Weight and fat loss happen when you expend more calories than you consume. And while this simple and straightforward principle is true at its core, getting this right in day-to-day life is more complicated than that, and a meal plan to lose fat faster can be a great aid.
Meal plan to lose fat faster
Learn how to prepare a meal plan to lose fat faster while keeping everything tasty and satisfying.
Read more: How to Calculate Your Macros and Calories
How does weight loss work?
In essence, eight loss is all about the calories you consume versus the calories you expend.
Calorie balance is the ratio between calories taken in and calories expended in any one individual at any given time. There are 3 states of calorie balance:
- Negative calorie balance (hypocaloric diet)
- Calorie balance (eucaloric diet)
- Positive Calorie balance (hypercaloric diet)
It is impossible to be in more than one of these states at any one time.
A negative calorie balance will always result in weight loss. “Even though body water alterations may occasionally mask this loss of tissue, it is always going to occur, with ZERO exceptions so far discovered.”
A eucalorie balance means that the athlete will not gain or lose weight because they expend as many calories as they consume.
A positive calorie balance means that the individual is consuming more calories than they are using.
In order to maximize your chances for muscle gain or fat loss, you must know when and how to enter a hypo, hyper, or eucaloric state.
The second most important factor for transforming yourself is to consume the correct macronutrients to support your body and the goals that you are working towards. These consist of proteins, carbohydrates and fats.
Having the right ratio between these three parts of your nutrition will differ depending on your exact goal, weight, sex, age, height, and the way that you train.
Read more: Understanding Your Diet: Why Elite Athletes Eat Gummy Bears And You (Probably) Shouldn’t
How to eat to lose weight
- Stick to minimally processed foods
- Eat the bulk of your calories early in the day
- Include highly satiating foods in your diet
Minimally processed foods are those that you consume closets to their natural form and generally provide more nutrients, as well as keep you fuller for longer.
“One of the unique fat loss benefits about unprocessed foods is that in most cases our body burns significantly more calories when digesting unprocessed foods than it does when compared to their processed counterparts,” says Jeremy Ethier, Kinesiologist and FMS, NASM certified.
Allocating more calories to your meals early on in the day seems to have indirect fat loss benefits, Either continues. He says this of course varies from person to person, but he recommends that you experiment with shifting more calories to your first meal of the day and see what the effects are.
Consuming highly satiating foods will keep you full for longer and reduce the risk of sabotaging your calorie deficit through excess snaking. “Swapping brown rice for whole grain pasta or boiled potatoes would provide a 30%, or 60% boost in satiation respectively,” explains Ethier.
Experiment with swapping some foods for highly satiating ones and see how your body and appetite respond, he suggest.
Meal prepping is a great way to not only stick to your goals, not only because you can specifically build your meals based on your goals, but because it also makes them the path of least resistance; the easiest option is the one you’re most likely to take.
Ultimately, you should stick to what you find works best for you and your lifestyle. The best weight loss meal plan is the one you can adhere long-term to.
Read more: 8 Delicious Vegan Foods to Help You Lose Weight
Why you should prep your meal plan
Meal prep is exactly what it says on the tin – preparing your meals for the day or week ahead, to enable you to consistently meet your fitness and performance goals.
In its most essential form, it is consistently preparing every meal, with the right amounts of macronutrients to ensure your food is there exactly when you need it – boxed up and ready to go. This prevents you from straying off course with sub-optimal convenience food and keeps you on track to meet your fitness goals.
Having a structured and well-planned diet can be critical to success, whatever your fitness goals. Meal prepping allows you to prepare and plan every meal, count every calorie, control every ingredient, and eat when you want.
If your diet is structured to meet your fitness goals, you’ll be halfway to achieving them.
Everything begins with a plan. But the key thing with meal prep is ‘understanding your numbers’. That means calculating how many calories you should be eating on a daily basis to support your goals – whether that’s fat loss, muscle building, strength or performance.
Read more: How to Shed Fat and Completely Transform your Body
Image Sources
- Meal Prep: Ella Olsson on Unsplash
- Meal-plan-to-lose-fat-faster: Leon Ardho from Pexels / S'well on Unsplash
