How to lose weight fast?

Let’s face it, you want results, and you want them yesterday. Maybe you have a special event coming up, or you need to lose weight quickly for health reasons. Whatever your reasons for losing weight fast, you will start feeling overwhelmed on how to start if you spend more than 5 minutes on the Internet. All the information and misinformation can be overwhelming!

We are going to break it down for you with no fluff or fiction. Just the science explained in simple terms and some proven solutions. We are here to help you and want to empower you to understand how this works.

The first thing you must understand is how metabolism works. In a nutshell, the scientific name for our metabolism is our TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Our TDEE makes up various bodily functions that burn calories to operate.

Things like our heartbeat and other involuntary muscles/ organs, digestion, skeletal muscles, daily movements, exercise, etc., all take calories to function. That number is represented by our TDEE, as seen in Figure 1.

Your TDEE determines your ability to lose weight quickly or slowly. Someone with a slower metabolism will not lose weight as soon as someone with a fast metabolism. Thankfully the ability to slow down or speed up your metabolism is within your power! What we eat, our lifestyle, and even how we handle stress are all determinants of how fast or slow our metabolism will be. For this reason, we recommend coming into the clinic to discuss a complete lifestyle change rather than doing one thing to lose weight.

Calories

Once we understand how vital our TDEE is to weight loss, we can better understand how to lose and gain weight. The most crucial factor in weight loss will always be calorie balance. Too often, people focus on fad diets or supplements only to lose fat. Yet they ignore their overall calorie intake. Figure 2 illustrates the order of importance when it comes to what you need to pay attention to in weight loss, with calorie balance being the number one most important factor.

Your diet will be ineffective if you are not paying attention to your total calorie intake. You can gain weight by eating clean. You can gain weight by eating keto. You can gain weight eating plant-based. You can gain weight by eating Mediterranean. You can gain weight on any diet if you are not paying attention to the overall calories.

Please note that all the nutrition plans at MD Diet are calorie controlled, even if we don’t have you count calories. Our plans will still have you track your portion sizes.

Macronutrients

The second most important factor in weight loss is our balance of macronutrients. Macronutrients are carbohydrates, proteins, and dietary fats. We need harmony between all three to survive since each one plays a vital role in our bodies. Even in highly controlled diets like HCG and Keto, we still need a specific amount of each.

Do you know what macronutrients are? In summary, these are the nutrients we need to eat in high quantities to survive. Each day we need to consume a varying number of carbohydrates, protein, and dietary fat to fuel our bodies.

The typical American eats more carbohydrates, fats, and too little protein than our body requires. The low protein intake leads us to lose muscle mass, yielding a lower metabolism (TDEE) over time and the excess carbs and fat calories store up as extra body fat. Not only that, but these macronutrients create a domino effect of chemical reactions in the body. The wrong balance of these nutrients will also lead to a slower metabolism or insulin-related issues.

You can eat a diet with the appropriate number of calories and have it all come from junk food like Twinkies. However, you will likely not feel full, and your health will suffer. You can still lose extra body fat short-term on crash diets like that, but it is unsustainable. We recommend never doing any extreme dieting without the supervision of a medical provider.

Many tend not to think of “healthy eating” in terms of calorie balance and macronutrients. Instead, they only think of healthy eating with popular marketing terms like organic, GMO-free, chemical-free, or other buzzwords.

Here is the thing you need to remember. For fat loss, you can eat as many “healthy” shakes and diet foods as you want, but if your calories and macronutrients are still improper for your goals, you will not be successful. See Figure 3 for an example. I once did this experiment. In my search engine, I typed in “Healthy salad recipe.” You would think this search would yield a magical recipe that is low in calories and balanced with its macronutrients. However, the number one recipe that showed up was this high-calorie salad recipe.

Neither the roast beef sandwich nor the white bean salad are “good for you” or “bad for you.” Instead, they will deliver various calories and nutrients to your body. So, depending on your TDEE, goals, and other physical needs, either could be the healthier choice.

Micronutrients

The third most critical rule to fat loss on our pyramid is the micronutrients you consume. These are things like vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals (from plant-based foods), and zoochemicals (from animal-based foods.)

Getting caught up in thinking about “healthy” food being richer in vitamins and minerals is easy, but these foods are not always the best diet food. Things like beans, peas, quinoa, steak, salmon, and fruit are all full of micronutrients that are very good for you. However, they are also full of extra calories and might be higher in fat or carbs than your TDEE and goals require.

It goes the other way too. Just because something is labeled a diet food does not mean it will supply you with adequate nutrients to sustain your health. Popular weight loss programs that require you to eat their packaged meals exclusively are unsustainable because these processed diet foods will lack the nutrients needed to keep you healthy.

For this reason, we recommend getting most of your calories from whole foods. These are foods that are minimally processed and are closer to their source. For example, an apple is generally better than apple sauce, apple sauce is better than apple juice, and apple juice is better than an artificially flavored apple drink. There are exceptions to this rule; keep reading to find out!

Meal Timing

Meal timing is a valuable piece of the equation that has recently come under fire due to trends like intermittent fasting. We always teach in the clinic that fasting is a tool that some people can use for various reasons, but it has not been studied enough to determine whether it’s practical. What has been researched though, is the importance of meal timing.

A recent study had one group of participants eat their calories spread out throughout the day vs. another group that ate their calories mostly with dinner. Both groups ate close to the same calories, macronutrients, and micronutrients. After three months, the group who spread their calories out throughout the day lost an average of 18 pounds. The group that did not have optimal meal timing and ate all of their calories late at night only lost 9 pounds.

We always recommend eating five times daily, three meals and two small snacks spread about 2-3 hours apart to keep your metabolism running. Even the HCG diet recommends spreading out the limited calories over the day.

If you want to get even more specific with your meal timing and macronutrients one thing you can do is to spread your protein consumption evenly throughout the day so your body always has protein available when it needs it. Another thing to do would be to eat your carbohydrates in bulk around your workout time so that you have the energy to exercise. If you do not work out, you should have most of your carb calories earlier in the day so your body can use those calories to fuel your daily activity. Finally, your fat calories should be spaced out and consumed around when you eat your main meals. Make sure to avoid consuming fats around your workout time.

Supplements

Remember earlier when I said there was an exception to the rule of micronutrient-dense foods? Sometimes it is tough to hit our macronutrient and calorie goal if we eat a lot of nutrient-dense foods. For example, steak has a lot more micronutrients in it than chicken. However, steak is also going to be a lot higher in fat! If we are on a weight-loss diet, that may mean we end up eating the chicken instead of the steak and lose out on important micronutrients. This is where supplements can come in handy and make up the difference. 

You might have heard some people say that taking vitamins is just expensive urine. There might be some truth in that for some people. However, the majority of people are not eating enough nutrient-dense foods, especially if they are dieting. Not to mention how most of our foods today are not grown in mineral-rich soil, which means that our plant-based foods will not have the same amount of vitamins and minerals they historically yielded.

Most agriculture is not focused on the animals’ health and quality of life, leading to poorer consumable meat quality. So unless you get all your food from hunting or the farmer’s market, you need a quality supplement regimen.

We always recommend starting with a multivitamin. We have some fantastic vitamins in the clinic that are screened and approved for quality by our medical provider. You can also talk to our provider, nutritionist, and medical assistants for their professional opinion on what other supplements might help you with your goals.

Protein supplements are one of the most popular supplements out there. While we want you to get most of your nutrients from whole foods, we understand that it takes a lot of work to get all of your protein with certain lifestyles and preferences. This is why our clinic is full of high-protein options to help make it easier for you to stick with a high-protein diet.

Supplements are listed last in order of importance because while they have a place in a health plan you should refrain from taking supplements to make up for an inadequate diet. Instead, your supplements should fill the gaps and build upon an already healthy diet.

To sum it up

1. How fast you lose body fat depends on your TDEE (Metabolism).
2. Calories are the most important factor in losing, maintaining, or gaining weight.
3. The second most important variable is your macronutrient balance. Macronutrients are carbohydrates, protein, and dietary fat.
4. It is essential to ensure you are eating a diet rich in vitamins and minerals from eating whole foods that have been minimally processed.
5. You should eat several times a day. Most people must eat five times daily, ideally spaced 2-3 hours apart.
6. Supplements are a helpful tool to fill in the gaps in nutrition. However, supplements should not be the main focus if you ignore the above-mentioned points.

We started out this article by asking the question, “how can I lose weight fast?” Well, the answer is that the fastest way to lose weight is to use all of the above principles in your weight loss plan to ensure your metabolism becomes a lean, mean, fat-burning machine.

You don’t need to do this all on your own. Come into the clinic today and we will help design a custom weight loss plan using these principles so that you can lose weight as quickly as possible. Call 801-758-2130 to get started.