However, whether you gain or lose that weight from mostly fat or lean mass depends significantly on your dietary habits. There are many ways that nutrition can influence body composition, but many times when individuals adjust their nutrition plans they may not always see results.

Hormones, genetics, medical conditions, and many other factors play a role, so nutrition and exercise are only two of many factors to consider. If weight loss is your goal, research shows that protein intake is the most significant factor in where your weight loss will come from.

Consuming a high-protein diet during weight loss will help preserve your muscle tissue, improving your body composition by helping you reduce fat while keeping your lean mass.

If you are active, which you likely will be if you want to make body composition changes, more protein is needed to support your activity and recovery. Aim for a range of 1. If increasing muscle mass is your goal, you will likely need to increase overall caloric intake as well as protein.

Adjusting your diet to support muscle gain means consuming more calories than you burn and ensuring you get enough protein and carbohydrates to support your training, recovery, and muscle growth while also including enough healthy fats for optimal hormone functioning and health.

If weight gain is your goal, you will also need to increase caloric intake. This can mirror the same method as increasing muscle mass, focusing on nutrient-dense carbohydrate, fat, and protein sources to meet, and generally exceed, your needs. Exercise is how you can make the most noticeable changes to your body composition by increasing muscle mass.

Exercise, in general, has been shown to increase lean mass in normal-fat individuals and reduce fat mass in overfat and obese adults. Lowering fat mass and building or maintaining lean mass will improve body composition. Research shows that adults with excess body fat may particularly benefit from resistance exercise.

Studies show that resistance exercise affects lean and fat mass percentages, whereas aerobic exercise only affects fat mass.

If you aim to change your body composition, don't skip exercise. Losing weight with diet alone will result in loss of lean mass, including muscle, which will further cause adverse metabolic adaptations and will not cause the desired change in your body composition.

Sleep, stress, and hormonal factors interplay to impact body composition as well. For instance, a lack of sleep can impact your hormones, including those that control feelings of hunger and cravings. This could get in the way of your body getting the nutrients it's craving.

As well, without energizing sleep , you'll likely move less and not perform as well during your workouts. Recovery from training will also suffer, impeding muscle gain and fat loss results. Growth hormone is released while you sleep and impacts your muscle mass growth and loss of fat mass.

If you do not get enough sleep, your growth hormone levels may not be optimal. Some people have hormonal shifts that will make fat loss or muscle gain more difficult.

Hormone abnormalities such as PCOS or the reduced levels of testosterone and estrogen that come with age and menopause can significantly impact your results.

Similarly, stress can impact food choices, sleep, hormones , and more to make fat loss or muscle gain more challenging. Cortisol, which is a stress hormone, is considered to be catabolic muscle wasting and will make anabolism—muscle growth—difficult if it gets too high for too long.

Implementing stress reduction and sleep-promoting practices into your lifestyle will help you counteract these effects. Some people require a substantial break from calorie deficits and intense training to help their bodies relax and de-stress.

To address serious issues with stress and hormone levels, it's best to seek guidance from a healthcare professional. When it comes to cardiovascular exercise, you can choose whatever form you enjoy. This means so long as your calorie burn is the same, you will get the same results whether performing HIIT or steady-state cardio, so choosing whatever you prefer and can be consistent with will work best.

If you are eating correctly to support muscle gain, then performing resistance-based exercises will help you build more lean mass. If you are new to resistance training, you may even see increases in muscle mass while eating maintenance or even deficit calories.

Strength training also helps prevent the loss of lean mass, including muscle tissue, while in a calorie deficit. Types of resistance training range from bodyweight movements to heavy weight lifting.

If your goal is to build muscle size , follow best practices for hypertrophy-based strength training by using progressive overload , adding volume consistently over time, and managing fatigue with deload phases.

It's also key to track your progress , so you know when to make adjustments to keep on track toward your body composition goals. To put together an effective workout plan to improve your body composition, begin with a minimum of two weekly strength training sessions for each major muscle group.

If you have the time, splitting your workouts into 3 to 4 strength training sessions per week will likely be best. Gradually add sets and reps over time to help build muscle mass. If you enjoy cardio, adding two or more cardio sessions per week will support fat loss, but it will not increase lean mass.

Include any cardiovascular activity you prefer. Increasing your overall daily activity through natural movements like walking, climbing stairs, pacing, and taking movement breaks from work will also help you burn more calories if that is your goal.

Changing your body composition is a common goal that can have benefits for your overall health. Focusing on your protein consumption, a balanced exercise routine, and keeping stress levels low all contribute to this change.

If you have questions or concerns about your body composition or changing it, it's best to seek advice from a healthcare professional. Muth ND. What are the guidelines for percentage of body fat loss? American Council on Exercise.

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Preserving healthy muscle during weight loss. Adv Nutr. Pesta DH, Samuel VT. A high-protein diet for reducing body fat: mechanisms and possible caveats.

Nutr Metab Lond. Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM. Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports Medicine: nutrition and athletic performance. J Acad Nutr Diet.

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Sports Med - Open. Sanford Health. How to gain healthy weight. Drenowatz C, Hand GA, Sagner M, Shook RP, Burgess S, Blair SN. The prospective association between different types of exercise and body composition. Med Sci Sports Exerc.

Prather AA, Leung CW, Adler NE, Ritchie L, Laraia B, Epel ES. Short and sweet: Associations between self-reported sleep duration and sugar-sweetened beverage consumption among adults in the United States. Sleep Health. Duraccio KM, Whitacre C, Krietsch KN, et al. Losing sleep by staying up late leads adolescents to consume more carbohydrates and a higher glycemic load.

Published online December 17, zsab O'Donnell S, Beaven CM, Driller MW. From pillow to podium: a review on understanding sleep for elite athletes. Nat Sci Sleep. Chang CS, Liu IT, Liang FW, et al. Effects of age and gender on body composition indices as predictors of mortality in middle-aged and old people.

Sci Rep. Barber TM, Hanson P, Weickert MO, Franks S. In fact, the components that make up your fat loss approach are all majorly important. From what you're eating to how you're moving, sleeping, not stressing and where you are in your cycle will all have an effect on your ability to lose fat.

Read on for your full guide to losing body fat for good. If you're trying to lose body fat, there's one approach that could help you have your cake and eat it occasionally, too — calculating and counting your macros.

A nutritional technique popularised by bodybuilders, macro counting has since become mainstream, with millions of people popping their daily food into apps like MyFitness Pal. The volume and ratio of which you eat these foods can help you to lose body fat quickly.

Not sure what each macro is responsible for? Well, in broad strokes, protein is the building block of growing and repairing muscle mass, fat regulates healthy hormone production and secretion, and carbohydrates provide energy. Our full guide to macro counting will set you straight on what foods make up each macro as well as which foods to focus on for each.

The benefits of calculating the best macros for fat loss for you —everyone will have different macros — are that in theory, no foods are off-limits. They just have to be accounted for and adjusted for. Although of course the nutritional value of food should never be ignored.

If you're not up for calorie counting or tracking meals and would prefer to take a more intuitive approach to fat loss, Rabess suggests making small changes gradually. Here's a portion control guide to help you. Contrary to what diet culture would have you believe, cutting out entire food groups is a bad idea, she adds.

With 'everything in moderation' in mind there are a couple of across-the-board recommendations for what not to eat when trying to reduce body fat. The 'hidden' calories in alcohol are hard to swerve thanks to their association with relaxing and unwinding or celebrating and having a great time.

However, they can quickly add up to the equivalent of a few extra snacks or a small meal should you imbibe on the reg. Plus, alcohol can impact your sleep and how efficiently your body is able to repair.

Not the one. Not-so-nutrient dense and usually quite moreish, processed foods often pack a calorie wallop without the satiation of more nutrient-rich foods such as lean protein, vegetables and treats such as antioxidant-rich dark chocolate.

The question of whether cardio or weight training is better for fat loss is a debate that's still raging on. A study by North Carolina researchers found that, of the participants surveyed, those who did aerobic exercise lost more weight than those who strength trained.

But research from Wake Forest University concluded that weight training beats cardio, thanks to its ability to increase muscle mass. Other findings from Harvard School of Public Health found that even though strength training workouts are more successful than cardio sweat sessions, combining the two had the best effects for fat loss.

The reality is, both have their benefits and should be part of your weekly fitness routine. Regular strength training should be a cornerstone of most fitness routines, regardless of your goal. Because, besides helping to build muscle , the benefits of strength training include lowered cholesterol, improved posture and bone density, decreased risk of injury and better body composition.

Plus, building muscle tissue can help to rev up your metabolism and work to burn fat more efficiently. To do that you need to add more weight than your own body. Activity that favours the low-intensity sweet spot is NEAT exercise. A method of movement beloved by PTs, NEAT is how to burn fat and keep your efforts ticking along nicely.

Describing everything you do that isn't exercising, NEAT stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis and makes up a large portion of how many calories you burn a day aka your total daily energy expenditure or, TDEE. From washing the car to walking the dog and running upstairs, keeping your body moving throughout the day is key.

To find out how to increase your NEAT levels as well as what makes it a fat loss secret weapon, read our in-depth NEAT exercise explainer.

Bottom line: the best way to exercise to lose body fat is to combine regular resistance training with cardio workouts and daily movement. The short answer: it's impossible to give you a timeframe.

It's a little annoying, but there is a good reason behind it. To put it simply; everyone loses body fat at their own pace - there is no be-all-end-all answer that suits us all.

There are a tonne of factors that can affect how fast you lose body fat from nutrition to exercise to keeping yourself hydrated, and some are pretty surprising. For example, not only are there some medications like antidepressants and beta-blockers that have weight gain as a common side effect , but certain medical conditions, like Hyperthyroidism - a condition where your body doesn't produce enough metabolism-regulating hormones, can also make losing body fat harder and gaining weight easier.

With so many variables making it so hard to have a timescale, it's better to focus on how you can help your body out by making the lifestyle tweaks that encourage body fat loss; work on your nutrition, mix it up with your exercise routine, and get a full night of sleep. Although technically this one varies a lot based on the same factors mentioned above, there is a little bit more of a ballpark range that you can aim for to successfully maintain the fat loss.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention , or CDC, people who lose around pounds a week are the most successful at losing body fat. With pounds per week coming to pounds 1. If you do have higher levels of body fat and are looking to reduce them, trying to do so in a short window of time, such as a week, is not the safest or most sustainable way to go about things.

So, in short, no you can't lose body fat in 7 days in any significant quantity. It should also be noted that we are all different, and how quickly your body responds to lifestyle tweaks will be different to your sister's or your best friend's.

The best thing to do is to focus your nutrition and exercise as mentioned above, proper rest and stress management.

No quick fix truly works. When in the luteal phase the latter half , oestrogen starts to drop, meaning more cravings, and high-intensity training can feel harder.

So this is the time to cut yourself a bit of slack. The relationship between exercise and periods is an interesting one and something experienced differently for everyone. However you choose to approach it, know that some days you'll need to be a little kinder to yourself and that's OK.

Sometimes you're stressed. It happens. After a year and a half of upheaval cheers, coronavirus it's natural that you might feel stressed fairly often. Plus, your daily routine will have probably drastically changed without a commute or activities to pootle off to. Stress like this and chronic stress, in particular can cause your body to hold onto fat due to pesky stress hormones like cortisol.

Looking after your sleep hygiene and setting boundaries with work, down and leisure time is important to keep yourself in a place where your body feels safe and comfortable enough to lose fat. Here are nine ways to manage stress symptoms if you're feeling the pinch.

So you're happy with your body fat levels, but now you want to maintain. Surprisingly enough, you may need to increase the number of calories you're eating as you'll need more food to sustain the muscle tissue you've built.

Sites like Healthy Eater can help you calculate the best macros for maintenance. Got all that? Ready to smash some home workout, nutrition and hydration goals? Of course you are. Go get 'em, tiger.

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