How Do You Lose Body Fat Fast? (And Should You?)

How do you lose body fat fast? There's some nuance to this question, so let's unpack it a little bit.

How to Lose Body Fat Fast

Losing body fat quickly can be super motivating. But for most people, it's probably not the best idea. And there are a few reasons for this.

From my experience, I found that people can lose weight quickly or lose body fat quickly. However, when that happens, it tends to be a lot harder to sustain over the long term. One of the main reasons for this is when you're going on a diet, when you're in a fat loss phase, the habits that you build are important. These habits include things like eating more protein and paying attention to your overall calorie consumption.

What you're eating, dialing in your exercises, finding a schedule—all of those habits that you're building along the way are important. It takes time to build up those habits. However, if you go on a crash diet (or if you're just trying to lose as much body fat as you can) you might lose a bit of body fat, but you'll skip out on the sustainable lessons along the way.

While it might sound nice to lose body fat fast, that fat will typically always come back if you don't develop sustainable healthy habits.

Get Strategic With Your Fat Loss

Make sure that you are being strategic with your fat loss efforts. Typically, for most people, a general range of weight of fat loss per week is between 0.5 to 1% of body weight per week. I like to use the percentage because it's going to be based on the person's body weight rather than a universal arbitrary number. Because a 400-pound person losing a pound or two a week is very different from a 120-pound person shedding a pound. 

If you're using the scale to track your weight over the course of a few weeks or months, things like 0.5 to 1% of your body weight per week is a good place start. It's a large enough deficit to see good progress, but it's not too big that you're getting super fatigued or burnt out from your diet. Make sure that you're paying attention to all the things that matter the most for maintaining that fat loss over the long term—because that's what matters, right?

We don't want to just lose body fat and then gain it all back. We want to lose that body fat and do it in a way that's sustainable. And that's going to come from building the habits along the way.

Fat Loss Vs. Muscle Loss?

Another thing to think about is that when you lose weight fast, you might not just be losing body fat—it might also be muscle. If you are in a really deep calorie deficit (typically anything above like 30% of a deficit), it's going to be a recipe for losing muscle as well as body fat. 

But we don't want to lose muscle. Muscle gives you the figure that you want. When you lose the body fat, that's going to help shape your body with that toned look. That comes from having muscle, so you don't want to lose that muscle. So making sure that you are not losing weight too fast is going to ensure that you're holding on to that muscle mass. We also want to think about the scale. And if you actually are using that as your only metric, you might be missing a lot of the things that are happening with your body composition.

From my experience over the years working with clients, I've had clients lose body fat, and the scale actually doesn't even move that much. The reason for that is because they're actually building muscle at the same time. And that is going to be super, super beneficial over the long term.

We know muscle is super important for overall health, longevity, feeling good, and looking good. The scale is not the end all be all. When you're looking to lose body fat, don't just use the scale as your main metric. Track other things track, such as how you feel throughout the day and how you feel in your clothes. Use progress pictures, body tape measurements, and track your happiness. Other things besides just the scale are going to give you a bigger picture of what's actually happening with your body composition and how it's actually changing over time versus looking at a number on the scale.

You definitely want to make sure that you are paying attention to the long-term goal of losing that body fat, but you want to make sure that you're keeping it off—so losing body fat as fast as possible might not be the best route to go.

Want to learn more about fat loss and sustainable ways to go about it? Browse the other articles across our blog and podcast.