My Top 10 Weight Loss Tips

Good morning, guys. First of all, apologies if I sound a bit dodgy. I have a cold, so I might be sounding a bit weird on the camera. But I really wanted to get this video out there because a lot of people are going to be trying to lose weight for 2020. It's the New Year's resolution. And I just wanted to make a top 10 list of the ways I found most helpful to lose weight. I lost a lot of weight last year. I lost about four stone. I gained a bit back over Christmas, but that was kind of expected. So I'm back on my diet now. I'm actually going to be trying a vegan diet for this month. I have no real desire to carry on this vegan diet after January finishes. But I just thought it would be an interesting experiment and a challenge and see if it helps with the weight loss. I'll keep you guys updated on that. I'm just going to get a quick drink of lemonade to help me deal with this cold and I'll be right back. Disgusting. So I really wanted to get this video done at the start of the year. I wanted to give people the best chance of trying to lose some weight. I picked up a lot of tips over 2019. I found out a lot of good ways to lose weight. Also I came across a couple of problems so I just wanted to make this list to try and provide as much help as possible to help you with your weight loss journeys. You may already know some of these tips, they might be quite obvious, but hopefully you can find maybe a couple of points that will help you out. If you have any tips yourself, please let me know in the comments below. Because I'm always looking for fitness tips myself and diet tips myself. Also I apologise for referring to my notebook. I've made a couple of points so I just don't want to miss anything out. So apologies for the rudeness. So enough introduction, let's start off the list. I hope you guys enjoy. So the first point and one of the most important points in my opinion is to invest in home equipment. Going to the gym can be quite overwhelming. Especially in January it's going to be extremely packed. I would Advice, if you can, to save money on gym membership and invest in home equipment. If you buy a treadmill, it's going to last you... A couple of years, hopefully three or four. My last treadmill lasted me, I believe, about five or six years, and it only broke because I was messing around with it. There's so many benefits that come with working out at home, if you can, of course. If you can't, gyms are excellent, but I would definitely recommend home equipment. When you're first starting out on a fitness program, you don't need a million different machines to target specific muscles. You just need the basics. A lot of bodyweight exercises you can do at home. If you buy yourself a dumbbell, you can do so many exercises. Just with that one piece of equipment alone. So yeah, I don't believe there's a need to go to the gym, especially when you're first starting out in your fitness program. It's also a lot easier to work out at home because you're not having to worry about Getting dressed in an appropriate manner to go to the gym. You're not worried about traveling to the gym or coming back home. You also have easy access to a shower and food straight after which is another plus point. Going to a gym can be quite overwhelming or intimidating especially if you're overweight and you don't have a clear idea of what exercise or what goals you have in mind. It can be just quite intimidating so a lot of people will go for a couple of weeks and then they just decide not to go. So yeah my first point It's definitely to try and invest in home equipment. If not, head down to the gym. But yeah, I would say save money and invest in home equipment. Okay, so the second point is diet is key. This is such an extremely important point. I cannot stress how important diet is to lose some weight. You can't out-train a bad diet. A lot of people say this and it's 100% true. I found this out last year. I was eating unhealthy and also increasing my exercise. And my weight loss just slowed right down. Diet is so important. Even if you don't train, you can still lose weight if you follow a strict diet. The diet I followed last year was quite a simple one. It was just low calories and low carbs. I ate about 1,800 calories on days when I had a lot of activity when I had to go into work. I lowered the calories down to about 1,600 if I had a day off. But yeah, I had a low calorie diet, low carbs as well. But what I will say about exercise in comparison to diet is, in fact, when I did exercise in the morning, it made me want to maintain a strict diet. So exercise did motivate me to keep a strict diet. So they kind of work hand in hand. But yeah, even if you don't train, you can still lose a fair amount of weight just by diet alone. So the third point is to keep statistics. Now this is quite a personal point to me because I'm a massive stats fan. I record all my workouts. All my progress, I've lost it in graphs. I just love to see the trends. So yeah, this is some of my weight recordings. As you can see, I record everything. It's a lot of recordings. This is my exercise plan that I follow for this year. As you can see, I'm ticking it all off and stuff like that. And again, this is just some more stats. So there's also plenty of apps that you can record your weight loss and your training program. I'm a bit old school, so I like to write it all down. So I record my weight loss on an app. It's really satisfying to see the graph decreasing. It's just, I don't know, I just love stats. So I would always say to record your statistics. It just helps to keep you on track and it helps to motivate you. So the fourth point is to always increase your exercise. A lot of people tell me they run every day for the same distance, the same... speed and they wonder why they're not losing weight it's because your body can adapt to certain things so for me personally when i first started my cardio i was running for 15 minutes at speeds nine kilometers per hour so about every week i would increase my uh time that i was running so i'd add five minutes extra and then when i got through about an hour of consistent running i started to increase the speed so now i'm running 10 kilometers per hour also with the weight training you don't want to do the same thing every time you train you want to try and increase The amount you lift, the amount you press up, everything. You just want to try to be increasing it every time. I will be making a full video about my weight training program. But yeah, just to make sure you keep trying to increase, keep trying to push yourself to add extra distance, add extra time, add extra speed, add extra weight. Because your body can adapt and it will slow down the process. Point number five. It's kind of linked to the last point, but weight lifting. It's super important to weight loss as well. For me mainly, just split up the cardio. Cardio can become quite boring. And so I actually look forward to my weight training days. So you may hear a lot of people saying if you have more muscle, you'll burn more calories. And whilst that is true, recent research has actually shown that the effect of having more muscle has been drastically overestimated when it comes to burning more calories. So it definitely helps, but it's not as great as a lot of people will say. But yeah, weightlifting is really important, and yeah, I really like weight training. I've done a full body weight training session about every four days, and there's about three days of cardio and then a rest day, so yeah, make sure you get onto weight training. As I say, I don't go to the gym. All of my weight training is body weight training and dumbbell training, so yeah, you don't really need to go to a gym. So the next point is fasted cardio. I experimented with fasted cardio and cardio in the middle of the day and at the end of And at the end of the day, I found... Fasted cardio to be a lot more effective also I just prefer to train first thing in the morning and then get a nice healthy breakfast straight after it just sets me up so I prefer fasted cardio but I also did find out that if you incorporate Cardio straight after weight training, it has a great effect on weight loss. Your body's used up a lot of its energy stores for the weight training, so if you go straight to cardio after your training session, it can burn a lot of calories and help you lose a lot of weight. But you don't want to spend too long on the cardio after weights, and it will start to have a negative effect on your muscle building. But yeah, I spent about 20 minutes of running speed, 12 kilometers per hour, straight after my weights, and I found that to have a really positive effect on my weight loss. So number seven, this is actually a point that I struggled with when I first started my training at the start of last year. So this point is to learn to be more flexible with your meal plans and diets. So the standard way of eating in the West is to have your breakfast, your lunch and your dinner, three meals a day. A lot of people moved on to the six small meals a day. Well, for me, I found I was trying to focus so much on these three meals a day. I was eating at the wrong time, so I was trying to fit it in. I do shift work, so it was messing me around and I was trying to fit in all my meals. But I learned to be a lot more flexible, so I actually moved down to having two larger meals a day, which actually helped with my weight loss. So normally I'd go for my morning run, I'd have a very large breakfast, about 700 or 800 calories, normally a fruit smoothie, sometimes I'd have yoghurts and oats and berries and stuff like that. But yeah, I'd have my breakfast quite late, about 10 or 11 o'clock, then I might have a small snack during the day, but I'd wait for my dinner and have another large meal at about 6 or 7 o'clock. and yeah i found this method helped me lose a lot of weight important to keep up your calories you don't want to go too low with the calories but yeah just to be a bit more flexible with your meals don't worry too much about having a standard three meals a day or the six small meals a day i was a bit too fixated on the standard meal plans and it was having a negative effect so i love to be a lot more flexible and it actually helped me to lose weight okay so point eight this is such a simple point but it's one i actually I fell down a lot with last year and it's one of my new year's resolutions, but that is to drink a lot more water. It's so simple to say. But often I didn't have enough water, especially for training, you need to be drinking a lot. Some days I would even forget to drink till about 3 or 4pm and I'd start to notice my brain function decreasing and I'd realise I hadn't had anything to drink, so yeah. What I do now is I drink a pint of water in the morning, I always drink a pint of water with all my meals and I have a pint of water before I sleep. I add a lot of ice to my water, so drinking a lot more water can help with weight loss. Sometimes your body when it's thirsty actually thinks it's hungry so there's a little bit of a mistake there but yeah definitely try to drink a lot more water. Okay number nine is to take rest days. This is something I struggled with last year. For me when I was fully into my training I found when I took a rest day I'd kind of get a bit agitated a bit hyperactive and it just I don't know I was so into my training I didn't like to take a rest day. You may not feel like your body needs it, but eventually it will catch up to you, you will start to get injuries, and then you'll have to take a lot more rest days, which will lead to negative effects, but yeah. So I take a rest day about once a week. So the last point is quite a personal point to me, is to take photos and videos of yourself, especially at the start of the new year. You may be a bit overweight, you may just be starting your training program, but yeah, make sure you take so many photos. So even after a strict month of weight loss and training and exercise. I didn't really see too much of a difference just looking at myself in the mirror, but after you see a comparison on a photo or video there's a big difference which you can notice and I found it really motivating. I really love making films and production and editing so it's a great hobby for me and plus it helps with my weight loss. So yeah. There you have it guys, so those are my top 10 tips. Sorry it's quite a long video but I hope you found a couple of points that you can take away from it. So over the course of the last year I learned a lot of different techniques, I learned what worked and what didn't work. Of course it's quite specific to my own body so it may not work for you but I'm just giving you some points that helped me. Please let me know if you have any different points or suggestions in the comments below because I'm always trying to learn. But yeah, last year I just wanted to say thank you so much for all the support you gave me last year. I wanted to make this list Oh my god, I'm dying. I wanted to make this list just to help you guys out, to give you the best start in this new year. I'll be making so many more videos. I've got so many planned. I hope this video helps. I'll see you in more videos coming soon. Thank you.