How can I lose fat?

Hi Angus,

Weight, or fat loss, is achieved by creating a caloric deficit. If you use up more calories with exercise than you take in with food, your body needs to use stored calories (e.g. our fat stores) to make up for the difference, resulting in weight loss. Research shows over and over again that people are most successful at losing and maintaining weight loss when they combine healthy diet choices with exercise.

Cardiovascular or aerobic activity, (i.e. walking, biking, running, etc.) will give you the best bang for your buck when it comes to expending calories and losing weight. Weight lifting/resistance training is important for building and maintaining muscle mass. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue and uses up calories even at rest. Fat is not, and literally just sits on our bodies and takes up space. So the more muscle you have, the more calories you’re using up throughout the day.

We burn, on average, about 100 calories for every mile we move, whether it be walking or running. So, if you wanted to lose 1#/week just by running, you’d have to run 35 miles a week, or 5 miles a day, 7 days a week. However, 100 calories is roughly one cookie or one slice of bread, and therefore, making small changes to your diet can result in measureable differences in your weight.

It’s great that you’re already going to the gym and exercising regularly! The running will definitely help create that caloric deficit that will help with weight loss. If you like to run and plan on continuing, I would recommend aiming to work up to about 30 minutes of running at least 3 days/week to improve your cardiorespiratory fitness and facilitate weight loss.
Remember that weight loss is a slow process and it’ll take several weeks before you really start to see measurable results, so just keep moving in the right direction and be patient.

How else can I help?

Hi Angus,

When it comes to burning bodyfat there are several methods that can be applied. Yes cardio does ramp up your metabolism however the intensity of that cardio plays a role in how much fat you burn and when. Personally i've always found that I got better results doing HIIT cardio than steady running. Running for longer doesn't mean burning more fat. In a study Everybody's different of course but you can't argue with the science of it.

During steady cardio i.e; jogging walking, your body uses up stored carbs, fats and oxygen as sources of energy. So that run 3 times a week at a lower to moderate speed elicits the most Free Fatty Acid(FFA) oxidization - you're burning fat as you run. The higher the intensity the less inclined our fat cells are at releasing FFA's for energy. However, the higher the intensity the greater the EPOC or Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption. Why is this good? In simple terms the higher the intensity of the exercise the longer it takes our body to return to its natural resting state the higher your metabolism - the more fat you utilise or "burn".

"In a study of exercise intensity and its impact on fat and skeletal muscle metabolism by Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, Bouchard C. in 1994 subjects were pitted 20 weeks of endurance training against 15 weeks of interval training:

Energy cost of endurance training = 28661 calories.
Energy cost of interval training = 13614 calories (less than half)

The interval training group showed a nine times greater loss in subcutaneous fat than the endurance group (when corrected for energy cost).

Read that again. Calorie for calorie, the interval training group lost nine times more fat overall. Why? Maybe it's EPOC, an upregulation of fat burning enzyme activity, or straight up G-Flux. I don't care. I'm a real world guy. If the interval training group had lost the same fat as the endurance group, we'd get the same results in less time. That means interval training is a better tool in your fat loss arsenal."

This is all academic if you're not supplementing your fitness regime with a quality nutrition plan. Finding out how many calories your body needs to sustain itself is key. Your resistance training is burning more fat for you right now than the running so keep it up but try and get in some HIIT cardio 2 times a week.