Change your diet. You lose weight in the kitchen.

Grant yourself a cheat day from time to time but stay on your diet the first months. I’ve been on a diet for about three years now and I can have a cheat day once a week.

Expect it to be something you have to commit to the rest of your life but believe me, it gets easier. Don’t go on a crash diet but do something that you realistically can maintain.

Then start with some moderate exercise. Just walking more often is a great way to lose weight.

You can’t target zones to lose weight but you can tone zones by building muscle. Bigger shoulders lake your waist look thinner.

Stick to it. You’ll feel better overall. Good luck.

There’s a lot of bro-science in here (“Your body metabolizes sugar to basically fat”, no, it doesn’t, sugar is just a simple, easily metabolized carbohydrate, and as long as you aren’t exceeding your caloric intake regularly, it’s fine).

You can loose weight by exercise alone, but it’s a challenge; most people tend to start eating more (consciously or not) once they’re exercising. Exercise is only have of the equation. Diet is the other part. Most people are very, very resistant to changing their diet, because they have an emotional connection with food. Think about that; is what you eat more important to you than how you feel? Are you willing to make life-long changes, or are you just trying to have a beach body? “Dieting” is setting yourself up for failure; you want to be changing your entire lifestyle and relationship with food and movement.

So, let’s start off with something super-important: talk to a registered dietician. Don’t make radical changes to your diet without consulting a professional that’s qualified to give answers to YOU.

Second: spot fat reduction is not a thing, unless you want to go the surgical route. You need to reduce body fat all over in order to reduce fat on your neck and waist.

Third: do a resting metabolic rate test, and find out how many calories you burn just existing. That gives you an idea of what you need to eat to maintain your weight, what you need to your macros (daily carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake), and where you need to be as far as exercising. At one time you could get them done at certain Lifetime Fitness locations, and they were a couple hundred bucks. Without knowing this, dieting and exercise is being done blindly.

Fourth: Once you know your metabolic rate, and you’ve consulted with a dietician, start keeping track of everything that goes in your mouth in a day. Start by just taking a photo, and get used to that. (And yes, everything; every drink that isn’t plain water, every single thing you swallow.) Once you’ve gotten used to that, then start writing it down. Once you can reliably write everything down, start measuring everything. How many ounces of Cheerios go in your bowl in the morning, how much milk, and how many eggs are you scrambling? Once you’ve got that? then start comparing that to your macros. How many grams of carbs, protein, and fats are in your Cheerios, milk, and scrambled eggs (and don’t forget to count the butter that goes in the pan before you scramble your eggs!)? That tells you where you are, and where you need to add, and where you need to cut.

While you’re doing that:

Start with cardio, just to get in the habit of moving. I would suggest buying a heart rate monitor (I have a Garmin Instinct). Figure out your maximum heart rate (220 minus your age), and generally work at 60-80% of that, for 30-60 minutes at a time. Working above 80% increases your aerobic threshold, staying below 50% isn’t going to give you a significant benefit.

Weight training should be your bread and butter. Cardio burns calories now, weight training burns calories for up to 3-4 hours after you’re done in the gym, and muscle burns more calories just existing than fat does. If you have never done weight training before, I would strongly suggest that you hire a personal trainer. Look for a trainer that has at least a BS in exercise science or kinesiology, and a training certification from ASCM (American College of Sport Medicine) or the NSCA (National Strength and Conditioning Assoc.). Other physical trainer certifications are worth about as much as the paper they’re printed on, and I say this as someone that was certified through NASM. ASCM and NSCA have a very strong science-based approach that other certifying bodies lack. DO NOT sign up for months and months of training, unless you simply can’t motivate yourself, or are unable to replicate training prompts on your own; you want someone that will create a program for you to follow for several months that isn’t just trendy, bullshit exercises (see also: fitness “influencers”), and coach you through the proper way to complete the motion so that you can do it safely and effectively. Unless you have significant movement deficiencies, your goal should be to use freeweights and for almost everything. A trainer should be able to tailor your programming to your goals; there’s no one-size-fits-all. Generally speaking, if you’ve never lifted weights before, 30 minutes of fairly intense work is about all you’ll be able to manage.

Finally: Best case, with perfect diet and exercise, you should be losing no more than 1-2 pounds of fat per week. That’s the most that will be sustainable. Don’t worry about raw weight; worry about measurements, and body composition.

Is this a lot? Yeah, it is. And it’s barely scratching the surface.

But everyone starts on the ground floor.

There is no way to target specific areas of fat. You just need to expend more energy than you consume and you’ll get skinnier. So do lots of exercise, decrease portions, eat healthier and sleep better. It sounds simple but it takes a long time and a lot of effort to build and maintain good habits.

Losing weight is actually more about eating at a calorie deficit rather than what exercise you choose. Exercise is still very important in overall health though and can certainly help lose weight, but the actual mechanism is a calorie deficit.

But to more answer your question, chose something you enjoy so that you actually have motivation to stick with it. If you like cardio, do cardio, if you like weight lifting do that, if you like calisthenics do that.

And the last thing, be patient with it and yourself but be consistent in both exercise and eating well. As long as you are consistent you will see results.

Good luck!

You’re not going to have a lot of luck targeting areas, regardless of what Internet and checkout lane magazines might claim. Your best bet is generalized diet and exercise based weight loss plus building areas you want to build (arms, legs, butt, chest, whatever).

My old boss who lost over 100lbs, once said this to me:

I asked him: “What did you eat to lose all that weight?”

He said: “Everyone knows how to lose weight, you know exactly what you’re doing to yourself.”

Man, I love Lenny.

Some thoughts.

Regarding weight loss, diet is more efficient to exercise. But exercise has tons of other benefit, especially regarding mental /physical health and it can also be the base of healthy habits to improve your lifestyle. Just compare one hour on the threadmill with a starbuck’s pumpkin spice latte.

Gym is not for everybody, there is tons of other sports, if you want to stick with it, find a sport you enjoy in a club with nice persons. If you exercise like you clean the toilets you won’t be regular, if you have a fun time with friends you will.

If you can afford a couple of kickstart session with a trainer, go for it.

Depending how overweight you are avoid running, and do body weight training and elliptical

You cannot spot target weight loss. It will decrease as a total over your whole body rather than in a particular area. And don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

If you want to lose weight in the most efficient way possible, just sit. Or rather, SIT.

https://runrepeat.com/sprint-interval-training

Don’t bother with the gym, it will almost certainly just be a waste of money and a source of stress.

Instead, learn how to eat healthily (good start is eating less in general and eating more greens) and start easing yourself into getting more exercise.
The key to weight loss is making changes that you can maintain for the rest of your life, otherwise you will inevitably rebound and be sad.

If you can, probably the single most effective way to lose weight for most people is to start biking or walking to work, this is a trivial way to burn tons of calories compared to driving.

Also important is to fully expect it to take a year before you notice a difference, this is going to be a lifestyle change so you have to commit, and it’s better to be positively surprised to see a difference early, than the opposite.

Hunger is the feeling of fat leaving the body.

Yewtu.be/watch?v=NfassplthxU eat less calorie dense food, and eat more protein.

According to the video below, exercising doesn’t actually cause you to burn more calories as your body just chooses to delay non-essential stuff for another time.

https://youtu.be/seDmwOQtazU?si=cLPFuF_6grASR93C

As I understand it, if you increase your muscle, your body will burn more calories n a daily basis whereas cardio just burns calories in the current moment.

So focus on eating less calories than you burn (really helps to just cut out the crap and eat “whole food” rather than ultra processed crap - read “ultra processed people” for more info on this). Consume more protein to help muscle growth.

You unfortunately can’t target specific areas for fat burning, it’s pretty random.

I’m going to disagree slightly with the majority of the comments here and say that excersize is still very important for weight loss.

First off though, because I’m sure some folks are already getting their pitchforks out, all weight loss is CICO, and you can absolutely hit any goal weight just by diet alone without ever getting off your couch. Additionally, what works for weight loss (in terms of actual techniques to achieve a net Calorie deficiency) varies from person to person, what I say below may totally not be the case for you, and that’s fine.

All that being said, I think you’re going to have a much easier time of it if you also workout in some way.

For one thing, more excersize means more calories out. You can easily (well, your definition of “easy” may vary lol) burn 500 calories during a single workout. If you’re making smart eating choices, 500 calories is a lot of food. You would be hard pressed to be physically able to eat 500 calories of an air fried vegetable medely for example. This means that you can lose weight while not feeling starved. And even for less healthy choices, it’s still a fair bit of food. You can eat 2 slices of pizza for that one workout and still break even from a calories standpoint.

Basically, excersize = free food - most people fail their diets because they’re tired of being hungry all the time and tired of not being able to enjoy the foods they love. Adding excersize into the mix means you can eat more, and still enjoy sensible servings of your favorite “treat” foods while still losing weight.

Secondly, for me at least, working out gives you motivation in the kitchen later. It’s a lot harder to cave and order that pizza instead of making the salmon and veggies you had planned for dinner when you know that doing so means “wasting” all that sweat and effort you put in at the gym earlier that day. Remember how earlier I pointed out that a single excersize = 2 slices of pizza? Well that also works the other way around - when you go to reach for a slice of pizza, you wind up asking yourself “is this one slice of pizza worth half a workout?” for me at least, the answer is often no, and even when it’s yes (every diet needs room for your favorite junk foods in moderation), I keep asking myself that for each slice, and so will stop eating before I go overboard.

Finally, you probably don’t just want to lose weight. OK, maybe you do, idk you - but if you succeed and hit your goal weight, you’ll probably just transition to being insecure about fat deposits to being insecure about being scrawny. If your goal is to look good, at least some muscle tone is necessary, and if your goal is to be generally healthier, than it’s even more important to add exercise to the mix.

Just my $0.02, Im no dietician or personal trainer, but I’ve been working hard at getting in shape and have lost 13 pounds in the last month through a combination of diet and exercise, and I truly don’t think I could have done it without having added excersize to my routine

You should record yourself in the mirror and act like a victim when guys pass by you. Then post the videos to tiktok.