Weight loss hacks

In today’s fast-paced world, busy professionals often struggle to lose weight. By this, we mean dropping body fat whilst maintaining or even building lean muscle mass. The process can feel overwhelming and complicated, especially when dealing with deadlines, managing emergencies, and caring for your family.

Fortunately, making progress toward that goal isn’t as complicated as most people think. All you need is the right knowledge and sustainable tactics, both of which are the focus of today’s article.

Ready? Let’s talk about it.

Learn About NEAT and Calorie Deficits

NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis and represents the calories you burn through everyday tasks––walking, brushing your teeth, cleaning your home, etc.

Along with BMR (the calories your body burns to carry out its internal processes), TEF (the caloric expenditure to digest food), and EAT (the calories burned during exercise), these things make up your total daily energy expenditure.

At its core, weight loss occurs when you burn fewer calories than you expend (TDEE), also known as creating a calorie deficit. In other words, the combination of NEAT, EAT, BMR, and TEF must exceed the calories you ingest through foods and drinks every day.

Fortunately, achieving this is easier than you might think. It mostly comes down to calculating your calorie needs with a TDEE calculator, tracking your intake, and staying in a calorie deficit.

Get Better Sleep

In a study on ten overweight but otherwise healthy individuals, researchers noted that restricting sleep to just over five hours per night led to significant muscle loss.
When presented with the opportunity to sleep longer, these same subjects lost significantly more fat and less muscle while following the same diet.

Sleep deprivation can also increase ghrelin levels (a hunger hormone) and hinder impulse control, making people more likely to cheat on their diet and overindulge in tasty but calorie-rich foods.

So, the first thing you should do is aim for at least seven hours of quality sleep each night.

Try Meal Prepping

Meal prepping, the act of cooking a bunch of food in advance and splitting it up into multiple meals, can be a great way to ensure dietary consistency. Most notably, investing time, money, and effort into cooking would make you more likely to finish that food because you wouldn’t want it going to waste.

Plus, meal prepping means you have healthy food available, even when you don’t have the time or energy to prepare a meal. That means you are less likely to resort to fast food or microwave meals.

Commit to a Plan

Committing to an exercise plan, one outlined by a personal trainer or created for a small group, is another effective weight loss tactic.

Regular exercise is valuable for weight loss because it burns calories, making it easier to create the necessary calorie deficit. It also helps you hold onto more muscle and might even regulate hunger and satiety signals.

Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate!

Proper hydration might not seem all that important for weight loss, but it is. For one, hydration can promote satiety and reduce the risk of mindless snacking.
Second, water is essential for many bodily processes, including fat oxidation.
Third, adequate hydration supports athletic performance, leading to longer, more intense workouts that burn many calories.
Plus, hydration makes you feel better, leading to greater productivity and motivation to move around.
According to some guidelines, men should aim for up to 3.7 liters of water daily (125 fl. oz) and women––up to 2.7 liters of water (91 fl. oz).

Final Words

Weight loss is not complicated but requires attention to detail and perseverance. The most important thing to focus on is creating a calorie deficit and establishing healthy habits that contribute to a healthy body composition.