Christian Bale’s weight loss for The Fighter

330px-Christian_Bale_2009Christian Bale first came to our attention after his amazing transformation for Batman Begins. For his award-winning role in the movie The Fighter, Christian Bale had to lose a lot of weight, including a lot of muscle as well as fat, to play the role of Dicky Eklund, an ex-boxer and underweight cocaine addict.

In The Fighter Bale plays Dicky Eklund, who is the older brother of the professional welterweight boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, who is played by Mark Wahlberg. But unlike his younger brother, Dicky Eklund’s boxing career is destroyed when he becomes a cocaine addict.

He becomes very underweight and unhealthy. So, how did Bale shed the pounds once again? And why does he keep getting roles that require him to lose a lot of weight and then gain a lot of muscle / weight for the next?


Christian Bale The Running Man

We know how Christian Bale lost weight for The Fighter because he shared his weight loss regime with UInterview.com in September 2010. He lost weight by running a lot.

Running is a very efficient form of cardiovascular exercise that burns fat very well. By running every day you constantly deplete your glycogen reserves (blood sugar) which means that your body needs to take reserves from stored fat tissue. Once you are reasonable fit you can expect to burn around 700 Calories per hour by running. You have to be fit to be able to run for 1 hour, but the more you run, the fitter you will get, and the fitter you get, the more calories you can burn.

Christian Bale explained his weight loss;

“[I] was just running like crazy. I could run four hours on and I felt really healthy,” Bale told Latino Review. He also joked, “Oh I do a lot of coke whenever I lose weight,” but later added the clarification, “I’m not sure if it’s so funny for this movie, to say that.” UInterview.com

So even if he was not running fast enough to burn 700 Calories per hour, he was still probably burning around 2000 Calories in 4 hours of running. If you do this every day you can consume 2500 Calories of food and still lose a lot of weight quickly.

It really is as simple as that. If you eat a healthy and balanced diet, keep calories to a minimum to allow weight loss to occur, then you will lose weight consistently week after week.


People only ever fail to lose weight because they eat too much. Exercising increases the rate at which you use up the energy in food (metabolism) so you can eat more and still lose weight – but you still need to restrict calories.

The biggest advantage of exercise to lose weight is that you can still consume a healthy and balanced diet simply because you have more calories to work with. If you are on a very restrictive diet to lose weight, such as a dangerous 500 calorie a day diet, you will become malnourished in time as you cannot continue to get all the nutrition that your body needs while only consuming 500 Calories a day.

If you increase your diet to 2000 Calories and then burn 1500 Calories through exercise you will lose weight and still provide your body with fuel and nutrients. This is the basic principle of creating a calorie deficit to lose weight.

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