3 Habits That Boost Your Fat Loss Success
Fat loss can be an incredibly frustrating process. Do you start with exercise or nutrition or both? What kind of exercise and how much? What types of foods and how much? Are there any hacks I can use? The questions pile up and toss you around like a whirlwind.
The truth is that it is not a simple process. People have different challenges when it comes to decreasing body fat. Some things that work for you may not work for someone else. The process requires data collection, learning, effort, and a great amount of patience. If dropping body fat is important to you, then you need to treat it like a priority.
While there are numerous tips, tricks, and habits I can recommend for fat loss, there are just three that you need to do consistently to significantly increase your chances of success. These are not easy, but they are effective.
Track Your Calories
Most people underestimate how many calories they are eating. The most common error I see is someone unknowingly selecting a food that is super dense in calories, often driven by fat. Another common error is not measuring the correct serving size. For example, they think they are drinking one glass of wine, when in fact they are drinking two or even three servings in one glass!
In order to really understand how many calories your body is consuming, you need to track. Every meal, every drink, every snack gets recorded. If it goes into your digestive system, you record it. Only then will you start to get an estimate as to how many calories you are eating on a daily basis.
Tracking calories takes a lot of work, but there are tools that make it significantly easier. Apps like MyFitnessPal and Cronometer allow you to track foods by selecting pre-populated foods from the database and scanning barcodes.
Once you find the app that works best for you, follow the steps below.
Find Your Baseline: Log everything you eat and drink normally for one week without trying to restrict yourself. At the end of the week, determine your daily average.
Create a Small Deficit: Set a new daily target that is 200 to 300 calories less than your baseline average. This creates a sustainable deficit without leaving you starving.
Monitor the Trend: Track your weight first thing in the morning, but look only at your weekly average to see if your weight is trending down over a few weeks.
Adjust for Plateaus: When your weight loss stalls for more than two weeks, simply decrease your daily intake by another 200 to 300 calories to push for progress again.
Bonus: Divide your calories into sub-targets of macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
Track Your Steps
While there are many ways to measure physical activity, tracking steps is one of the simplest ways to target and measure your daily movement. It can be done every day, it’s easy to do, and it requires very little recovery time. Almost everyone can do it, no matter the circumstances!
Similar to calorie intake, many people get the quantity of their movement wrong. They may think they are getting thousands of steps in one day, but in fact it’s only 2,000. This overestimation may be driven by daily lifestyle changes, such as working from home, grocery delivery, and shopping online.
Tracking steps is very simple. You need a smartwatch or fitness tracker, such as a Garmin or Fitbit, that you can easily wear throughout the day. Other options include a pedometer and smartphone, but you are less likely to include all your daily steps with those.
Once you find the tracker that works best for you, follow the steps below.
Find Your Baseline: Wear your tracker for a week to find your current daily average.
Create a Small Increase: Set a new daily goal of 500 to 1,000 more steps than your baseline average.
Progress Gradually: Try to increase your daily step goal every 2 to 4 weeks.
Maintain: Once you have reached a number of steps that feels good for your body, then stay at that goal. Listen to your body; do not increase your goal if you begin to feel joint pain.
Bonus: Add resistance training to your routine.
Track Your Sleep
If tracking your calories and steps are the pillars, then tracking your sleep is the foundation. Yes, you can successfully lose fat by decreasing calories and increasing steps with poor sleep. However, a poor foundation means the house is not stable; it can collapse at any moment.
Consistently getting fewer than seven hours of sleep can contribute to sleep deprivation. I’m sure you can operate just fine the next day, but there are a lot of downsides that happen in the body.
In relation to calories, your body will feel low energy and increased appetite. This may make you more likely not only to overeat, but also to choose calorie-dense foods like pizza or French fries.
In relation to steps, you will feel tired, sluggish, and slow. Taking steps will become a more difficult task. You are more likely to just sit still and eat. Poor sleep really does make it harder for you to manage your calories and steps.
Measuring sleep is easy to do, but it requires the right technology. In recent years, sleep tracking devices, such as the Whoop and Oura Ring, have provided people with very useful information about the quantity and quality of their sleep. Other sleep trackers include smart watches and mattress pads. These are not as effective as the Whoop and Oura Ring.
Once you find the tracker that works best for you, follow the steps below.
Find Your Baseline: Wear your tracker for a week to find your current daily average.
Create a Small Increase: Set a new goal of getting 30–60 minutes more sleep than your baseline average.
Progress Gradually: Try to increase your daily sleep goal every 4 weeks. It takes time to make this adjustment. It’s best practice to set a consistent bedtime and wake-up time and stick to it.
Maintain: Once you have reached 7 to 8 hours of sleep, it’s okay to maintain (i.e., stop increasing).
Bonus: Get to 9 hours of quality sleep.
Conclusion
Performing just one of these is enough to help you get some fat loss results. Combining two or three will skyrocket your chances of success. Approach it with effort and consistency and you will reach your goals.
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