fat loss exercise Archives

June 13, 2025 By Urvi Gohil 3 Comments

5 Fat Loss Mistakes You Might Be Making

The internet can be useful – there’s no denying that. Those fun DIY tricks and tutorials that help you pick up a new skill-set are pretty brilliant, aren’t they? But, like all things, the internet has a downside. While it helps you discover something new every day, it can also lead you down a rabbit hole of misinformation – particularly when it comes to health.

Take for example: Quick Fat Loss Tips or Lose Fat in 10 Days. While these headlines grab attention, they often promote unrealistic, unsustainable, and even harmful methods. So if you’re on a fat loss journey, here are 5 common mistakes you might be making – along with why it’s time to ditch the myths.

1. Starving for Fat Loss

Research shows that chronic starvation reduces muscle mass and organ size by up to 20%. Weight loss through starvation can also lead to lower bone density, making you more injury-prone.

It doesn’t stop there. Starving slows down your metabolism and hampers overall body function. Worst of all, once you return to eating normally, your body may store more calories as fat—undoing all your efforts.

Golden rule: Eat healthy, balanced meals at the right time. Nourishment, not restriction, is key.

2. No Rest Day

Think over-training equals faster fat loss? Think again.

Rest days are crucial to avoid muscle overuse and allow your body to recover. Lifting weights causes tiny muscle tears that can only repair – and grow – during rest. Over-training can actually stall fat loss, disturb your hormonal balance, and even cause amenorrhoea (loss of menstrual periods).

Tip: Take one rest day a week. Try light activity like walking, yoga, or deep breathing exercises.

3. Excess Protein Doesn’t Mean Better Fat Loss

Yes, protein helps you feel fuller and supports muscle maintenance – but more is not always better.

A high-protein diet alone won’t do the trick. Too much protein can strain digestion. What you really need is balance – enough fruits, vegetables, and complex carbs alongside your protein to support healthy fat loss.

4. Lack of Optimum Sleep

Getting fewer than six hours of sleep reduces leptin (the satiety hormone) and increases ghrelin (the hunger hormone). Translation? You’ll feel hungrier and less satisfied.

Studies show that people who sleep 7+ hours a night lose more fat and preserve more muscle mass. Lack of sleep also spikes cortisol – body’s stress hormone – which hinders fat breakdown and increases muscle loss.

So if you’re waking up early to squeeze in a workout but skipping sleep, it might be time to rethink your schedule.

5. Keeping Unrealistic Expectations

Setting tangible goals is great – but aiming too high, too soon, can backfire.

Studies show that people with overly ambitious expectations, especially those who are overweight or obese, are more likely to drop out of fat loss programmes within 6–12 months due to disappointment.

Instead: Set modest, achievable goals with the guidance of a certified coach. Progress that’s steady is progress that sticks.

Want to stop guessing and start getting real results? Speak to a GOQii Coach by subscribing to Personalised Health Coaching here.

Did this article help you? Share your thoughts in the comments! And for more tips, check out our Healthy Reads on weight loss here.

#BeTheForce

Disclaimer: The information provided in this blog is for general awareness and educational purposes only. It is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider for personalised medical guidance or concerns related to your health. Images shown are for representation purposes only and may not depict the exact recommendations or outcomes.

June 30, 2023 By Palak Mittal 11 Comments

How To Break a Weight Loss Plateau

You have been working hard on your weight loss journey by following a healthy, low-calorie diet and improving your exercise habits. Your reward has been watching your weight go down on the weighing scale. Now, at some point, your weight stops decreasing! The weighing scale doesn’t tip in your favor anymore and you’re left frustrated! Don’t worry. You’ve just hit a weight loss plateau.

It’s pretty common and nothing to get discouraged about. It is normal for weight loss to slow down and even stall. But, by understanding what causes a weight loss plateau, you can decide how to respond and avoid backsliding on your new healthy habits.

Here are some ways you can overcome a weight loss plateau to stay on track and keep going!

How Can You Overcome a Weight Loss Plateau?

When you reach a plateau, you may have lost all of the weight you can on your current diet and exercise plan. Ask yourself if you’re satisfied with your current weight or if you want to lose more. In which case, you’ll need to adjust your weight loss program.

If you’re committed to lose more weight, try these tips for getting past the plateau:

1. Drop Your Calorie Intake

To cut down fat, a calorie deficit diet is needed. Consume fewer calories than you burn per day. Maintain a food journal to track your calories. Then slowly reduce your calorie intake by 500 calories per day to boost fat loss. Fat percentage can be measured either by using callipers or with the BCA machine.

2. Rotate Your Workout Routine

Have you been addicted to the treadmill and cross training for the past 4 months? It’s time to switch! Once your muscles become familiar with the same old workout, it makes your regular routine less effective. To see a change in body fat, you have to get outside your fitness comfort zone. Introduce High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) to burn body fat effectively. Try a total-body circuit. Instead of a basic sprint interval, you’ll work your entire body which will boost your metabolism. Also note that you need to progress slowly and deliberately when incorporating high-intensity exercise into your routine. Doing too much too fast can leave you too sore, tired or even injured.

3. Eat More Protein

Protein is essential to fat loss, as it maintains your muscle during a calorie deficit. It keeps you satiated, which prevents overeating and snacking on junk food. Also, it boosts your calorie burn throughout the day because takes more energy to digest as compared to carbs or fat. Eat at least one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight every day and get your protein from whole sources like nuts, eggs, lean meats, yogurts, and quality protein powders.

4. Eat More Healthy Fats

To lose more fat, eat more fat. This might seem absurd but healthy fats such as animal fats, real butter, coconut oil, nuts, and avocados actually make you leaner and more muscular—they keep you full & maintain your good testosterone levels. Eating healthy fats force you to lower your carbohydrate intake. Get at least 30 percent of your calories from good sources of fat and never consume artificial fats, which can cause health problems like heart disease.

5. Stay Hydrated

Hydration is important as your body often craves food even when you are mildly dehydrated. We are often confused whether we are thirsty or hungry because the symptoms of hunger and thirst are similar. Aim to drink 2-3L of water per day plus additional fluids lost during activity.

6. Try Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting increases fat oxidation, which promotes more fat loss. Also, fasting along with exercise boosts the insulin sensitivity, helping your body send nutrients to muscle rather than fat. Fasting during a calorie-restricted diet can lead to weight loss.

7. Get Plenty of Sleep

Insufficient sleep can interfere with weight loss by reducing your metabolic rate and shifting your hormone levels to promote hunger and fat storage. Hence, have at least 7-8hrs of good quality sleep.

8. Eat Your Veggies

Vegetables are loaded with important nutrients and are low in calories and carbs. The fiber in your greens aids digestion and also provide your body the essential antioxidants it needs. Including them might help you break through the weight loss plateau.

9. Don’t Rely on a Weighing Scale

The numbers flashing on your weighing scale might be misleading because it does not reflect the loss of body fat. Instead, focus on how you feel, whether your old clothes fit you or if your measurements have changed.

10. Check for Medical Conditions

If you’re still stuck on the weight loss plateau despite all your efforts, then you might need to check for a medical condition. Check your thyroid levels, hormonal imbalance, PCOD, or for Vitamin deficiencies such as Vitamin D or B12. You will first need to correct a medical issue to lose more weight.

Stress also plays a part in weight loss as it raises the level of cortisol in the body which in turn increases weight. Most important of all, don’t get demotivated and work towards your goals. The weight loss plateau is a part of the journey and with the right direction, you can overcome it!

If this article helped you, let us know your thoughts in the comments below! You can also find more articles on weight loss here. If you want to overcome a weight loss plateau and need some advice or guidance, reach out to our experts by subscribing to GOQii’s Personalised Health Coaching here.

#BeTheForce

August 8, 2022 By GOQii 10 Comments

Put Your Fat On Flame With Interval Training

Most of us have this desirable goal of losing fat but, when asked to act on it, we have a fixed set of excuses ready – No time! Too tough for me! Too boring to repeat the same pattern, etc. It’s time to ditch these excuses and rev up workouts which consume less time, can be done easily and are not monotonous. We suggest going for Interval Training!

What Is Interval Training?

Interval training is a workout in which we alternate the bursts of high-intensity exercises with intervals of lighter activity. All that we do here is, we repeatedly challenge our body and then give it shorter breaks to recover, for a massive cardio blast. It helps burn more calories in a short period of time, as compared to a steady-state exercise.

How Does It Work?

When we vary the intensity while working out, it leads to muscle confusion. Our body gets confused and wonders what’s happening! As a regulatory mechanism, our heart rate shoots up and it starts pumping more blood. More the blood, higher the Oxygen and to your surprise, fat combustion occurs more efficiently in the presence of Oxygen.

Ever wondered why a candle stops burning when we put a glass over it and block the Oxygen? That’s exactly the principle. Any burning process requires O2 which is a key to burning fat. And since interval training involves a lot of Oxygen, it’s been gaining fame in the fat loss/inch loss sector.

There are no hard and fast rules in interval training. We can have variations as we want, to make it most enjoyable and keep boredom at bay. We can:

Interval walk: Walking fast for 2 minutes, then walking slowly for a minute, again fast, then slow and go on this way as long as we can
Interval runs Alternating 2 minutes run with a 1-minute walk
Interval swim: Alternating fast-paced swimming moves with slow-paced moves

We can also try this with cycling, dancing, strengthening exercises (Tabata – being the most popular form of High Intensity Interval Training) and the list can go on.

It’s quite possible to take interval training to many levels. The length and speed of each high-intensity interval solely depend upon our strength and capacity. To get better with it, we need to make sure we push our body way past our comfort zone each time we do it. Remember, not to rush into strenuous exercise before our body is ready, to avoid injury. Ensure a good warm-up session before starting with it, and end it with stretches.

If you are a beginner to exercising, We’d say, don’t start with interval training directly. Give your body some time to build the stamina with steady cardio workouts for a few weeks to a month. You can then add interval training to your routine. In fact, you can also add these interval training plans to your gym routine once a week to enhance your speed and cardiovascular endurance.

So what are you waiting for? Jump into your workout shoes and jazz up your workout routine by adding interval training! If you have a chronic health condition (Hypertension or Cardiovascular illness), it’s better to keep away from interval training to avoid any aggravation. You can check with your trainer or coach to take the best course. For further guidance, you can subscribe for GOQii’s personalized health coaching and get the best exercises and habits to meet your weight loss goals.

Additionally, you can also join our online classes on GOQii PRO, where our certified fitness experts will guide you on the correct form and posture in real time, while making sure that you are well motivated! You can book a class now from the GOQii App.

For more on fitness and weight loss, check out Healthy Reads.

Get Active and #BeTheForce

March 23, 2018 By Ranveer Allahbadia 1 Comment

Best fat loss exercise for Indian women

In India, most women have only one fitness goal – WEIGHT LOSS.

From my experience as a fitness coach, most young girls/women have similar goals – flat stomach or that thigh gap or those toned arms.

One of the biggest mistake women make in their fitness pursuit is that they are chasing “weight loss” when they really should be chasing “fat loss”.

Young girls and women have a very clear picture of their fitness targets. But, too many women are misinformed about the CORRECT way of achieving those targets.

KEY: CARDIO will not get you to your goals fast.

Losing WEIGHT by purely starving yourself and doing exhaustive cardio workouts, but neither is good for your overall well being, nor is it the most effective means of burning fat.

Let’s break it down. When you do any form of CARDIO exercise. Running, jogging, even some hipster cardio exercise like some form of dance or martial arts, you’re burning calories. You’re burning off the fat that is stored in your body and using it for energy.

So it is burning fat but, keep in mind that the fat burns only WHILE you’re doing that particular exercise. Once you go home, your body enters a period of rest and things are normal.

Now let’s consider what happens to your body during and after WEIGHT TRAINING. So weight training is like any other EXERCISE. In order to go through with it you need to exert your body. You need to spend calories.

While you’ve undergone resistance training, while you’ve done squats or push ups or a bicep curl, your muscles are made to fight against that resistance. In doing so, your muscles undergo a number of minute tears.

After your exercise, when you go home, and you’re resting, these tears in your muscles are repaired by your body. In order to repair them, your body spends calories, and continues to burn fat even when you’re on your couch, watching TV and even when you’re asleep.

SIMPLE CARDIO – Burn calories only while you exercise.

RESISTANCE TRAINING – You’re burning calories while you exercise AND you’re burning calories even after the exercise, while you’re chilling at home.

The added advantage of resistance training is the lean muscle you put on in the long term. The more muscle you put on, as a woman, the more fat you’ll burn.

The other big issue I’ve seen in India, is that many women are afraid to take up weight training because they think they’ll end up looking like a “bulked up bodybuilder”. They don’t wanna get “Bulky”. You need to know that these overly bulky women have taken a LOT of steroid injections to make their bodies turn into THAT.

Many of them have used testosterone, the male hormone. The testosterone is what makes those women bulky and it’s also what makes mens’ muscles bigger.

Rest assured you won’t become like that UNLESS you take testosterone injections. As a woman, your natural biological make up will make you look beautiful always, it will make you look “girly”, unless YOU mess around with it.

Priyanka chopra, Bipasha Basu, Alia Bhatt. All these women lift weights and have been lifting weights for a long time. They aren’t bulky by any means.

If you still aren’t convinced about this, I urge you to at least try it out for a couple of months. Go to a good gym, get a good trainer, see the results for yourself. As a woman, especially if you’re someone who has never tried resistance training, you owe it to your body to give it a shot. You have only one body, its time to maximize its potential.

THIS IS THE FASTEST WAY TO BURN FAT.