How to Lose Weight the Easy Way

How to lose weight the easy way!

As a personal trainer I am constantly asked what is the ‘best’ or ‘quickest’ way to lose weight. Whenever I am presented with this question I always ask them what they are currently doing to lose weight and am always met with the same response.  The typical response is that they have recently joined a gym and spend about an hour there each time. The usually do about 10-15 minutes on the treadmill, 10-15 minutes on the X-Trainer, another 10 minutes on the rower, followed by a final 10 minutes on the stationary bike.

Fair play to them! They’ve made a good start by joining the gym and I have no doubt that in doing so they have experienced a bit of weight loss already. However, there are other more effective and much quicker ways to lose weight.

First things first, there is only one way to lose weight and it is a very simple concept. Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight. Likewise, if you consume more calories than you use you will put weight on.  (Check out my article on ‘The concept of energy balance’ for more info)

Okay, let’s say for arguments sake that in doing the workout mentioned you burn between 400 and 600 calories, depending on how intense you are train. That’s great, and if you did that every single day you would burn around a 1lb a week (3500 calories is equal to about 1lb of fat).  However, although initially you would lose a pound or so a week, eventually the weight loss will slow down and you will have to burn even more calories in order carry on losing weight. This means that you will now have to train for two hours every day in order to lose 1lb a week. That sounds like an awful lot of training for a measly 1lb a week, right?

So what do you need to do? Well the first thing you need to do is start interval training. Studies have shown that after intense interval training your metabolism stays raised for up to 48 hours after your workout has finished. This means that you’re burning additional calories throughout the rest of the day. This doesn’t happen with regular ‘traditional’ cardiovascular exercise that the majority of gym users perform.

The second thing you need to do is weight training. When I say this to people, I am usually met with some scepticism. In general people assume that weight training makes you bigger and therefore won’t help you lose weight.  Women in particular shy away from weight training in fear of becoming too bulky and therefore appearing less feminine.  However, this isn’t the case!

Several studies have shown that unlike continuous cardiovascular work, weight training results in a significant increase in your metabolic rate after training. In addition to this, each pound of lean muscle that you build burns an extra 50 calories a day. Imagine that, if you build just 4lbs of lean muscle your body will burn an extra 200 calories every day whilst you rest.

To sum up, the most effective way to lose weight is to combine intense interval training with weight training. Not only will you burn more calories during your workout, there is also the added bonus of burning more calories throughout the day after your workout has finished.

Keep your eyes out for more articles, in which I will share more specific information on what type of weight training and interval training to do in order to lose weight.