Losing weight here can feel challenging, especially with easy access to hawker favourites like hokkien mee, chicken rice, mee goreng and prata.
To lose weight in Singapore, focus on three key things: eat in a slight calorie deficit, stay consistent with both strength training and daily movement, and build habits you can maintain alongside your usual lifestyle.
The good news is, you do not need to give up the foods you enjoy. With the right structure, it is possible to lose body fat while still eating local food in a balanced way.
One of my client who lost 25kg and got her confidence, fitness and health back
I’m Benson Poh, a personal trainer with over 12 years of experience. Like many of you, I enjoy local food, and I have helped many individuals lose weight and improve their health without extreme approaches.
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Here are 5 simple tips
that can help you achieve your weight and fat loss goal.
For brevity’s sake, I will not go into the numerical details. If you want to know the numbers, drop me an email at Benson@vigeo.sg.
Calorie Deficit
The only way to lose weight and body fat is to create a calorie deficit. In simple terms:
Calories in < Calories out
This means eating slightly fewer calories than your body needs each day.
A practical starting point is reducing about 300 to 500 calories daily. This can lead to steady fat loss of around 0.5 to 1 kg per month, which is more sustainable for most people.
You can be on Low-carb and lose fat
Ketogenic diet, a weight loss of 58lbs, or roughly 26kg
You can be on High-carb and lose fat
106 participants in a 1930s study lost an average of 140lbs, or roughly 67kg
from eating only white rice, fruit and sugar
Calorie Deficit
The only way to lose weight and body fat is to create a calorie deficit. In simple terms:
Calories in < Calories out
This means eating slightly fewer calories than your body needs each day.
A practical starting point is reducing about 300 to 500 calories daily. This can lead to steady fat loss of around 0.5 to 1 kg per month, which is more sustainable for most people.
How to Create a Calorie Deficit in Simple Terms
You do not need to overhaul your entire diet. Small adjustments add up:
- Reduce portion sizes slightly
- Cut down on high-calorie add-ons like oils, sauces, and sugary drinks
- Increase daily movement such as walking more
Working with a personal physical trainer can help you estimate your needs and adjust your intake without guessing.
Common Singapore Food Swaps
You can still enjoy local food with a few smart swaps:
- Chicken rice → Ask for less rice, remove skin, reduce sauce
- Fried noodles → Switch to soup-based options or request less oil
- Prata with curry → Limit frequency or portion, pair with protein instead
- Bubble tea → Choose less sugar or swap for plain tea
These changes lower calories without removing familiar foods completely.
Portion Control for Hawker Meals
Portion control makes a big difference in Singapore’s food environment:
- Eat 70 to 80 percent of your usual rice portion
- Share higher-calorie dishes like fried items
- Skip second servings, especially for carb-heavy meals
- Balance your plate with more protein and vegetables where possible
Making It Sustainable
It does not matter if your diet is low-carb, high-carb, or intermittent fasting. What matters is consistency.
You can create a larger deficit for faster results, or a smaller one for a slower but more sustainable approach. The key is choosing a method you can maintain long term.
Remember, it is not how fast you get there, but how long you can stay there.
Eat more protein
Ask any of my personal training clients, they will tell you that I always nag them as their personal trainer in Singapore to eat more protein like a mom asking their kids to eat broccoli. Why do you need to eat more protein to lose weight? Here are 3 reasons why:
- When you eat more protein, you tend to feel fuller longer. Protein releases the satiety (“feel full”) hormone which makes you eat less at each meal and keeps you full longer so you eat less throughout the day.
- Protein makes your body work harder to digest it. Unlike carbs and fats, our body burns more calories digesting protein – up to 25% of the calories ingested to break down protein.
- Protein also helps you retain lean mass while you’re losing fat. When we are in a calorie deficit Our bodies try to convert everything it can into fuel: fat, muscle, tissue. Since muscle is a metabolically active tissue, maintaining your lean muscle mass helps you maintain a higher metabolism
Plan ahead, be flexible and adjust
This is perhaps the MOST important practice to achieve sustainable weight loss in Singapore.
Knowing the best eating strategy is useless when life events throw it out the window – be that social events, parties or god-forbid: irresistibly good food.
The key to sustainable weight loss is not to avoid food, but to plan around it.
- Have a social event?
Reduce the calories you eat prior to the event, so you have more room to indulge during the event. - Eating at a restaurant?
Choose food that contain more vegetables or protein. - Overate on an occasion?
Don’t beat yourself up and don’t go for a run, just eat lesser for the next couple of meals.
We all have a life outside of eating lesser and losing weight. The key to sustainable weight and fat loss is to enjoy or at least, not hate the process.
Resistance Training and Exercise
You want is to get in shape and look fitter, which means lean muscle and low body fat. It is a common misconception among personal training clients that they want to lose weight, but in fact what they really want is to look fitter, which means losing fat and increasing lean muscle.
Even though increasing muscle mass will not cause a massive increase in metabolism (10-13kcal/kg of muscle mass), a mere 5kg increase will help you burn an extra 50kcal a day, which can result in 2.4kg fat loss a year and over 12kg fat loss in 5 years, all by increasing your resting calorie expenditure, that doesn’t even include additional calories used for exercising and daily physical activity, be it sweating it out with your gym fitness trainer or simply walking around your home.
Another great advantage of resistance training that utilizes compound movements (exercises that involve multiple muscle groups) is that they contribute to higher calorie burn both during and after exercise.
Do you need cardio for weight loss? No, you do not. Remember the most important ingredient of weight loss is calorie deficit. If you can achieve calorie deficit through eating well, cardio is not necessary.
BUT if you like cardio or if you cannot create a deficit through nutrition, then yes, you can incorporate some cardio as a form of exercise
Daily activity level
This is an often-neglected aspect of weight and fat loss that sometimes, can be more important than exercise (not including resistance training).
Imagine:
- You burn 400calories in a workout (which is a lot) and you work out twice a week – you will burn a total of 800calories in a week
- If you move around for an hour more every day, you may burn about 150-200calories a day – which equates to more than 1000calories in a week
So simply being more active in your daily life – walking short distances instead of taking public transport, getting up to refill your water glass once every hour etc. – can help you burn more calories overall and contribute to weight loss.
Summary
- Create a calorie deficit through your diet by reducing / eliminating less-loved, calorie-dense food – be that high-carb or high-fat
- Eat more protein to help you “burn more calories”, keep you fuller and retain lean muscle
- Plan ahead and adjust your calorie intake around life events and good food
- Do resistance training to maintain muscle mass and metabolism
- Move around more every day to expand more energy.
Additional tip – Do something that works for you and have fun doing it.
So what if you ate a bit more, went on a vacation or missed one workout?
Choose something that works for you and enjoy the process.
The ultimate key to sustainable weight loss is when you can lose weight while enjoying what life has to offer, including hokkien mee.
