How to lose weight? Get shredded? Get abs? Stay lean year-round?

What if I tell you that it is fairly easy to lose weight, if you inculcate or alter a few habits in your daily life? This article is not going to be a succinct one. Please bear with my naïve article writing style. Consider it more of a blog for now.

The people who know me personally must be like, “Okay Unmesh, we know you have a six pack and you are pretty lean. Stop bragging now!”. I am not bragging, maybe a little. But it was as difficult for me as it is to most of you guys. I too had a beer belly. I kind of applied a brute force method to get rid of the fat by running 8kms on an average, daily, for months straight with no days off. That’s one way to do it. You can definitely give it a try. But it is fairly easy when it’s backed up with a good diet.

You can get lean and lose those excess pounds by making cardio your best friend. But there is even a better way to do it.

I believe there’s science behind everything.

I always wanted a chiseled six-pack since I was a kid. I started crunching in on those abs since Day 1 of joining the gym. All in vain. I was clueless after not seeing any visible changes in my body even after months of hard work in the gym. I used to party a lot on weekends. Almost every weekend. I had terrible eating habits. My friends feared the sight of me when there was a cake on the table as I would grab a chunk of it. I once ate 7 slices of a large cheese burst pizza and could definitely have one more but the pizza was over by then. Biryani was my weakness. I always refilled my plate more number of times than any of my peers.

Okay, enough of my hogging tales.

I decided to take things seriously when the lockdown was imposed in March 2020. There was no way I could eat outside food. I did a lot of reading on the internet about weight loss and also about how to burn body fat.

Here’s what I learnt (grab a pen and paper to make things easy for yourself & no more memes for quite sometime now):

1. Our body requires calories for energy. Calories from these 3 major macronutrients matter the most. Carbohydrates (carbs), fats & protein. 1 gram of carb & 1 gram of protein consists of 4 calories each. 1 gram of fat contains 9 calories.
2. Our body burns a lot of calories without us noticing. To digest the food, to pump blood into the body and a lot of other things. That is known as the BMR (basal metabolic rate). It is generally around 1000 to 1500.
3. Given your current weight, a certain number of calories are demanded by your body to maintain the current weight. It’s generally termed as “maintenance calories”. Calculate your maintenance calories by inputting basic information like weight, age, height.
   https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html
4. Now to lose weight, you just need to eat 10% less of your MC (not cursing, but from now on MC=maintenance calories). Check weight after a week and you’ll definitely see a drop in your weight. Now again calculate your MC and eat in a 10% caloric deficit. This is generally termed as the “cut phase” in bodybuilding terminology.
5. You need to make sure to eat at least 2 grams of protein per kilo of body weight to avoid any muscle loss.
   For example, Mr.A wants to lose weight who’s currently weighing at 70kgs. His MC are around 2800 kcal.
   His caloric deficit will be 2800–280 = 2520. So, he needs to make sure that he eats 140 grams of protein in a day. That’s 560 calories. Rest of the calories can be taken in 70–30% of carbs & fats.
6. Also, eating a bag of chips or having that tasty samosa doesn’t help in this case. Make sure to eat clean. By clean, I mean having less oily foods as possible. Eat home cooked food. You can eat rice too. I can share a diet plan that worked for me but it is not really necessary that it needs to be your facsimile diet plan.
7. Avoid sugar, as it slows down your digestion and has a lot of calories. Cut down on it slowly and then completely if possible. I still do indulge in pastries but I make sure I do some extra cardio on that particular day.

Abs are just part of this process. When you lose weight, you lose body fat as well. And when your body fat drops below 14%. BOOM. Your abs start showing up. No need of doing thousands of crunches and sit-ups.

I will definitely post a few more articles if you guys love this one.

Until then, Stay Hard!