How Fast Can You Lose Fat – Part 2

by Yuri in Weight Loss

Yesterday, we talked about how your body type and fat cells can determine how fast you can lost fat.

Today, we’re going to look at exercise and diet help you lose body fat.

Body types and fat cells are pretty genetic issues that are out of your control. However, diet and exercise are 100% your responsibility!

How Exercise Helps You Burn Fat

It should be well understood that fat loss boils down to creating a negative energy balance in which you are burning more calories (ie. via exercise) than you are consuming (through foods).

If you can create an on-going negative energy balance than you should be able to lose weight for as long as you want.

But the problem is that a lot of people tend to use only side of the equation – either exercise or diet. 

Research shows that neither one on its own is as effective as the both combined.

Therefore, you need to exercise (and eat well) to lose fat for good.

Both cardiovascular exercise and strength training workouts are necessary for burning fat. 

Cardio workouts will have more of a short term effect since the calories they burn are short lived. For instance, you might go for a run and burn 1000 calories, but that’s about it. There’s no lingering calorie-burning effect over the next few days.

Conversely, strength training has a long-lasting effect on your body’s ability to burn fat. 

This occurs because as you stress your muscles, you promote the development of more lean mass. Since lean mass positively correlates with a higher basal metabolic rate, strength training has a long-term calorie-burning effect by increasing your metabolism!

That’s why exercise is an absolute must!

The Role of Diet

I’m not going to talk about quality of diet in this post. Rather, I’m going to discuss the “quantitative” side of your diet.

Since calories matter in creating a negative energy balance, your goal is to ensure that you are consuming fewer calories than you are burning through exercise.

In order to do so, you need to do 2 things:

1. determine your BMR (basal metabolic rate)
2. determine your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)

To calculate your BMR, you’re going to need to know your body fat percentage, which you can have done at most gyms or by a medical or fitness professional.

I’m going to assume that you know yours.

So the equation you want to use now is this…

BMR = 370 + (21.6 x lean body mass (kg))

Example:

If you weigh 180 lbs and have body fat percentage of 25%, then that means that 45 lbs of your body is fat mass. That means that 135 lbs (or 61.4kg) are lean fat-free mass.

So your BMR would be…

BMR = 370 + (21.6 x 61.4 kg) = 1,695 calories

This represents the basic number of calories your body needs to survive at rest every day.

But you’re obviously more active than that, right?

So we need to move onto step 2…

TDEE = BMR x activity multiplier

There are 5 levels of activity multipliers based on your activity level. They are:

Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Mod. active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk)
Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extr. Active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job or
2 X day training, etc..)

For our example, we’re going to use the activity multiplier of 1.55. That’s usually where most people are at with their workouts.

So based on that we get…

TDEE = BMR x 1.55

TDEE = 1,695 x 1.55 = 2,627 calories

This is the golden number!

In this example, you would have to eat fewer than 2,627 to lose fat. It’s pretty much as straight-forward as that.

From a safe weight loss perspective, you want to aim to decrease your caloric intake by no more than 15-20% from that level.

So if you reduced your daily calories by 15% that would mean that you were consuming 394 fewer calories per day.

Since 1 pound of fat equals 3,500 calories, it would take 16 days to lose 1 pound of fat – at this rate.

Make sense?

So now that you’ve got the tools, go ahead and plug these numbers in for your own situation so you can determine how many calories you should be eating each day.

How fast you can lose fat will boil down to the caloric deficit you’re creating and how you long you are able to stay focused on your goal.

As we’ve seen, many variables come into play but your ability to exercise more and eat less is the easiest and most effective way to lose body fat for good!

Tags: basal metabolic rate, bmr, body fat loss, calories, diet, exercise, fat burning, how fast can you lose fat, lean body mass, muscle, negative energy balance, strength training, tdee, Weight Loss