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Disclaimer: As a fully certified fitness nutrition specialist, all I say here are guidelines to healthy fat loss. If you feel you have an eating disorder or have developed an unhealthy obsession with losing weight, I strongly advise speaking to a certified dietitian or general practitioner.

In order to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit. However, there's a lot more to it than that. Two thirds of a deficit involve having a good, nutritional diet, and one third is by keeping active. In addition, a calorie deficit doesn't mean going into an unhealthy deficit. Low-calorie diets that are 900kcal or lower are often prescribed by dietitians and are performed under strict supervision. They are not recommended. If you're already doing this unsupervised, it's likely that you may actually need to eat more rather than less.

If you track your calories and are not undertaking a low-calorie diet, but have found you consume around 2000 a day for example, consider lowing your daily calorie consumption by 500. This means consuming 3,500 calories less per week. 3,500 calories is approximately 1 lbs in weight. Both British and American weight-loss guidelines advise losing between 1-2 lbs at maximum for safety.

There's that saying, you are what you eat, so make sure you cut out sugary drinks, sweet foods, and other confectionery to reduce consumption of foods that hold no nutritional value. Swap them with foods such as fruit and vegetables that, while contain refined sugars, have far more nutritional value as opposed to a chocolate bar, for example.

There's a lot more I could write on safe fat-loss, but this is the internet, and beyond this point I would strongly suggest that you consider speaking to a registered dietitian, or possibly your lecturer since you're already studying nutrition yourself.