The Easiest Way to Lose a Pound a Week in 2023
Well? Did I Get Your Attention?
That’s the thing about fitness these days, we’re attracted to “quick fixes,” how easy something pitches itself to be, etc. People want to know, “How can I change my life without changing my life?” You can’t.
I’ve got a real question for you, are you tired of it yet? Are you finally at the point of being fed up with your bad habits? Are you sick of letting yourself down? Can you even afford to continue to neglect your full potential any longer?
The human dilemma with health & fitness is not a very uncommon one. Look at the most recent statistics: Nationally, American adults have a 41.9% obesity rate, states with an adult obesity rate at or above 35% now sit at 19% where a decade ago there were 0, and overall, and the numbers aren’t projected to lower themselves (tfah.org). We have a lifestyle issue within our culture, that’s the truth. All of us are a part of it too, including me.
The thing is, if you want “The easiest way to lose a pound a week in 2023,” you will need to become the person who has those attributes, it’s going to take some lifestyle changing, you didn’t get to where you are today by routinely exercising, regularly choosing healthy dietary habits, etc. The good news? It’s worth it, 100%.
Ok, but where do I start?
Great question! Before we get into planning our new 2023 lifestyle routine together, I want to dismiss some potentially damning health & fitness misunderstandings. In general, it’s true, you really can’t out exercise a “bad diet.” Nutrition plays a big part in the recovery role coming off of all the hard work you are going to be putting in at the gym.
Knowing now that nutrition really does go hand-in-hand with our training, let’s talk about the other half.. the training. In short, we want a program that will allow us to regularly stimulate our muscles so that they need to adapt in a positive way to the new environment we are regularly putting ourselves in. The environment is our training. Generally, two training days a week is a great way to maintain muscle mass and maybe promote a little muscle gain. As a trainer of almost a decade, I generally recommend a starting point of 3 training days a week. This gives us a great opportunity to up our “simulation” frequency and tell the body that it needs to adapt. This is also a more manageable training frequency for beginners and people just getting back to the gym.
Nutrition is important.. Training is also important.. Now what?
More great questions, reader! Let’s get specific. A general nutrition recommendation I make for a lot of people is to do a quick calculation on how may calories you should be taking in. If you don’t know how to find that, no worries. Try using a simple calculator like this one from Calculator.net: Calorie Calculator
Once a general estimate is found, we want to figure out protein. Most professionals generally recommend 1g of protein per pound of ideal bodyweight. If I weigh 240 lbs but want to lean out to 220 lbs, I would aim for 220g of protein each day. Now, this should not be added onto the total calories that you got from your calculator, but they should be worked into the total. It should be noted that 1g of protein is equal to 4kcal. Therefore, if I am aiming to eat ~2,400 kcal a day, roughly 35% of that total would be attributed to protein intake. For carbohydrates and fats, there are different pluses and minuses attributed to eating more of one or the other for the remaining daily kcal balance in your budget, and there is a lot of nuance to go through in order to make cases for either one, so we will leave that out of this article.
As for training, there are tons of incredible programs out there for beginners, and also a lot of bad ones. To keep things simple, I generally recommend a squat day, an upper body push day, and a pull day. That gets us to our 3 days of training each week goal. Accessory work can depend on what your individual goals are, every can be variable in that sense. The most important part to a good training routine is sustainability and stimulus. We need you to be able to hit these 3 training sessions each week, without miss, and along with that we need to simply stimulate your muscles so that they know to adapt through the help of your new nutrition routine.
Like I said, there are tons of training programs out there and great trainers, but I would be foolish not to plug our services here. We have local group and personal training at our Wheaton location but we also offer online, or remote training for people out of our area. Find out what works best for you here: Training Services
Let’s review what we have so far:
A general training recommendation for training types and training frequency
An estimated daily calorie goal
An estimated daily protein goal
Feels good doesn’t it? Now, to bring up nuance again, there is a lot of it. A good trainer simply make educated guesses off of client-specific situations and their professional experience for reference. The magic happens in the program feedback and regular adjustments. That could be the challenging part of this whole equation depending on your experience level. We need to be able to adjust food intake, recovery processes, training plan, etc. in order to see long term success.
Well, that’s it, the simple fitness success formula! If you got something out of this article do us a favor and share it with a friend and give us a shout if you need any help.
Andrew Happel