When it comes to fat loss, so many people adopt an “all or nothing” approach, setting unrealistic and unhealthy goals for themselves, or going overboard with exercise and cutting out copious different foods and food groups in pursuit of these goals. Often, this can be damaging to your relationship with food and your body. However, if you have excess fat you want to shed in 2023, you can do so healthily and sustainably, if you approach it in the right way. Here are some key things to consider on your fat loss journey to help you reach your health and body goals, while maintaining a positive and healthy relationship with food, exercise and your body along the way.

Define your goals and motivations.

First things first, you need to determine why you want to lose fat. Do you have excess fat to lose, or is this an unhealthy ambition for you, driven by social media pressures, comparison culture and lack of self-acceptance and self-love? The truth is, losing fat isn’t the key to loving yourself - in fact, this is a trap many people fall into believing, only to later learn that body appearance has little to do with body image and body love. The more fat you lose doesn’t correlate to the happier you feel. So be sure that your motivations for fat loss are driven by a desire to be healthier, fitter, stronger. If you’re aiming for better health, you’re more likely to stay motivated and keep the weight off in the long-term, particularly if you make sustainable lifestyle changes in order to achieve your specific goals.

Once you’re aware of your underlying motivations (and please be brutally honest with yourself when identifying these!), it’s time to set some specific goals. Instead of focusing on the numbers, try focusing on how you want to feel as a result of your fat loss. So, instead of aiming to lose 5 kgs, or to drop two dress sizes, ask yourself: do you want to feel more energised in your daily life? Do you want to feel fitter, and be able to run 5 km without stopping within the next 6 months? Is your goal to be able to deadlift your bodyweight, so you can feel strong and empowered? Maybe you want to feel less bloated and lethargic?

Whatever it is that you’re striving for, identify it clearly before taking specific, actionable and targeted steps to make it happen. If you don’t know what your goal is, it makes it very challenging to stay motivated and enact the required changes to achieve your targets.

Make small changes.

This is a big area of failure for many people when it comes to goal setting - whether they’re aiming for fat loss or something else entirely. The “all or nothing”, “black and white” way of thinking many people have when it comes to health and fat loss is a one-way ticket to failure. By implementing this mentality, you’re setting yourself up for continuously feeling disappointed in yourself and your “lack of willpower” or determination in sticking to your goals.

The truth is, when you decide to completely overhaul your lifestyle overnight, cutting out all “treat” foods and even entire food groups, going from no exercise to hours of HIIT exercise each day, and rethinking all your daily habits at once, it’s almost always too overwhelming and impossible to sustain. 

So instead of going from zero to a hundred, focus on making one small change each day or week, which you can sustain over the long-term. For example, if you’re someone who hasn’t exercised consistently for years (or ever!), don’t start training like an elite athlete overnight. Work your way up. Maybe you start your mornings with 20 squats and 10 push ups per day initially. Then, when you adapt to this, increase to 50 squats and 25 push ups. Over time, you may introduce some cardio, going for a light jog for 20 minutes. Soon, you might feel ready to tackle the gym and introduce some resistance training a few days per week. It’s all about laying solid foundations made up of small, maintainable habits and lifestyle changes which you can continue to build on and improve over time. After all, consistency is the key to seeing results that last.

Don’t restrict or deprive yourself, or turn to fad diets.

Similarly, if you want to improve your dietary patterns and quality, don’t turn to the latest fad diet to help you shed the extra kilos of fat! Fad diets are the key to misery and failure when it comes to fat loss. Particularly if you’re starting a fad diet at the same time you embark on a new exercise regime, chances are you won’t be fuelling your body with the nutrients and energy it needs to support its optimal function, so you’re actually doing a disservice to your fat loss goals.

It’s a key reason why most diets fail too: once you forbid yourself from eating a certain food or food group, your brain fixates on it so much more, and your cravings for that particular food will intensify to the point where you feel no option but to give into them. Then, once you’ve indulged, you’re filled with so much shame and guilt that you “write off” the rest of the day or week, feeling you’ve already “failed” so you may as well throw in the towel completely and binge or overeat. This continues until you “restart” your restrictive diet plan, only for the cycle to begin again.

Instead, if you allow yourself to continue eating all foods in moderation, without “forbidding” any foods (even those which are less nutrient-dense), you’re not putting the same importance on those foods you’re eliminating. You’re not elevating them to this god-like status, where they become all you can think about or fixate on until you give in. Foods don’t have a moral value or level of importance assigned to them, so they’re simply all equal. This means the thoughts and cravings around foods won’t exist. Because you know, if you really want or crave a food, you can just eat it! Even if you eat a small amount, you know you can come back for more later, so there’s less need to binge or overeat when you do allow yourself the foods you’re craving. It’s a much more practical, sustainable approach to achieving your goals. Not only does it reduce the occurrence of bingeing, it also makes you more able to exercise portion control, and gives you the permission to still enjoy your life and all your favourite things, while working towards your goals. Because nothing is less motivating than pursuing a goal that requires you to remove all the things that bring you joy from your life! What’s the point in that?

Focus on inclusion rather than exclusion.

Following on from the last point, instead of asking what you can cut out of your diet or lifestyle to help you achieve your fat loss goals, ask yourself what you can include instead. Approaching health and fat loss from a place of abundance, rather than a place of scarcity and lack, makes the world of difference when it comes to your ability to maintain your hard work, effort and results. Instead of attempting to cut out the “less healthy” foods or habits for a period of time, what can you introduce into your life to improve your general health? 

For example, why not try adding in an additional serving of vegetables to each of your meals? This will provide you with more fibre in your diet, helping you feel fuller for longer, supporting gut health and stable blood glucose, and preventing overeating later in the day. You can also try adding an extra litre of water to your daily consumption targets, to keep you hydrated and healthy. Implementing small additions to your lifestyle like these is a far more positive way to approach fat loss, allowing you to maintain a positive relationship with food and your body, while still achieving the results you want and helping you feel better within yourself too! Mentality and sustainability are critical to your success when it comes to health and fat loss.

Exercise smarter, not harder.

Resorting to copious amounts of cardio to help you shift the last few kilos isn’t the answer to your fat loss goals. Instead of spending hours in the gym, punishing your body or attempting to sculpt it and burn off food you’ve eaten, you need to reassess your mentality and routine when it comes to your workouts.

Emphasise moving your body in ways you enjoy, whatever that may look like for you, because these are the styles of movement you’ll be consistent with. And consistency is the number one ingredient for success when it comes to fat loss. So whether you’re choosing yoga, Pilates, HIIT, resistance, strength, dancing, swimming, whatever you love, stick with it and know that with time and consistency comes results and change.

It’s important to note, however, that variety in your fitness routine will help you avoid a plateau in results. If you’re doing the same workout, day after day, it’s a matter of time before your body adapts and stops producing the dramatic changes you see at the start of a new workout regime. Whereas, if you find you enjoy a few different styles of movement, and you’re regularly including them all in your weekly workout regime, your body is being continuously challenged in different ways, making it more difficult for your body to adapt, so you see results more quickly.

And before you jump into hours upon hours of long cardio sessions to help you achieve your fat loss goal faster, cardio isn’t the gold standard for fat loss. Interestingly, resistance and strength training are your best bet if you’re looking to burn fat. Lean muscle mass, built during these types of training, is a much more metabolically active tissue than fat, so essentially the more lean muscle you create during strength training, the more energy your metabolism burns each day - even at rest. So when you’re sitting on the couch watching Netflix, you’re still burning energy in accordance with how much muscle you have. Plus, resistance training creates little micro tears in your muscles, which require more energy to repair and rebuild. During this repair process, you’re burning energy and building more lean muscle mass - both critically important if you want to lose fat.

Cardio, on the other hand, can act as a stress on your body if you overdo it. Over time, this can result in elevated production of your stress hormone, cortisol. When cortisol levels are chronically high for a period of time, this encourages fat storage - particularly around your stomach and middle section - as your body is tricked into thinking it’s in a state of threat or danger, meaning it stores fat to use in the event it needs more energy or isn’t getting enough food consistently. So if you do ridiculous amounts of cardio, you may actually be working against your fat loss goals!

More is not more when it comes to working out for fat loss. Instead of spending hours in the gym every day, simply keep your workouts varied, push yourself to keep exceeding your personal bests - lifting heavier, performing one more rep, running a few more metres. Prioritise strength training over cardio (or a combination of both at least!) and actively schedule (and stick to!) rest days, to prevent burnout, low performance and energy levels, injury and elevated cortisol levels. Rest days are key for results and performance, so don’t neglect them. Less can be more a lot of the time!

Don’t neglect your protein!

Protein is another important element of a fat loss journey. Protein requires more energy for your body to break down into amino acids, compared to carbohydrates and fats, meaning it has a greater thermic effect. This means, when you increase your protein intake, you’re burning more energy digesting and breaking down your food, essentially supporting your fat loss goals.

Similarly, there’s a phenomenon called the protein leverage hypothesis which shouldn’t be underestimated when it comes to fat loss. In basic terms, this idea suggests that as humans, we have a certain (somewhat individualised) requirement for protein, and we’ll eat and eat until we meet that requirement each day. That means, if we’re only feeding our body fats, we’ll continue eating those fat-rich foods until we get the protein we’re looking for. Whereas if we fed our body the protein it’s craving sooner, we wouldn’t overeat in an attempt to meet those requirements. So the more protein you give you body, particularly earlier on in the day, the more satiated you’ll feel throughout the rest of the day, and the less likely you’ll be to overeat or binge later on.

Plus, protein supports muscle synthesis and repair after your workouts, helping you build lean muscle mass which, as we discussed, further supports your fat loss efforts.

Don’t skip meals or undereat.

Skipping meals may seem like an obvious way to consume less energy and lose fat faster, but it’s actually counterproductive for your goals. Skipping meals means your body can be fooled into thinking it doesn’t have a reliable or steady supply of food coming in, acting as a stress on your body and causing your production of cortisol to increase. As we mentioned, this means your body holds onto fat and stores it in an insurance policy against famine or an absence of food, so you’re actually increasing your fat rather than shedding it like you’d hoped.

Plus, if you’re skipping meals and getting to the point where you’re absolutely starving at your next meal, you’re far more likely to overeat and binge later on. You’ll be less in control around food, and your body will crave high-sugar, high-fat, energy-dense foods which likely won’t help you achieve your fat loss goals. Skipping meals or undereating is a common mistake people make when aiming for fat loss, yet it actually has the opposite effect to what you’re aiming for, so be sure to eat regularly and adequately throughout the day, eating at least three main meals plus snacks and including a source of protein, carbohydrate, fat and fibre at each meal.

Progress over perfection.

So many people tend to eat “perfectly” during the week, sticking to their meal plans or macros or health goals, only to let it all fall to the wayside every weekend and blow out on “unhealthy” food and drinks. Then, come Monday, they begin their “health kick” or diet once again, and the cycle repeats. This is a recipe for failure. If you’re implementing such strict food rules and restrictions on yourself throughout the week that you feel unable to maintain them on weekends without feeling like you’re “missing out” in some way, this is a telltale sign that you need to rethink your approach to fat loss. Instead of aiming for perfection five days out of seven, then falling off the bandwagon, simply aim to make sustainable lifestyle changes which you can implement every day without feeling deprived. This allows you to achieve slower fat loss, but you’re far more likely to sustain the fat loss over time.

Similarly, if you’re prone to slipping up on your “healthy” eating plan or food rules, and then beating yourself up about it and throwing in the towel vowing to “start again” the following day (or week), this is another signal you need to slow down and focus on small, sustainable changes instead of aiming for perfection. If you’re experiencing this shame spiral each time you eat something less nutrient-dense, or you skip a workout in favour of a sleep in, you’re far more likely to get stuck in the spiral of bingeing and restricting, reverting to the bingeing and overeating each time you make one small “mistake”. Instead, when you allow yourself to eat all foods in moderation, you include regular rest days, and you approach health and fat loss from a consistency and progress mindset instead of striving for perfection, you can forgive yourself for any “slip ups” along your journey, and simply move on, knowing you’ll make health-aligned decisions next time the opportunity arises. It’s a much more positive, healthy, balanced approach to fat loss which you’ll actually be able to sustain over time.

Celebrate yourself.

Don’t forget to celebrate your hard work and achievements along the way! On a fat loss journey, it can be tempting to achieve a specific goal, and simply move the goalpost further away, feeling as though your achievements “aren’t enough”, instead of celebrating how far you’ve already come.

Instead, check in with yourself regularly and notice how you feel. Come back to those goals we discussed initially. Are you feeling stronger? Fitter? Less bloated, more nourished? Do you have more energy? If you’re answering ‘yes’ to any of these, that’s certainly cause for celebrating!

And lastly, remember you’re so much more than your body. You’re enough, and you’re loved, regardless of your body shape and size, or the amount of fat you’re carrying right now. Show yourself some compassion and acceptance, and recognise that no fat loss journey is easy or straightforward. There will be slip ups and setbacks, and that’s okay! Just do the best you can, be consistent, and make small changes over time, and you’ll get there with time.