories if you are to have any idea what your deficit calories are. So this means you need to eat the same amount of food per day as you burn off for a while, pushing that number up until you reach a point where you’re relatively full, feeling good and energised, and not gaining or losing weight. 

Once you find this number, you can subtract 4-500 calories/day off your maintenance calories via activity, less food or a combination of both, and the body will make up that difference with body fat. 

1. Track your food

If you don’t track, you won’t lose weight and keep it off because you have no data to fall back on. 

There may be an exception to this rule, being that if you’re overweight, say 120kg and you simply change to a whole food diet, it’s highly likely you’ll lose weight without tracking, but for most women I meet this is not their struggle. They’re generally slightly overweight, just enough that it is uncomfortable, and in this case, calories need to be tracked. 

You can use an app like MyFitnessPal, ensuring you’re eating the same amount of food each day which is a deficit, so the 4-500 calories per day lower than your maintenance calories. 

You also learn a lot about food! Like how 1 tbsp peanut butter can be up to 200-clalories, and how you may be easily eating 1500 calories per day of snacks and cappuccinos, without even realising it.  

2. Eat whole foods

When you eat whole foods you ensure the body gets all of its essential proteins and fats for the energy day person, and also carbohydrates for an active person. 

You also ensure your hunger hormones remain healthy, as when you eat processed foods they are designed to override these signals. The more fat cells you have from eating junk food, the more out of control the situation with food cravings becomes. 

We also have gut bacteria like Candida for example, that often overgrows in women who have high stress levels and eat too much sugar, and as these critters feed on sugar, they send signals up your nerve to the brain to make you eat more sugar. These things generally don’t occur in a whole food diet. 

Whole foods also ensure you are more satualred in a deficit, and have less cravings. 

3. You want to have a consistent routine which is repeated week after week. 

You want to do the same thing over and over in a fat loss routine, where you check in once per week and so long as it’s working, you just repeat. There is no way to ‘speed it up’ and if you don’t keep it consistent it is confusing to the body and it will likely backfire on you. 

So get in a good rhythm and repeat, over and over, until you have a two weeks plateau in measurements and weight, then you want to change something (generally, increase the deficit as the metabolism has adapted). 

So those are the essentials for any fat loss goal. If you want to take it further, and see changes in musculature or finish your fat loss with a ‘toned’ look, you must also; 

4. Lift weights 

Lifting weights ensures you gain muscle in maintenance phases, and maintain muscle in fat loss phases. Cardio is catabolic, so too much cardio will actually have the opposite effect. 

If you do fat loss without weight training, you will be smaller but soft. If you don’t care about muscle, this is totally fine! For many of you thought, you want to look toned and if this is the case, you must lift weights. 

5. Track macros (and protein is really important) 

You must also track macros, rather than just calories. This means you eat a consistent amount of carbohydrates, fat and protein on a daily basis, with protein being the key nutrient that must remain consistent. 

Protein is the body’s building block, and this should come mostly from animal protein as it is the most anabolic (meaning, it has the highest amount of Leucine, an amino acid that is essential for building skeletal muscle). 

So within your calorie targets you want to hit protein, fat and carbohydrate targets. This is exactly how bodies are rebuilt, as different macronutrients have different effects on the body’s health and aesthetic. 

So! That’s a summary of what you need if you want to lose weight and keep it off! If you’re trying to lose weight and aren’t doing any of those things, I suggest you start to take the process more seriously and either enlist some professional help, or if you’re knowledgeable in this area create a long term plan!

Always remember that your body is smarter than you and being lean is not its number one priority.

Just a couple more things to keep in mind; 

• You want to be patient. Some weeks you will drop, others you may go up. 
• You want to track measurements as well as weight
• For body recomposition, your focus is on LOOKING different. Not lowering the number on the scales unless you have excess body fat. 
• 400gms per week is a really healthy amount of weight loss, where it’s not a big enough deficit that it triggers a binge, and just enough weight loss that you are seeing results from week to week. 
• You want to hire a professional if you’re not educated in this area

So that’s all on how to lose fat and keep it off. If you want to see countless women who have achieved these results, check out my transformations page!

Jen X