The one and only requirement to lose fat on a physiological level is a calorie deficit, meaning you need to be burning more calories than you’re eating in order to lose fat over time and the simplest way to think about this is via your bank account…

If you spend more money than you make, your account is going to dip into the red and you’re going to go into debt, however if you make more money than you spend, the cash in your account is going to accumulate!

The exact same thing happens in the body, if you expend more calories than you consume you’re going to lose fat, but if you consume more calories than you spend you’re going to gain fat.

If you’re someone who’s been maintaining your weight more or less, that just means you’re spending what you’re making or essentially breaking even.

In one way or another this is how every single diet works, it creates a calorie deficit in which you’re taking in fewer calories than you’re expending….there’s just no other way to achieve fat loss outside of drugs of course, however the drugs or steroids that result in fat loss are actually still using the same mechanism via increasing calories burned from chemical mechanisms. So, at the end of the day it’s still the same thing, a calorie deficit.

Now the degree of the deficit is going to be the number one factor as far as how fast you lose, so if you’re spending $500 more than you’re making each month you’re going to lose quicker than if you’re spending $100 more than you’re make each month. The bigger the deficit, the faster you’re going to drop weight.

However, there are trade-offs to be made here because the bigger the deficit, the more you’re going to ‘feel it’ in a sense. For example, you’re more likely to feel hungry more often if you’re over spending by $500 per month vs. $100 per month. You also most likely won’t have as much energy day to day when over-spending with the larger amount, which makes total sense because you have less energy (calories) coming in.

The absolute fastest way to lose fat is by not eating anything at all, you can’t go any lower than 0 calories, but we all know that that’s just not a maintainable strategy. For example, if you want to lose 40 lbs you’re not going to stop eating until you drop all 40 lbs because that would mean you’d be going without food for weeks if not a month plus depending on where you’re starting from weight and body composition-wise.

So, ya need to find a middle ground where you’re still in a calorie deficit, but supplying your body with the nutrients it needs. Also consuming 0 calories is a great way to lose fat, but it’s also an awesome way to lose muscle…but we’re going to dig into some of the strategic stuff after we address all the factors at play.

Like I mentioned a second ago, another factor that dictates how fast you lose is where you’re starting. So for example, if you’re 5’6 and 300 lbs or 5’6 and 150 lbs, the version of you at 300 lbs is going to lose A LOT faster than the version of you at 150 lbs because you’ve just got a lot more total weight to lose at 300 vs. 150.

When it comes to relative loses, losing 2 lbs per week for the version of you at 150 lbs is like losing 4 lbs per week for the version of you at 300 lbs because you’re double the size.

I see smaller women specifically run into this issue quite often because they don’t take relative losses into account meaning, if you’re a smaller person to begin with and/or you’re leaner when you start, you’re going to lose less total pounds because…

1.     You’ve got less total weight to lose

2.     It’s relative, meaning a 1 lb loss for you at 120 lbs as a percentage is a lot more than a 1 lb loss for you at 180 lbs. Yes it’s a 1 lb total loss in both scenarios, but 1 lb off of a 120 lb body is a larger total percentage than 1 lb total loss off of a 180 lb frame.

So be sure to take this relative losses concept into account because if for example you’re comparing weight loss with your husband…it’s not apples to apples if your husband is starting at 250 lbs and you’re starting at 150 lbs…he’s going to lose more total pounds quicker most likely because he’s got more total weight to lose.

Also I’ll mention, this isn’t a male/female thing, it’s a total bodyweight thing so if a woman is starting at 250 and a man is starting at 150 assuming all other things are equal, the woman at 250 is going to lose much quicker on average.

Now something to mention on the psychology of fat loss front is, it’s never fast enough for us.

The fat loss process is as fast as it is, but let’s put an arbitrary number on it to illustrate this point…let’s say the fastest we could lose weight was at 50 km/hour or 30 miles per hour for my American friends.

If right now you’re losing fat at 50 km/hour, you’re going to want to lose at 75 km/hour.

Now in an alternate universe if the baseline was 75/km hour, you’d want to lose at 100 km/hour, so the point I’m getting at here is that it never seems to be fast enough and you’re not alone in that feeling because everybody wants it to be quicker than it is!

The thing is that it has nothing to do with how fast it actually is in reality because no matter how quick it was, we’d want it to be faster…that’s just human psychology 101 right there.

An interesting thing to think about is, hypothetically if fat loss was even 1% faster than it happens to be, we might not be here. Humans may have gone extinct completely because starvation was a threat to our survival, so if we happened to burn calories quicker than it turns out that we do, our species might have starved to death and you might not be reading this article right now…interesting eh!?

But wrapping up that point, it is as fast as is and while it’s completely normal to wish it were faster because we’re human and we want what we want as quickly as possible…it’s sort of like wishing that gravity acted on the planet in a different way.

Gravity acts the way acts and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, so just surrender to the process and work with what you’ve got vs. getting hung up on wishing it were a different way because it just can’t be. We can control a lot of things but this isn’t one of them because like I mentioned before, even if you were to eat 0 calories, you can’t lose fat or weight any faster than that because you can’t eat -500 calories, that’s not possible.

Now if we were to compare speed of fat loss vs. muscle gain, it’s a no contest fat loss is WAYYY faster…I’m talking, not even close!

I’ve had plenty of clients lose 15-20+ lbs over the course of 12 weeks which is quite quick, but there’s no way in hell someone is gaining 15-20 lbs of muscle in 12 weeks without drugs.

If someone puts 15-20 lbs of muscle on in a YEAR, that’s absolutely incredible progress and I’d say 99 out of a 100 times they’re going to be absolute beginners that are training for the first time in their lives, hence the muscle gain process is much faster to begin with because they’re essentially starting from ground zero.

Even with drugs or steroids, adding 15-20 lbs of muscle in a year is pretty amazing and that’s with pharmacology, so quite literally injecting supra-physiological doses of anabolic steroids…that’s still great progress, so comparatively speaking fat loss is really fast when you look at it next to muscle gain. Not to mention building muscle is a lot more physical work because it’s not just the food that you need to dial in, you also need to put in all the time at the gym because you ain’t gaining shit if you don’t lift heavy things.

Movement and/or exercise can definitely speed up the fat loss process…

But if you workout and then simply eat the calories that you burned via your workout, any fat loss you would have achieved via exercise is a wash because you just replaced the energy. It’s sort of like spending $100 on your debit card and then going straight to an ATM right after and depositing $100 in cash…that’s a wash.

But, if you don’t eat more food as a result of the exercise you do it will speed up fat loss however, I don’t actually recommend relying on exercise alone too much for weight loss for two reasons…

One, it’s just not all that effective, diet changes are WAYYY more effective for fat loss than exercise will ever be.

Two, what happens if you get injured? If you’re relying solely on exercise for fat loss, if you get injured or you can’t workout for whatever reason you’re screwed because now all that calorie buffering exercise is gone and you don’t have the skills to adjust your nutrition accordingly vs. if you had used nutrition as your baseline to lose weight and then potentially supplemented that baseline with exercise.

We see this all the time in runners right, they’re running a bunch of kms each week and they’re lean and then the next time you see them some injury popped up, they stopped running and the weight just piled on…this is a prime example of relying too heavily on exercise for fat loss or weight maintenance.

It’s important to mention when I say I don’t like to rely on exercise too much when it comes to fat loss, I’m talking solely about fat loss, there are all sorts of additional benefits to exercise that aren’t weight loss specifically. Meaning I’d recommend that you workout for those benefits, but in a vacuum exercise is just not all that effective in the big picture on its own when it comes to losing weight.

Now I also don’t lump exercise in the same category as movement, they’re two very different things in my mind...

If you’ve been following me for any period of time I’m sure you’ve heard me talk or post about how important walking is and getting your 8-10k steps in per day. I separate steps from formal exercise because in my opinion walking is like the nutrition version of movement meaning, you have to eat, you don’t have the option of not doing so, so you’ve gotta walk, your physiology expects it!

Having said that if you want to workout on top of that great, do it, get after it, but workouts don’t replace walking, they’re supplemental to getting your daily steps in.

There are 4 categories when it comes to this movement/exercise idea…

Sedentary with a sedentary lifestyle = minimal steps and no workouts.

Sedentary with an active lifestyle = 8-10k steps daily and no workouts.

Active with a sedentary lifestyle = minimal steps and 3-4 workouts a week.

Active with an active lifestyle = 8-10k steps daily and 3-4 workouts week.

Ideally we want to be active with an active lifestyle, second would be sedentary with an active lifestyle, third would be active with a sedentary lifestyle and lastly sedentary with a sedentary lifestyle is absolutely not how ya wanna be living.

Also, one of the coolest things about walking itself is that it has a great appetite regulating effect so it does an awesome job of balancing blood sugar and therefore regulating appetite…I know it’s not the sexiest aspect of health but aside from nutrition, walking is the most underrated fat loss tool out there in my opinion.

When I was putting this podcast together I had a few clients mention they wanted to hear my thoughts on how age, genetics, stress, medications and depression impact rates of weight loss, so let’s delve into those as well…

Age? Is it harder to lose weight as we age and does the metabolism slow down? The research shows that the metabolism does slow down as we age but get this, it’s only 1-2 % per decade!!

If you were eating a 2000 calorie per day diet at 30 years old, if nothing else changed at all other than your calorie intake, you could maintain your 30 year old weight at 1940 calories at 60 years old. So that’s a 20 calorie quote on quote ‘slow down’ per decade, that equates to a 2 calorie reduction per year which is equivalent to about 3 blueberries.

Truly what happens as we age is not a metabolic slow down so much, it’s just a slow down. The older we get the less and less we move, but the thing is that a lot of folks don’t reduce their calorie intake to adjust for less movement, they just eat the same amount if not more but move less and that’s a recipe for fat gain.

How do genetics play in here? Some folks have faster metabolisms than others naturally, but this is actually a really small percentage of the population, the vast majority of us are dealing with the same basic metabolism as one another. What genetics seem to impact more so than the metabolism itself is behaviour that impacts how many calories you burn, so for example…

You’re at a party and you notice this one person is talking to some people in the kitchen, then 5 minutes later they’re in the living room, then 10 mins goes by and all of a sudden they’re chatting folks up in the back yard…they seem to be everywhere, they’re bouncing around, they’re working the room!

Then you take the person that sits down on the couch in the living room when they arrive at the party and 3 hours later they still haven’t moved, they’re sitting in the exact same spot…

Who’s burning more calories? The person bouncing around and chatting with everyone without a doubt, this general tendency seems to be somewhat genetic. You have the classic home-body and then you’ve got the token extrovert…now the difference in calories burned between these two individuals at one party isn’t going to be THAT different because it’s just one party, but when you compound all of your waking hours over the course of months, years and decades…that’s a huge difference in total calories burned between two individuals like this.

Now fortunately these behaviours or ‘types’ are malleable, you can change them. When I was young I was a busy body and I never stopped moving, then in my late teens/early twenties I was more of a home-body/sedentary type and now I’m a busy body again…so it sort of begs the question, is it even genetics or is it the type lifestyle we choose to lead?

I’ve also seen complete 180’s in clients I’ve worked with on this lifestyle movement front, I’ve had lots of folks go from living in a very sedentary way to being more of that busy body person, so again fortunately we can adapt!

If you’re interested in delving a little deeper on this topic specifically I’d recommend reading the article, ‘Fast vs. Slow Metabolism’ HERE.

Moving on to stress, can stress impact rates of weight loss? The short answer here is stress doesn’t impact weight loss at all, it impacts eating behaviour which seems to go one of two ways. When some folks are stressed all they seem to want to do is eat, and then on the other hand there are people that don’t even want to look at food when they feel stressed out, so it’s not stress itself that impacts weight gain or weight loss, it’s our response to stress around eating behaviour.

How about medications, can meds impact rate of weight loss? Fortunately we’ve got the same situation as the stress, medications don’t cause you to gain weight in themselves as they don’t contain calories, but they may impact your appetite and therefore eating behaviour, so again it’s not the medication itself but rather how you respond. Meds are also similar to stress in the sense that the response seems to be individual…

For example, one person might take an anti-depressant and lose weight, one person might just stay the same or maintain their weight and someone else might gain weight. This stuff is really individual specific and folks are different to begin with and so it’s really hard or essentially impossible to distinguish what is leading to the response…human psychology and coping strategies are very complex!

If everyone had the same response and gained weight after taking a certain medication, it would be clear that that medication caused weight gain, but that’s not the case and there is a big difference between causation and correlation.

Causation is one thing directly causing another, so a calorie deficit while we’re talking about it causes weight loss.

Correlation is different…someone might say well every time it rains people are using umbrellas so umbrellas must be causing it to rain, but of course we know that’s not true…this is an example of correlation.

Having said that some medications can impact fluctuations in water weight, but they do not in themselves slow down fat loss and you can only have so much water retention going on vs. you can hold hundreds of pounds of fat on the body.

Depression seems to fall into the sameish category as stress and medications because depression itself doesn’t contain calories, it’s a feeling or a mental state so it can’t cause weight gain…but it can heavily impact behaviour which I can attest to personally as I experienced a lot of depression in my teens and early twenties.

So again, some folks seem to eat more when they experience depression and others don’t want to eat at all and then there’s everything in between. It’s a result of how we respond vs. the depression itself causing fat loss or fat gain.

Personally, when I was feeling down in the dumps I gained weight, you may have seen my before and after photos on the website…I had gained over 50 lbs meaning I was overeating in a BIG way. Fortunately as I did more and more work on myself via having a therapist which I still see bi-weekly to this day, I lost the weight. Having said that there were a million and one factors at play here, but again folks seem to respond in different ways to depression itself and it’s highly complex because humans are complex.

Now that we’ve squared away all the factors that can play a role in how fast or slow we lose weight, I’m hoping I painted an encouraging picture here because fortunately you’ve got the power!!

There’s only one thing that can slow your rate of weight loss and that’s calories, that’s it. There is nothing else in the universe that can make someone gain fat, which simplifies the solution sooo much.

I’m not saying weight loss is easy because it’s not, but the solution is straight-forward…you need to modify the calories in/calories out equation in one way or another.

The most effective way to reduce calorie intake in my opinion is by focusing on single and minimal ingredient whole foods you cook yourself. They’re high in food volume yet lower in calories than junk foods, so they keep you feeling nice and full which makes life SO much easier when you’re feeling satisfied while eating fewer total calories.

Single and minimal ingredient whole foods are also more nutrient dense, meaning they’re healthier and they’re going to make you feel better across the board.

On the movement front get those 8-10k steps in daily and be sure to get your 7-9 hours of sleep on a nightly basis as well because the research is clear that lack of sleep typically results in fat gain.

Lack of sleep itself does not result in fat gain, it actually results in an increase in calorie intake by an average of 250 calories per day, which equates to an extra 1750 calories per week and 7000 calories per month…so get that sleep in!

Sometimes I hear folks say, I just wanna be there already, I want to be at my goal and trust me you don’t!

You don’t want to snap your fingers and be at your end goal because you need to develop the skills necessary for maintaining your weight loss throughout the actual process of losing weight.

70% of lotto winners file for bankruptcy within 2 years.

You can have all the money in the world but if you don’t know how to manage it, you’re fucked.

It’s sort of like saying I want to be a fortune 500 CEO tomorrow, you snap your fingers and there you are heading up a massive company and you’re hit with a borage of questions…

 ’Hey boss I need your approval on this potential merger as well as this acquisition, and also what do you think about these asset allocation strategies?’

You’re think, ‘Shit, I don’t even know what an asset allocation strategy is…’

You don’t want overnight results because you can’t maintain them, you develop the skills to sustain your progress having the actual experience and going through it!

I hope this article helpful and empowering.

Fat loss is not easy it’s actually fucking hard, but it’s absolutely doable if you’re committed to the outcome!!