A quick dive on weight loss
Losing weight is (usually) a straightforward process, but it’s far from easy. Here are 3 quick tips to help you lose weight.
- You cannot out train your diet
It’s impossible to out-exercise your nutritional habits. The chart below shows that physical activity, on average, accounts for only about 20% of the calories you burn on a daily basis.
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Going an extra 10 minutes on the stair-master without changing your eating habits is like trying to drain Lake Erie with a fish tank siphon.
2. Strength training isn’t about getting jacked
If your goal is to lose weight and, for some odd reason, you’re forced to choose between cardio work or strength work, you’ll want to choose strength training.
Wait, what?
It seems counter-intuitive, but hear me out.
Strength training builds muscle. Muscle is highly metabolically active, meaning it burns calories all-day everyday. Even when you’re resting.
If we look at the pie chart from section 1, you’ll see that something called “Basal Metabolic Rate” makes up 70% of our total daily energy expenditure. Basal metabolic rate = BMR = how many calories you burn while resting.
Adding muscle increases how many calories you burn at rest. How many calories you burn at rest has the biggest impact on how many calories you burn period.
Therefore, adding muscle can have a massive impact on the total amount of calories you burn throughout the day.
Sure, that intense cardio workout might burn more calories during a single session than a strength training session. However, that pails in comparison to the long-term calorie-burn benefits of getting stronger.
(FYI, this isn’t an either/or situation. You can and should do both.)
3. You need to be aware of what you’re eating
There’s no magical diet.
Intermittent fasting, low-carb, vegan, paleo, or whatever else you’ve heard of all work through one simple principle: you eat less calories than you burn throughout the day.
To ensure you’re eating less than you burn, you need to monitor your intake.
What gets measured gets managed.
There are a bunch of different ways to do this, but the two most common are using a calorie counter app and using hand portion sizes.
Exact calorie counting is a lot of work and unnecessary for most people. Simply sizing up your portions with your hand and journaling your food each day can make a massive difference.
More from me…
- Check out the most recent podcast episode where I give you a 4-step process to start actually gaining weight. Just click here!
- If you think this newsletter doesn’t suck (or maybe you even enjoy reading it), I would really appreciate you sharing it with some other parents that might benefit from reading it. You can just send them to gtperformance.co/free and they can subscribe there!
Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about long-term athlete development!
Best,
Zach
Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS