Maybe you think that “losing weight” and “getting in shape” mean the same thing, but it doesn’t, and having one of the two doesn’t mean that you have the other either. By that I mean that you can lose weight without getting in shape and that you can get in shape without losing much weight.
First, let me explains each concept:
Losing weight: It’s a short term goal, you do some kind of workout, mostly steady state cardio, the longer the better and/or diet until you reach a certain number on scale and stop it all after its reached. Then you come back to your old lifestyle until you feel bad about yourself again and start another diet.
Getting in shape: Life long goal, you integrate physical activity in your week schedule and you clear “bad” food from your menu. You don’t eat less, more often than not you’ll eat even more to sustain your high intensity workout and/or sports while still burning fat. You don’t have a fixation on your weight and there’s no end date.
What most people seems to miss is that you should focus on getting in shape and have a healthy lifestyle instead of only relying on pounds lost. Everyone has a different body so it’s not logical to think that you can weight an arbitrary amount of pounds, instead of trying to look and weight like somebody else (or like you were 10 years ago), just do what you can to be the best you can be now, no matter what’s the number on the scale and no matter what it used to be.
The reason why losing weight for losing weight is bad is that you don’t make your body more efficient. You either cut down calories by eating less or burn more calories by doing more cardio. I agree that you will inevitably lose some weight by doing this, by once you stop, which will certainly happen, because it’s a short term goal, you’ll slowly drift back to your previous state because your body composition haven’t changed.
So now you may be asking, “How is getting in shape any better then?”. Getting in shape implies a healthy lifestyle throughout your life, which means eating clean and working out every week. It’s a habit that you’ll want to take on for the rest of your life. By experience I can tell you that if you do it long enough for it to become a habit, you won’t want to get back to where you were and that will be enough motivation to keep you going.
Eating clean: The short answer for most people is: cut down everything that tastes great and is easy to make. This means all processed and high carbs foods like frozen/ready-to-eat meals and dessert. Instead replace them by high protein foods like meat and nuts (yes they contains a fair amount of fat but that doesn’t matter if you have a healthy lifestyle) and a lot of fruits and vegetables. Protein needs more work than fat and carbs to be assimilated which means that your body burns more calories to use them compared to fat and carbs. Protein also helps your body building muscles.
Working out: Steady state cardio burns calories while you do it, which seems nice, but it’s in fact pretty useless, ok doing any kind of physical activity is still better than doing nothing, but there is some ways to make your workout effort a little more valuable (and that means harder too, nothing comes easy). While HIIT cardio training can have some benefits, steady state cardio provides no lasting benefits, except maybe the hability to jog for countless hours which is nice if you’re into that kind of things, but not if you want to get a better body composition. You don’t build muscles while doing steady state cardio. If you do weight training or do a sport that requires some impulse and/or physical strength, your body will build more muscle to sustain the activity you’re doing, more muscle means more calories burned while working out AND at rest. Now you may say “Burning calories at rest! I want that!”. You still have to workout to make it happen. You burn more calories at rest when you have more muscle mass because it needs to be fed like the rest of your body, it’s not really the case for fat because it’s just storage.
But maybe you don’t want to look like a bodybuilder? Building muscle won’t make you look like a bodybuilder if you don’t specifically work out to be one, big muscles require specific weight training, lots of eating (clean eating) and possibly other “enhancements”, so you won’t magically become one, and this is true for both men and women. You will instead get a toner body because your fat will soon be replaced by muscles, which are more evenly placed than fat. So in short, working out is a double positive, you burn calories by doing the workouts and you also make your body more efficient at burning calories between each training session (higher metabolic rate). Muscle is in fact heavier than fat, so it’s possible that you weight more while still looking fit at the same time, that why I’m saying that the number on the scale doesn’t matter.
If you weren’t already aware, those abs machine advertisings are misleading, localised fat lost doesn’t exist. Your body won’t prefer a place or another for taking his fuel while you’re exercising no matter if you do full body workouts or abs only, so do yourself a favor, work out evenly. It also means that it will be longer to lose belly and/or thigh fat if you happen to have an excess fat there, that’s part of the game.
And most importantly, if you decide to get in shape (or do any kind of change in your life), do it for yourself. Because you spend your whole life in your body, friends/family/boyfriends/girlfriends will come and go, but only you will stay with yourself until the end so make sure that it means something to you.