When most people say best, really they mean fastest.  But I’m going to assume that you want to lose the excess weight and keep it off. 

If you’ve been keeping up with the blogs recently you’ll have already read our advice for starting out from a few weeks ago, and the importance of keeping consistent by choosing exercises and activities you enjoy.

What we are going to do here is turn our attention to weight loss in general.  The fastest way to lose weight is to do a lot of cardio exercise.  That will burn the most weight, and you’ll see the fastest weight loss.  However, over time your metabolism adapts to what you throw at it.  Doing an hour of cardio every day will have less and less impact on you, and you’ll adapt to after a few weeks.  Then you’ll have to add another hour each day. And another. And another.  This approach will have limited long term effect. 

The other way to lose weight when following this method is to cut calories.  So perhaps at the start you are consuming 1500 calories per day.  Then you cut to 1200 to see weight loss, and you lose more weight.  Then you drop to 1000.  Then 800.  Pretty soon this becomes unsustainable too, and you’re doing three hours of exercise per day and eating little more than 800 calories a day.  Drop the cardio down, or increase the calories, even for a day, and you’ll increase weight.

The first thing you should do may seem counter-intuitive, but you should actually start lifting weights.  Resistance training keeps the metabolism running at a high rate, and will help you build muscle.  Simply maintaining your calories levels at this point will mean that in order to build the body will have to plunder it’s body fat stores, and use that energy to build muscle (which people wrongly call turning fat into muscle).

The occasional use of cardio and running a calorie deficit at this point will see a weight loss drop, and as long as you don’t prolong those, they won’t affect the metabolism, and you’ll see a sustained weight loss. 

For personal training enquiries, please email enquiries@rkfitness.co.uk