Many people pursuing weight loss focus solely on reducing the number on the scale, believing that weight reduction is the primary goal. Some resort to restrictive diets like the steamed bun diet or water diet, only to find themselves not getting thinner but developing a body that’s more prone to gaining weight, making their physique worse with each attempt at weight loss.
As the saying goes: Amateurs focus on weight loss, while experts focus on fat loss! Weight reduction alone won’t truly make your body slimmer. Only fat loss – the reduction in body fat percentage – means actual fat reduction, which naturally leads to a slimmer physique. Therefore, during weight loss, the goal should be reducing body fat, not just losing weight!
How can you effectively and scientifically reduce body fat? Here are three aspects that will help you easily lower your body fat percentage!
First Aspect: Diet Management
- Strictly control caloric intake and avoid high-calorie foods. Generally, the foods we enjoy are high in calories, such as braised dishes, fried foods, and preserved foods. While these foods are delicious, they more easily lead to fat accumulation and weight gain. Therefore, controlling caloric intake in your diet is essential for weight loss.
- Manage satiety by eating foods that provide a strong feeling of fullness while being low in fat. This allows you to eat less without feeling hungry. Managing satiety helps your body digest and absorb food more efficiently, maintaining a moderate sense of hunger, which is key to weight loss.
- Maintain regular eating patterns with three meals a day. Don’t resort to extreme dieting, or you’ll find yourself gaining weight more easily. Weight loss should involve proper eating – regular meals are crucial, and excessive dietary restriction should be avoided.
Second Aspect: Lifestyle Improvements to Boost Metabolism
- Improve sleep habits: Stick to early bedtime and early rising. Start preparing for bed around 10 PM. As long as you can fall asleep before 11 PM, your body can enter an efficient recovery state, ensuring vigorous metabolism, easy weight loss, and maintaining high energy levels and vitality.
- Drink plenty of water, as replenishing your body’s water needs is crucial. It promotes body function, enhances blood circulation, accelerates internal organ metabolism, and ensures normal basal metabolic expenditure.
- Chew thoroughly and eat slowly to help control satiety. Eating slowly allows you to better sense your body’s fullness, control appetite, reduce caloric intake, and maintain a moderate sense of hunger that aids in fat loss.
Third Aspect: Consistent Exercise – Combining Cardio and Strength Training
To accelerate fat burning, maintain high-intensity fat-burning exercises such as HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training), jump rope, and jumping jacks. These high-intensity exercises can accelerate your body’s function and metabolism. They help you reach fat-burning heart rates quickly, make you sweat profusely, achieve good fat-burning effects, and maintain elevated fat-burning heart rates.
To maintain vigorous metabolism, you need to increase muscle mass, which better maintains a high metabolic state. For example, squats in strength training are excellent fat-burning fitness exercises that work leg muscle groups and engage smaller muscle groups in the movement, thereby accelerating muscle growth, increasing caloric expenditure, expanding the caloric deficit, and making it easier for your body to slim down.
During weight loss, don’t solely pursue a decrease in body weight. The reduction in body fat percentage is most important, as it indicates fat loss, and your physique will naturally become slimmer without even realizing it.