Tons of fitness videos promise the secret to fast fat loss… Then hit you with a “fat loss workout” that’d make a Navy SEAL throw up, a “fat loss diet” that repeatedly calls for boiled chicken for lunch… and lots of crying. If you’re not suffering, it’s not working. But what if I told you a simple walking method can help you lose fat faster than killing yourself with cardio? I know that sounds hard to believe, but it’s just one of four science-backed fat loss strategies I’ll show you to help you lose fat up to 2x faster—without losing muscle. And I’ve crunched the numbers to prove it.
The first fat loss strategy is adjusting your fat intake. For health reasons you don’t want to go below around 35 to 50 grams of fat per day. Here’s what I want you to do: Think about the fats you eat everyday. Cheese, butter, and even healthy fats like avocado. Starting tomorrow, cut however much you usually have of these in half. I want you to also check if you’re eating any high fat proteins. Try having just one of these daily, then for all your other meals, choose a more pure protein source from this list. And you can apply this same concept even when you’re eating out. If you just cut 1 fat source in half and make 1 protein swap, boom you’re saving up to 250 calories per day, which already speeds up your fat loss by half a pound per week.
And you can lose even more by combining it with the next strategy, the walking method. What most people don’t know is that instead of relying on a specific “fat loss workout”, a highly active person can burn up to 2,000 more calories daily just from NEAT compared to someone who’s sedentary. While cardio is great for your heart and health, it’s kind of just “meh” for fat loss. A much better approach I personally use myself and with our Built With Science clients is plain old walking. Now I’ve set a goal in my Built With Science app to hit 10,000 steps a day and it keeps track of it for me. But you can use the health app on your phone, and just aim for anywhere between 7,000 to 12,000 steps a day. But 30 minutes of walking is already 3,000 steps and for the average person can burn anywhere from 100 to 200 calories. Do that simple 30 minute walk every day and after a month you’ll lose an extra pound of fat, or an extra quarter pound of fat per week.
And you can speed this up even faster with a dieting strategy I call the accidental deficit. During your busiest days, rely on quick grab-and-go protein sources and ready to eat fruits. Then when you finally get home, have a big dinner of lean protein and vegetables instead of ordering takeout. Then, just go to bed before you start snacking. If you do this right, you could end your day eating as little as 1,300 to 1,600 calories. For most people this is a huge deficit and is why I do NOT recommend doing this “fat loss diet” more than once or twice a week max – and preferably on your rest days. But even just doing this once a week can increase your average daily calorie deficit by about 100 calories, and help you get rid of an extra quarter pound per week.
But this will work even better if you combine it with the last strategy for fast fat loss – eating foods that do the work for you. Most people don’t know this but your body burns a certain amount of calories just from digesting food. And protein is special because a solid 20 to 30% of its calories immediately get burned up for digestion, absorption, and metabolism – which is more than double any other food. As a result, studies have shown going from a low-protein to a high-protein diet can raise your daily calorie burn by 4–5%. For a 2000 calorie diet, that’s an extra 90–100 calories burned per day. It may not sound like much, but that’s like doing a 10 minute jog everyday, and can add up to a pound of fat loss every month. Not to mention all the muscle building benefits this has as well. So take your bodyweight in lbs and multiply it by 0.8. If you’re not getting anywhere near that, then bump up how much protein you have in each meal to get closer to that target. And if you’re already hitting that, great, focus on swapping your processed foods for whole foods high in fiber and resistant starch.
Put all 4 strategies together, and even being conservative with the numbers, you’re looking at an extra 1.2 pounds of fat loss per week. That’s over twice what most people manage on a typical diet.
