The Quickest Way To Lose Weight

Have you ever wondered what the quickest way to lose weight is? I know I get this question a lot from subscribers, through email, etc… so I figured I’d address it here because this question is not an easy one to answer.

Why Do You Want To “Lose Weight”?

Barring the obvious example of an athlete who is competing in a weight class enforced sport and actually NEEDS to weigh a certain number — I feel it’s not good that most people focus so much on “weight”… and that’s why this question is a tricky one.

See, there are many ways to lose weight, even lose it VERY quickly (like dehydrating yourself to cut weight — you can lose 20-30 pounds in 24 hours)… but is that really what you want?

What if you still look fat? Or worse, you look “skinny fat” after you’ve lost all that weight?

Redefine Your Goal

It’s better to clarify what you want. You want to lose fat not muscle (yes, even if you’re a girl — you want to keep your muscle and probably even build some).

So it’s better to think in terms of getting a better body “composition”, that is, having your body be “composed” more of sexy lean muscle and less of fat. Makes sense right?

Now that we’ve established our goal, let’s continue…

Step 1: Control your mouth

This is the hardest thing for most people to do, but it’s undoubtedly the most effective when it comes to losing weight fast!

If you can control what you put in your mouth, you can have pretty much ANY body you want. For some reason, women usually pay a lot of attention to what they’re eating — they’re usually the ones who have tried every diet out there and if they work out at all it’s just doing a little cardio here and there, maybe some weight machines at the gym, or dinky “Ken & Barby” light weight lifting with ineffective “toning” exercises like tricep kickbacks.

Which is why step one is ONLY step one, you need to combine it (for best results) with…

Step 2: Effective Exercise

Most smart people agree that losing weight comes down (primarily) to one thing–creating a calorie deficit. Think of it like this:

• You can eat less to create a SMALL calorie deficit…
• You can exercises a lot to create a SMALL calorie deficit…
• OR you can exercise a lot + eat less to create a LARGE calorie deficit.

So if you’re looking for the answer to losing weight as quickly as possible, it’s clearly COMBINING eating a lot less food with exercising a LOT more.

Step 3: Keep Focused and Adjust Your Approach As Necessary

So putting it all together, if you want to lose weight quickly, you should start cutting back on how much you’re eating each day… while at the same time… starting to exercise MORE each day.

That’s the start. But for most people it won’t go perfectly from the start. You’ll probably under-estimate how much you’re eating and have to get really strict on your diet for the first week or two, and really think about what you’re putting in your mouth. That’s ok — keep your eyes on your goal and if you’re not making any weight loss progress — cut back more.

And also, you’ll probably OVER-estimate how hard you’re working in the gym. That’s something most people don’t realize is how LITTLE calories you actually burn in the gym. Especially with the ways most people exercise:

• Most people walk on a treadmill for an hour, burning a pitiful amount of calories…
• Most people do “easy” weight lifting (if at all). Machines. Bicep Curls. Always avoiding full-body exercises like squats and deadlifts (and if they ever do them at all, they take it easy).
• Most people don’t ever get in the “supra-aerobic” zone (This is the name Dr. Sears gives to crossing over your aerobic threshold–when you’re huffing and puffing) where real fat burning is signaled to your body.

So that, in a nutshell, is the simple three step process to lose weight fast.

The Key To Making It Work

Is step number three because most people will read good advice from myself or someone else, put it to use, and then when they aren’t seeing results right away (a by-product of our “fast-food-mtv-I-want-everything-now” generation, a whole nother’ issue)–they give up and say “that didn’t work for me!”

When it’s not that it doesn’t work… but maybe you just didn’t get it right the first time out. You’re doing a little under-estimating here, over-estimating there, a little forgettful on recording how much you ate one night (or you forgot to count the triple latte coffees you had which were high-calorie insulin bombs)… The key to making this all work is adjusting your approach.

That’s what successful people do. They take a look at where they want to be, get some advice to get there, start walking, they look up every once in a while from the walk to see if they’re still on course and if they’re off a little — they change their approach. Simple. Easy. Not-complicated.

Like Gump says “That’s all I have to say about that”. If you’re looking for the quickest way to lose weight, make sure you put these three steps to work in your life today.