Lowering your stress, getting enough sleep, exercising more and eating less will together help you lose weight quickly. How fast you want to lose the weight will determine how much exercise you should do and how many calories you should cut. One pound is made from 3,500 calories, so to lose 40 pounds you will need to eliminate 140,000 calories from your diet or burn it off by using calories for energy. Exercise is one way to use up calories, but you also burn calories just through living, even during sleep. Other ways to elevate your metabolism are to eat often throughout the day, build muscle and do moderate-to-vigorous intensity aerobic activity.
Step 1
Do yoga. Yoga is effective for strength training and stress reduction, two things that contribute to weight loss. Go to two to three classes a week, as recommended by the CDC for strengthening your muscles and contribute to weight loss.
Step 2
Get enough sleep. REM or rapid eye movement sleep raises your metabolism so that your body burns a fourth of a pound per hour, according to Dr. Walter Moraes of the Universidade Federal Sao Paolo, Brazil. Dr. Moraes's study compared people sleeping for eight hours and people lying in bed for eight hours while being awake, finding that participants burned three times the amount of calories while asleep.
Step 3
Use a food journal to write down everything you eat normally for at least a few days so that you know how many calories you are eating on a daily basis. You can then adjust your diet accordingly.
Step 4
Eat four to six small meals per day. Plan out your meals so that the combined amount per day is up to 1,000 calories fewer than you were eating previously. The American Obesity Association says that a 1,000-calorie reduction should add up to two pounds of weight loss per week.
Step 5
Do aerobic exercise five days week. Work up to a minimum of 30 minutes, but aim for 60 to 90 minutes for the most weight loss. The CDC recommends moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise at a rate that increases your breathing and heart rate so you are sweating and can either just hold a conversation or only speak a few words at a time.
Step 6
Do three days a week of strength training. Yoga counts, but you can also try Pilates, weight lifting, or calisthenics like push-ups and squats.
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