6 Life Hacking Habits for Fat Loss

Track Your Food

If you are trying to lose weight there are two variables you need to keep track of. How many calories that you expend and how many calories that you eat.

Tracking everything you ever eat is not necessary but you need to have a general idea of how many calories you are eating. Building the habit of recording your calories will help build a proper diet routine. 

This is the first on the list because this will make the largest difference in your healthy weight loss journey. Crash diets of eating very little do not work in the long run but creating a healthy calorie deficit each day will.

20-30 minutes of non-exercise exercise

This is not exercise, this is a non-exercise exercise. This is 20-30 minutes a day of doing something that gets your heart rate up, something as simple as walking. This does not need to be done every day but rather trying to accumulate about 200 minutes of moving around per week. This could be hiking, 20-30 minutes of walking after lunch, or getting off the bus a stop early. 

This extra movement will not only burn extra calories over the week but also improve your cardiovascular health. Ideally, this activity should get your heart rate up to about 60% of your maximum heart rate. Which is intense enough for increased breathing but light enough that you can still talk. The science behind this is trying to incorporate 200 minutes of Zone 2 training a week. Besides just burning calories you are training your body to be stronger and build stronger cells, which will improve fat loss and live longer.

Get Enough Sleep

Sleep is often overlooked as a vital component of fat loss but studies have shown that by increasing your daily sleep by 1 hour, you can reduce your body fat by 6-7 pounds. This is a dramatic amount of weight that can be lost by just sleeping more, but also better recovery, better metabolism, and living longer.

‍For our full article on sleep click here.

Use a Workout Journal

Using a workout journal is a great habit to form. The key reasons are:

To keep you accountable

Monitor your progress

See what is working vs. what is not

To make sure you are challenging yourself

Sometimes or most of the time, you will not feel like working out. It is very easy to reduce the weight, reps, or time to make it easier for the day. Using a workout journal keeps you accountable to do what you need to do. You will be far more likely to complete a workout when it’s written done and you have made that commitment to yourself. This is not just for athletes, everyone can benefit from a journal.

Prepare Food for the Next Day

What you eat is so vital in losing or gaining weight. Everyone gets busy and it is easier to purchase your lunch or dinner during those times. If you are doing that it is much more difficult to track what you are eating. Also, by preparing your food you take away the human aspect of not knowing what to eat or scrambling to put something together. With food preparation, you will know what you are going to eat at each meal of the day and you remove that variability.

Studies show that people who spend more time in food preparation have healthier eating habits, eating more fruits/vegetables and snacking less. This also translated to money saved!

Drink More Water

The habit of drinking more water is a life-hack to losing weight. One reason is because to more water you drink the less hungry you will be. By drinking one extra cup of water people are likely to eat 68 fewer calories, and by drinking 3 cups you will eat 205 fewer calories. 200 calories is the equivalent of a one-hour walk.

Another water hack is drinking two cups of water before eating, people who do this have shown to eat 22% fewer calories than people who do not. Outside of just being more full and less hungry drinking water does boost your metabolism. This is because when you drink water your body needs to warm it after you ingest it. Drinking two cups of water at 71 degrees Fahrenheit led to a 30% increase in metabolic rate.

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These are 6 daily fat loss hacking habits you can incorporate to burn extra calories and eat fewer calories during the day. These are all very simple to incorporate into your life and lead to very dramatic results in fat loss.

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