The 2 Most Effective Ways to Lose Fat

Fat loss is a hot topic.

And there are way too many companies and people out there claiming to have quick and easy hacks to lose body fat in a short amount of time. While these can sometimes work, any fat loss is usually temporary, and you’re often wrecking your body in the process.

We need to approach fat loss in a smart and healthy way and look into the underlying mechanisms of why our body is holding onto fat. This is especially true if you’ve tried to lose fat before and have been unsuccessful.

While the two strategies I’m outlining here aren’t quick and easy “hacks” and they do require a bit of work, they are also really straightforward. In this article, I will clearly outline how you can implement these strategies to improve your fat loss efforts.

Avoid Vegetable Oil

Eating less does not lead to you losing fat.

While this is a popular opinion in the fitness and nutrition sphere, it doesn’t hold up when you investigate further. There are so many other factors at play beyond simply how many calories you’re eating.

For example, the quality of those calories is hugely important, and one of the worst things you can put into your body is vegetable oil.

One of the main mechanisms behind this is vegetable oil’s role in systemic inflammation:

“Inflammation can be caused by many stressors, including psychological stress, but the primary cause may surprise you: processed vegetable oils.” — Ben Greenfield

Vegetable oils are often unstable and therefore vulnerable to oxidative damage — which can be detrimental to the cells in your body, especially brain cells, and this is how they lead to high levels of brain and body inflammation.

Even more worrying is that the brain is especially vulnerable to free radicals, which are molecules that can damage our cells as well as cause inflammation and disease. Antioxidants neutralize free radicals, but vegetable oils disrupt the brain’s natural antioxidant system.

All this damage will drastically impair your ability to lose fat.

So the number one thing we are going to focus on for losing fat is cutting out these unhealthy oils and replacing them with good ones such as coconut oil and olive oil.

Note: You need to be careful not to let these oils get too hot. All oils have a smoke point, and beyond this, they become rancid and can also become highly inflammatory.

Also, store your oils in opaque glass jars to ensure they don’t oxidize. The smoke point of coconut oil is somewhere between 177–204°C, depending on the quality. The smoke point of olive oil is between 160–210°C, again depending on the quality.

“Contrary to what we’ve been told, industrial seed oils such as soybean, canola, and corn oils are not “heart-healthy” or otherwise beneficial for our bodies and brains; in fact, plenty of research indicates that these oils are making us sick.” — Chris Kresser

Control Blood Sugar

The next step is to control your blood sugar.

More specifically, we want to avoid big fluctuations in blood sugar, as this will impact our body’s ability to burn fat.

“If glycemic variability gets out of control, and your blood sugar gets too high, your body has two choices: get rid of the blood sugar by shoveling it into muscle tissue, or store it as body fat. If your energy expenditure during the day isn’t high enough to convert blood sugar into energy in your muscles, you’re going to gain fat tissue.”- Ben Greenfield

The best strategies for controlling blood sugar include:

• Doing strength/resistance training a few times each week

• Post-prandial walks — i.e., go for a walk after eating

• Standing more often

• Increasing the amount of movement you are engaging in each day

• Eating carbohydrates in the morning rather than the afternoon and evening, as your body will be better able to handle them

• Cold and heat exposure

While not always easy, fat loss is achievable for everyone.

By making a few simple changes in our lifestyle, with the two most important ones being avoiding vegetable oil and controlling our blood sugar levels, we can start to move towards a more ideal body fat percentage. While reducing calories can be a helpful tool, it doesn’t work for everyone and doesn’t always last long term.

However, by addressing what often leads to holding onto fat in the first place, we can create a more long-lasting impact.