3 Underrated Ways to Lose Fat
For fat loss, people tend to gravitate toward the dramatic. Extreme diets, punishing workouts, expensive supplements, and revolutionary innovations dominate headlines and social media feeds, but never seem to work.
Meanwhile, some of the most effective, sustainable, and evidence-based approaches remain quietly in the background, delivering consistent results for those who discover them.
These underrated strategies don't promise an overnight transformation. But they'll create meaningful, lasting changes in your body composition without requiring extreme sacrifice, unsustainable restrictions, or complicated rules.
Robust scientific evidence backs them. They work together. And perhaps most importantly, they can be adapted to virtually any lifestyle, budget, or fitness level.
Why are these strategies underrated? Partly because they lack the marketing appeal of quick fixes. Partly because they require consistency rather than intensity. And partly because their benefits compound gradually over time, making them less immediately gratifying than more extreme approaches.
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1. Protein
When people think about fat loss, they typically focus on cutting calories, eliminating carbohydrates, or avoiding dietary fat. Meanwhile, protein remains overlooked, despite offering advantages that directly support fat loss.
Satiety and Appetite
Protein increases feelings of fullness. Research shows that high-protein meals produce 25–50% greater 'satiety' ratings compared to high-carbohydrate meals with the same calorie content.
Protein intake stimulates the release of appetite-suppressing gut hormones, like GLP-1, PYY, and CCK. It also reduces levels of ghrelin (i.e., the “hunger hormone”). These hormone changes begin within minutes of eating protein and can last for hours, keeping hunger at bay.
So, you'll naturally eat less without having to rely on willpower or conscious restriction. Studies show that people who increase protein intake throughout the day consume fewer calories.
The Thermic Effect of Food
Your body burns calories just digesting and processing the food you eat. This process, called “diet-induced thermogenesis” (DIT). And protein has the highest DIT by far.
Your body uses 20–30% of protein's calories just to digest and process it, compared to under 3% for fat and 5–10% for carbohydrates. This means that of every 100 calories of protein you consume, only 70–80 calories are actually available for your body to use; the rest are burned through digestion itself.
Although this might seem like a small amount of calories, it compounds over time, especially if protein comprises a large portion of your daily calorie intake.
Muscle Preservation
When you restrict calories, your body needs to find energy somewhere. It can break down fat stores (best option). But it can also break down muscle tissue. Unfortunately, calorie restriction often results in losing both fat and muscle. Research shows that people who consume higher protein during weight loss lose less muscle (if any at all).
Why does this matter? Muscle tissue is metabolically active. This means it burns energy continuously just to maintain itself. A kilogram of muscle requires ~13 kcal/day, which is 2-3 times more than fat tissue. Preserving muscle means maintaining a higher 'metabolic rate', making fat loss easier and weight regain less likely.
How Much Protein Do You Actually Need?
The optimal amount depends on your physical activity level, current body composition, and your fat loss goals. However, research provides some guidance.
To preserve muscle during fat loss while restricting calories: aim for 1.6–2.4 g/kg/day. So, for a 100 kg person, this translates to 160–240 g/day, or roughly 40–50 g per serving, across three to five meals or snacks throughout the day.
Most people can target the lower end of this range. Whereas older adults, those who are physically active and have a lot of muscle already (e.g., athletes), should aim towards the upper end of the range.
Practical Implementation Strategies
While total daily protein intake is the primary goal, it is easier to distribute protein intake throughout the day. Start by increasing protein by 10–20 grams per day until reaching your daily target. This gradual approach can prevent digestive issues and allow your appetite to adjust naturally.
Batch cooking proteins like grilled chicken, hard-boiled eggs, or legume dips saves time and removes decision-making. Have convenient, ready-to-eat protein sources available for when you're busy or hungry. Canned fish, protein powders, Greek yoghurt, and pre-cooked lean meats are cheap and convenient options.
2. Weightlifting
When people think about exercise for fat loss, they envision hours of cardio: running, cycling, or elliptical machines. Weightlifting, meanwhile, remains overlooked as it is associated with bodybuilding and athletic performance rather than fat loss. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how weightlifting affects metabolism, body composition, and long-term fat loss success.
Muscle-Metabolism Connection
Muscle tissue is metabolically active. It continuously burns energy just to maintain itself, even while you're sleeping or sitting at a desk. When you lose weight through diet alone or with low-moderate cardiovascular exercise, you tend to lose both fat and muscle, especially if you're not eating enough protein.
Losing muscle impacts your metabolic rate. Every kg of muscle lost means fewer calories burned daily, making continued fat loss harder (known as 'adaptive thermogenesis' or 'metabolic adaptation'). This explains why many dieters hit frustrating plateaus or rapidly regain weight after losing it.
Weightlifting (and dietary protein intake) changes this equation by preserving existing muscle mass, or potentially adding new muscle tissue. Research shows that people who lift weights while dieting lose less muscle tissue and more fat.
Body Composition vs. Scale Weight
The bathroom scale often fails to reflect the positive changes occurring when you incorporate weightlifting into your fat loss programme. You might lose a kg of fat while simultaneously gaining a kg of muscle. The scale wouldn't change, but your body fat percentage, waist circumference, strength, and physical appearance will.
This simultaneous process of losing fat while gaining muscle is called "body recomposition", and it should be the actual goal for anyone wanting to lose fat rather than just "lose weight."
Instead of obsessing over scale weight, focus on other things: progress photos, how clothes fit, belt notches, and strength improvements in the gym. Waist circumference provides a particularly useful measure, as humans tend to lose fat from the abdominal region while gaining muscle around the appendages (i.e., legs and arms).
Weightlifting vs. Cardio: Different Tools, Different Outcomes
While cardiovascular exercise burns more calories during the activity itself, weightlifting provides superior, longer-term benefits.
The “afterburn effect” (technically called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC) can increase metabolic rate for hours after a weightlifting session. The process of muscle repair and growth also requires energy for days after your workout.
This doesn't mean cardio has no value (it does!). It's just that weightlifting provides unique advantages that cardio cannot replicate, so it is advised alongside, not instead of, other forms of physical activity.
Getting Started: Practical Advice
You don't need expensive equipment or gym memberships to start. Begin with 'compound' body weight exercises like squats, push-up variations, lunges, planks, and other core exercises. It's possible to build and maintain muscle using just your body weight, especially when you're new to resistance training (so no excuses!).
Start with at least two weightlifting sessions per week, allowing each muscle group at least 2 days of recovery between sessions. If you're new to weightlifting or haven't been physically active, master basic movement first before adding weights. Learning proper form prevents injury and ensures you're targeting the intended muscles efficiently.
When ready to progress, add weight gradually but maintain good form. For fat loss purposes, 2–3 sets of 6–12 repetitions per exercise works well, though muscle can be built effectively with other rep ranges and training approaches. The key is consistency over time. The health benefits and body composition changes from weightlifting compound slowly but effectively over weeks, months, and years.
3. Walking
If there's a single fat loss strategy that's more underrated than protein and weightlifting, it's walking. This might seem almost absurdly simple—how could walking, something humans do naturally every day, be a powerful fat loss tool
Understanding NEAT
Your total daily energy expenditure comes from 4 sources:
1. Basal metabolic rate (BMR): the calories your body burns at complete rest.
2. Thermic effect of food (TEF): discussed in the protein section.
3. Exercise activity thermogenesis (EAT): the calories burned during deliberate exercise.
4. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT): calories burned from movement that's not exercise.
NEAT includes everything from walking to work, taking stairs, fidgeting, doing household chores, gardening, and standing instead of sitting. Research shows that NEAT can vary by thousands of calories a day for different people. The differences in NEAT often explain why some people seem to “naturally” stay lean while others struggle to control their weight (despite similar diets and physical activity).
Walking represents the most accessible and sustainable way to increase your NEAT. Unlike intense exercise that requires recovery and can be difficult to maintain, walking can be performed every day (or many times a day!).
The Benefits of Walking for Fat Loss
Walking burns calories, that's obvious. But the benefits extend far beyond simple calorie expenditure. A 70-kilogram person can burn approximately 200-300 kcal/hour while walking. While this might seem modest compared to more intense exercise, it is easier.
Most people can easily walk for an hour a day (across multiple sessions) without fatigue, excessive hunger, or muscle aches. That's potentially ~300 kcal/day, which adds up to ~2,000 a week, which is the energy equivalent of one kilogram of fat a month; just from walking.
More importantly, walking doesn't seem to trigger the hunger response that some other exercises do. Many people find themselves unconsciously eating more after long and intense exercise sessions, potentially offsetting the calories that are burned. Walking, being low-intensity, tends to avoid this response.
Walking Preserves Training Quality
Another underappreciated benefit: walking doesn't interfere with other forms of exercise. In fact, adding light walking to your routine can improve recovery from more intense exercise (e.g., HIIT or weightlifting). It does this by promoting blood flow, reducing muscle soreness, and managing stress without adding any more physical strain. So you can walk freely, without worrying about impairing your strength gains or muscle growth.
Health Benefits of Walking
Beyond fat loss, regular walking provides other health benefits. Research links daily walking to reduced cardiovascular disease risk, improved metabolic health, better blood pressure control, mental health and mood, reduced stress, anxiety and depression, improved sleep quality and cognitive function.
Its accessibility and low barrier to entry makes walking a sustainable pursuit. You don't need equipment, special clothing, gym memberships, or skills. You can walk regardless of fitness level, age, or physical limitations (with appropriate modifications). This sustainability means people actually maintain walking habits long-term.
Practical Implementation: Making Walking a Habit
The key to leveraging walking for fat loss is building it into your daily routine rather than treating it as a formal exercise session. Here are some evidence-based strategies:Start with a baseline. Measure your current daily step count for one week. This establishes your starting point. Research suggests 7,000-10,000 steps daily provides health and fat loss benefits, though more is generally better.
Increase gradually: Add 1,000 steps per day each week until reaching your target. Gradual increases feel manageable and allow you to make a habit out of it.
Anchor walking to existing routines: Walk during phone calls, hold walking meetings, park farther from destinations, take stairs instead of lifts, walk to nearby errands instead of driving, take a walk after meals, or walk during commercial breaks or between work tasks.
Split it up: You don't need to take a single long walk to gain benefits. Multiple 10-minute walks throughout the day are just as effective and often more realistic for busy schedules. You burn the same calories and get the same health benefits from three 20-minute walks as you do from one 60-minute walk.
Make it enjoyable: Listen to podcasts, audiobooks, or music you like. Walk with friends or family and socialise. Explore new routes or neighbourhoods; change your surroundings to keep it interesting. Walk in nature when possible; research shows additional benefits from natural environments.
Use it strategically: Morning walks can energise you for the day and regulate circadian rhythms. Post-meal walks improve blood sugar control and digestion. Evening walks can help wind down and improve sleep quality.
Track progress: While not necessary, tracking steps or walking duration can provide motivation and accountability. Many people find that seeing their step count encourages them to move more.
Compounding Results
Increasing dietary protein, lifting weights and walking all independently increase fat loss (and health). But, they also combine well together; the sum being greater than the parts. Walking aids recovery. Protein supports muscle growth. More muscle means better fat loss. More muscle means more calories burned during walking.
They all either support each other's effects or at least don't interfere with each other. There are very few 'multi-component' interventions that do this. All three can be done together, immediately, at the same time.
Conclusion: Simple & Sustainable
These three simple strategies won't make headlines or go viral on social media. They require consistency rather than intensity, patience rather than urgency, and commitment rather than perfection. But they work. More importantly, they work sustainably, preserving health, maintaining metabolism, and creating results that last beyond a few weeks or months.
The science behind these approaches is robust and clear. The practical application is straightforward and adaptable to virtually any lifestyle. The compound effects over time are substantial.
N.b. This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider before making health decisions.