You’re a young man who wants to burn off some fat as quickly as possible. It’s a common problem in our culture. We have empty calories in most foods. Even something as seemingly healthy as fruit juice usually has a huge amount of sugar added into it. People tend to put weight on without even realizing it as a result, because they are not active enough to burn off many of the calories in the meals that they eat. And before you know it, you’re getting things ready for a great vacation and that’s when you notice that you’re going to end up bringing a lot of excess fat with you to show off at the beach.

You don’t just need to drop the weight; you need to burn fat off as quickly as possible in order to get the most out of an upcoming vacation. And now you’re probably wondering how to lose weight fast for men and started Googling for advice, right? That’s how you got here.  

I know quite a good deal about this topic, as I have struggled with my weight as a man in my own life. Since leaving the military it has been difficult for me to maintain a healthy weight, often because I became so invested into working that I did not keep up a regular fitness regimen. When you are on a computer from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed, typing hundreds of thousands of words a day then it can be hard to take breaks to go workout. Yet this is the only way that weight loss can be done. Over the past year I have lost fifty pounds of weight while still spending most of my time on my laptop, managing my businesses remotely. So I think I can provide some useful information for men seeking to lose weight fast.

Through my own research into the topic over the years I have noticed that looking for information on how to lose weight fast for men can be a difficult question for many fitness gurus to answer. People usually talk about their personal weight loss journeys in overly abstract terms. Some people like to fixate on weight loss journeys and considerable changes to their lifestyle. Other people insist that weight loss isn’t even possible. But the fact of the matter is that weight loss comes down to a single thing; calorie intake.

If you eat more calories than your body can use then you will put on weight as your body will store those unused calories as fat. And if you force your body to use more calories than you eat in a day then you’ll lose weight as this forces your body to tap into those fat stores of energy. Of course there are a large number of other factors that influence this process but any successful weight loss effort has caloric reduction at the foundation. 

Calorie Counting is the Easiest Weight Loss Strategy

The easiest way to lose weight is to practice calorie counting. Calorie counting can be a little difficult at first. But the first step is to simply write down how many calories any given meal is. You should then determine how many calories you’re burning per day without exercise. This is known as your basal metabolic rate or BMR. A simple BMR calculator should be able to provide a rough estimate of how many calories you’re burning as part of your typical day. Any physical activity should have a caloric number added to it as well. If you walk one mile a day, for example, then you’d add 100 calories to your BMR. This adjusted total is your TDEE or total daily energy expenditure

Once you have your TDEE it’s time to consider calorie cutting. One pound of fat is roughly equivalent to 3,500 calories. You’re burning off your TDEE every day. But every bit of food you eat is pushing that total down. When your caloric intake surpasses your TDEE then you’ll be gaining weight instead of losing it. Therefore the best way to lose weight is a calorie cutting strategy that will keep your caloric intake as low as possible. 

You’ll need to consider how much time you have to lose weight as well. For a man looking to lose weight fast you’ll need to do some planning. But in the span of a month most men will be able to drop a significant amount of weight if they are willing to put up with some mild fasting. For a man, how to lose weight fast in a month comes back to that TDEE. Say that a man’s TDEE reaches 2000 calories per day. Most meals have a pretty heavy caloric total. A large hamburger is about 700 calories, for example. 

One thing that seems to never be explained well in many of the videos and articles that I see online is that you have to use a food scale to weigh your food. Don’t just assume that online charts you find for how many calories are in a single meal of chicken breast actually means one single chicken breast; that’d be a huge mistake. For some idiotic reason serving sizes of food is always way smaller than any human would ever consider to be a meal. In my experience a chicken breast you buy at the grocery store is at least three times the size of what the online charts that measure chicken breast calories say a single chicken breast should be. So I highly recommend that you weight your food before you eat it in order to ensure you stay on track with your dieting.

I use the RENPHO Digital Food Scale to measure my calorie intake and compare the weight of food to the calorie charts for that food I find online. I suggest you do the same.

Now that you understand the basics of counting calories, let me provide you my best tips on how to lose weight fast.

How to Lose Weight Fast as a Man Tips

Stop Putting Calories Into Your Water

A bottle of soda is around 200 calories. So the answer to the question of how a man can lose weight fast in a month should be to reduce meal sizes through reduction of calories in each meal he eats. So start drinking plain water without anything added to it, as that just adds more calories to your meal. Yes, this means you must stop drinking coffee, beer and wine.

Consider this: if you usually have three sodas a day then eliminating these sodas from your diet would reduce your calories intake by 600. In less than five days that one simple change would burn off about a pound of fat.

Chances are that one of the reasons you are fat is because you drink many sodas and coffees throughout the day. Eliminate these drinks from your diet and you will be surprised at how much weight you drop.

This also applies to milk and juices, too. These drinks are advertised as being very healthy for you, and used in moderation they can be however if your goal is to lose weight you must eliminate calories from your diet and these drinks are high in calorie content compared to how filling they actually are.

Eliminate Your Empty Calories

A man who desires to lose weight fast should begin by considering where some of his empty calories are coming from. These are the calories that don’t make him feel full. Drinks are one of the biggest sources of empty calories. As such, you should switch to only drinking water as I mentioned before. For a man how to lose weight fast in a month will next consider the rate of loss. 

Candy is one of the biggest sources of empty calories, as candy is rarely ever filling even if it makes you feel good. Donuts, cookies and other kinds of cakes are another kind of empty calories. Basically anything that is pretty much just sugar is going to be an empty calorie, so cut out the ice cream.

Jog Every Day

I recommend that you jog 30 to 60 minutes a day while wearing a 20 to 50 lb weighted vest, whatever weight you feel you can jog in that is challenging but not impossible. This will maximize the amount of energy you use, causing you to burn calories that would have required you to jog for many more hours of time in order to lose the same amount of weight.

Some people also use treadmills at gyms that can have resistance settings, and that can work as well but wearing a weighted vest places additional strains on your body that require other muscle groups to work hard. Your back, shoulders, neck and abs will get a workout from jogging on pavement with a weighted vest that you will not receive from using a treadmill.

Another piece of useful fitness equipment you can use is weighted clothing, such as this weighted powersuit. This has less weight than a weighted vest but allows you to add more resistance to more versatile exercises. You can also wear it under normal clothing to challenge your body throughout the day.

For more advice on fitness equipment you can purchase to help you lose weight and get into better physical shape, read my article on how to build your own home gym cheaply and affordable.

Use Apps to Track Your Progress

Calorie counting is difficult without help. I use use the Samsung health app, as I own a Samsung device as my primary phone. This app has a calorie counting tracker built into it, and it also tracks how many steps you take a day and gives you alerts to help motivate you. You can also use the app to measure your heart rate and stress levels, too.

The Samsung Health App is very useful for tracking your progress.
The Samsung Health App is very useful for tracking your progress.

Weigh Yourself Daily

I believe that keeping track of your weight loss is important for staying on track with your dieting. Some people say don’t weight yourself every day but I need to measure my performance and see what results I get. If I’m not making progress then I know I need to reduce calorie intake and work out more that day. So I weigh myself every day when I wake up, when I am most dehydrated and after I relieve myself in the bathroom. This is when I am at the lowest weight I will likely be all day other than immediately after an hour long jog.

In addition to tracking my weight loss with my phone app, I also keep track of every pound I lose by putting keeping a paper log of the day I lost weight and what my new weight was.

The log I keep on my fridge that I update every time I lose weight. Also the mini-nude calendar is motivation.
The log I keep on my fridge that I update every time I lose weight. The mini-nude calendar is motivation.

I believe it’s best to keep the log on the fridge; you’re going to be insanely hungry during all of this and posting your log onto your fridge is going to help deter you from eating, as every time you want to open the fridge you’re going to have to look at your weight loss log and ask yourself if you want to eat or if you want to lose pounds so you can get the hot babes. The choice should be obvious.

How Many Calories Should a Man Eat to Lose Weight Fast?

The short answer is that you should reduce calories as much as possible. And it’s different depending on what foods that you eat. Considering eating apple;. if you can have one apple as a meal, then you’d only taking in about 300 to 500 calories a day. That would definitely result in weight loss and I have done an apple fast diet in the past, which did help me lose a lot of weight in a short amount of time.

The larger answer to how many calories should a man eat to lose weight fast comes down to how much he’s willing to work at it. If are willing to only eat three apples a day, and your TDEE is 3,500 then you’d come close to losing a pound a day.

Of course, you probably don’t have a TDEE of 3,500. The point is that to lose weight fast you’re going to have to force your body into a calorie deprived state where it is forced to live off your fat reserves.

So the answer to how to lose weight fast as a young man is to try fasting, or at least semi-fasting by reducing your calorie intake to below 1,000 calories a day. I achieve this by eating either one foot-long Turkey submarine sandwich per day from Subway (with as many veggies as you want, but no dressings or oils) or two bun-less McDoubles from McDonalds.

The next question you might have is, how many days should a man fast to lose weight? People are usually advised not to lose more than 4 lbs per week. But if someone really needs to drop pounds then it’s possible to do this. I suggest you start with a one week trial period to see how this kind of diet works for you. I find it is hardest the first few days but becomes much easier as my body adjusts its hunger levels to the reduced food intake.

In general, this one week period is a breaking point for most people. A full water only, one sandwich per day intermittent fasting over the course of a week can take a toll on both mind and body.

In the end everything returns to calories. If your body is pushed below its TDEE than it’ll burn some fat for energy. And for every 3,500 calories burned you’ll lose a pound of fat. Fasting is the fastest means of doing so. But if you only need to lose a smaller amount of weight you can simply determine how many pounds you need to lose and subtract it from a month’s worth of caloric intake.

I hope these tips help you in your own weight loss journey.

Author

Carey Martell is Editor in Chief for The Millennial Gentleman. A thirty something modern man who is politically independent, non-religious but a firm believer in ideals of chivalry and traditional family values. Carey lives his life as a vagabond digital nomad traveling and living life to the fullest while managing his businesses remotely with a laptop and internet hotspot connection.