The way to lose fat is Simple: Burn off more calories than you consume.
As simple as it may sound, many people find that it is hard to loose weight, they blame it on their genetics, and they give up. The problem with these people is that they expect too much, too soon. The first thing you have to know is that losing weight takes time. To do it the right way, it takes effort and consistency. The people that give up, are the ones that try crazy starvation diets and vigorous exercise to meet the rule of burning more calories than they consume. These people however can not meet the consistency rule, because you can’t starve yourself consistently! What you have to do is make adjustments to your eating and exercise habits.
The degree of these ajustments will depend on how much fat you want to lose, and how much time you want to spend to lose it.
My theory is that if you are going to do anything in life, you do it right, you do it hard, you do it the first time, and you don’t give up. Most people will have a problem with simply deciding they want to lose weight, then trying to do it. First, they need education. Understand that it needs to be a gradual process. If you have read my informative getting-started article, you know that food provides you with energy measured in units called calories. When you eat, your body takes the vitamins (calcium, iron, magnesium, vitamin a,b,c, etc) and sends them to do work in their appropriate places, then breaks down the food so that your body can function. These functions include everything from your heart beating to running.
When your body doesn’t get enough energy (calories), it goes into your body’s fat stores for energy. And that is what fat is - energy! Energy that your body hasn’t needed in the past so it has stored it as fat to be used in an emergency. Well, you don’t want that fat, or energy, there. So what are you going to do about it? Use your body fat as energy! All this requires is a slight calorie deficit.
Start by cutting unecessary fat from your diet. This includes fast food, mayonaise, chocolate bars, etc. This is good. By eliminating this you are cutting tons of “empty” calories, many of them saturated fat calories. I call empty calories those calories that give you energy but little nutrition or vitamins. Remember from the “getting started” article that one gram of carbohydrate and protein both contain only 4 calories, while fat contins 9! Replace junk foods with healthy snacks such as fruit. As you become more dedicated, make other changes, and cut any sort of excess calories that you don’t really need. Ask yourself, do I really need sugar in my coffee?
Now that you know that WHAT you eat is important, realise that WHEN you eat is important. Try to eat more than half of your calories during the first half of the day, when you are more active. Eat less in the evening and at night, when your body is less active and less likely to burn off those calories. If you don’t burn all your calories, they will get stored on your body as fat, to be used as energy for later. You know from the last article that small, frequent meals keep metabolism up. Space your meals out to 5 or 6 smaller ones. Think of them as breakfast, lunch, and dinners, with snacks in between if you like. This keeps metabolism up, helps in digestion processes, and will also mean less food in the stomach at once, making your gut look less bloated.
Diet composition is another important factor. To minimize muscle breakdown while cutting, I have found that a diet composed of 55% carbohydrates, 25% protein, 20% fat works quite well. Regarding protein, research shows that even extreme athletes only need 0.9g of protein per pound of body weight at the high end. I know, protein is the craze right now. Everyone is talking about it, especially those big guys at the gym.
But your body can’t process it all. It only turns it to waste, after being processed by the kidneys. Your body needs the vitimans in the carbs and the fat. Research shows that over time, too much excess protein may harm the kidneys. You’d be better off eating less protein and more carbs and fat (just keep the calories 20% less than your maintence amount that you will calculate in just a few paragraphs). Those ‘big guys’ would be even leaner and stronger if they took some of those excess protein calories that are going to waste, and replaced them with high energy carbohydrates or ‘good’ fat.
Another way to burn fat, is to add muscle. Muscle is more active than fat, and needs more calories the sustain it. If you add muscle by resistance training (lifting weights), your muscles
will develop and will use some of those calories that may have been heading for body fat storage. Having strong abdominal muscles will also hold your stomach in.
Note: there is no such thing as ’spot reducing’, that is, trying to loose fat from one part of the body, such as doing 200 crunchies every night to loose your gut. It doesn’t work. Doing crunchies builds the abdominal muscles. But if the stomach is covered up with fat you will never see them!
Back to meals now: a good idea would be to have a nice big breakfast. Your body has just gone over 8 hours without food, and needs fuel! NEVER SKIP BREAKFAST! This only leads to more fat GAINS! Research explains that the body thinks it is about to go into a period of
starvation, slows your metabolism, and stores anything it can find (possibly including muscle) as fat. This is to prepare it for a long period without food! I ALWAYS prepare my meals the night before. I also prepare sandwiches and fruit to take to classes, including an important
post workout meal. On the ideal day, I would have the first meal of the day at about 8am, then the second two hours later at about 10am. Between a break in classes, I go to the gym after allowing about 2 hours for meal two to digest before I workout for about an hour, then immediatly replenish my body with a nutrient dense lunch at 1pm.
To get more protein and vitamin absorbtion into the body, I eat again in class after two hours, 3pm. Three hours later, 6pm, I have a nice hot meal at home filled with vegetables, lean meat, etc. For the sixth and last meal of the day of the day, 9pm. I have a can of tuna, which provides my body with protein it needs to build muscle, but no carbohydrate energy, as I mentioned in the last article.
Although my goal is more towards building muscle, you can still see the general concept. I eat more frequently in the first half of the day, and less in the evening, with my last big meal five hours before bed. Tuna makes a great snack, but unless your body needs it, protein too can get stored as body fat, though not as easily as saturated fats or simple sugars. I should also mention that you should be drinking at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. More than eight if you are more active. Water may actually be the best way to lose fat. It contains no calories, and makes you feel full, causing you to eat less at each serving. A glass of cool water to rinse down a meal also helps to disolve unnecessary fat and quickly gets it through the digestive system. It can also rinse sugar off your teeth and save you a trip to the dentist for a filling!
By the way, coffee that contains hot water or coke that is sugar with water does not count as a serving! Actually, one cup of coffee or one can of pop will be one step in the opposite direction, as they dehydrate you. This is also true for alcohol. For every pop, coffee, or beer that you consume, double that amount with water. Nutrition is the major player, ABOVE EXERCISE, that determines your physical fitness and health, whether you want to lose fat or build muscle.
Well, now that you’ve got your diet improved, you will hopefully have a slight calorie deficit by now. This will cause your body to dive in to those unwanted body fat stores for energy. Be consistant and patient! After only a few weeks you will begin to see results from diet alone, but exercise will help even more! Like I said, body fat is energy that is stored to be used later, so lets get rid of that energy, or fat, by using it! Cardiovascular exercises such as biking, rowing, stairclimbing, etc. will burn more than 1000 calories per hour if your are extreme. Thats a lot of calories. You don’t need to do that though. If you can hop on the bike for 20-40 minutes, several times per week, you will burn calories. Doing your cardio, as well as climinating excess calories from fast food, sugar, and chips etc, and you are set to shreding pounds.
There are several ways to naturally burn fat faster. Although this contradicts what I just said about never skipping breakfast, do your 30 minutes of cardio (whether its jogging or biking or rowing, etc) first thing in the morning, before breakfast. When you get home, drink water immediatly, then hop in the shower, stretch, watch the news as you prepare your sandwhiches for the day, but don’t eat for an hour! The latest research shows that your heart rate is increased significantly in the hour following cardiovasclar exercise. This burns more fat!
After that hour, eat your first meal of the day, getting at least one item from each of the four food groups to get all the vitamins you need for recovery. The reason for doing your cardio first thing in the morning is because your body has been deprived of food for the last 8 hours
or so, and your blood sugar levels are low (unless you ate a lot before going to bed).
In order for your body to get energy to jog, it draws out energy from fat stores on your body. After doing much research and experimenting with my training programs, I’m fairly convinced that there is little risk of your body breaking down muscle to get energy. To make fat loss work even better, have a cup of coffee (without sugar) before your run. Studies I’ve read show that caffeine increases the rate that body fat is converted to usable energy. If you want to invest a little money, try a fat loss supplement containing ephedra, caffeine, and asprin (ECA). Combine any ECA supplement (Therma Pro, Hydroxycut, Xdrenaline, etc.) with a lowered calorie diet and cardio, and get ready for some rapid fat shredding. Now, if you can’t run without eating in the morning, you can try running before a meal any time of the day, preferably 3 hours after your last meal - which you should make light.
Again, running right before a meal means your blood sugar is getting low, and will soon draw out on body fat for fuel, even more so after taking caffeine, or an ECA supplement. Although pop has caffine, it doesn’t work the same as coffee because of the sugar in pop. However, nothing beats natural fat burning better than running before your first meal.
PLEASE NOTE: always check with your doctor before taking sports supplements, especially if you are on any other medications.
Although those tricks can speed up the process, don’t be in too much of a rush. My philosopy is that you didn’t gain those 5 pounds in one week, so don’t try to lose them in one week. Its a lot safer to lose 1-2 pounds a week (unless you are really overweight) otherwise you are probably breaking down muscle. A good formula for weight control, is to multiply your body weight in pounds by 14, 15, 16, or 17, depending on your gender and activity level. (14 slightly less active, 17 slightly more active). If you are really not active at all, try multiplying your weight by even lower numbers, such as 12. I use the number 16.
After multiplying your weight in pounds by 12-17, you get a number which is approximatly how many calories you need to MAINTAIN your current weight. To lose fat at a safe, non muscle burning rate, multiply that number by 0.8 to see how many calories you should consume each day. This means you will be eating 20% less calories than your body needs, creating a slight calorie deficit. If you loose more than 2 pounds a week, add more calories because you are probably burning muscle too.
On the other side of the scale, when you want to build muscle, you multiply that previous number by 1.2, which is 20% more calories than you need. Similarly, if you gain more than 2 pounds a week, reduce calories as you are probably gaining fat with your muscle. Now, if you find you loose 5 pounds in your first week, it may not all be fat, some of that could be water loss. When eating fewer calories, your body doesn’t need to retain as much water, so it gets ride of it through urination. Keep at your diet and cardio program, and after week two you will hopefully be loosing 1-2 pounds a week, after that first initial loss of maybe 5 pounds in that first week.
Now, some of you have asked me: what if I do cardio exercises every day and ate very little - would I loose weight even faster? My response to that is yes, but HANG ON! You would loose weight. I said weight. Not fat. Most of what you would be loosing would be muscle, followed
by water, then fat. Some woman have said: so what, even if I loose muscle, I will be lighter. Yes, you’d be lighter, but then you’d gain back even more fat than you originally had before you started dieting! What happens when you suddenly drop your calorie intake, then burn off even more of those calories, is your body thinks a disaster has happened, and you are not going to have access to food! It thinks it is going to experience starvation, so it actually SLOWS your metabolism in preparation! Now, with less muscle (because you’ve burned it for fuel during your cardio) and a lower matabolism, when you go back to your regular diet, you will gain back all that fat and more!
Then maybe you’ll reduce calories again, then the cycle continues. Your body thinks it is about to starve, and slows your metabolism even lower! Understand that muscle will burn calories simply by ‘being there’. If you have more muscle, you need more calories to sustain it. That is why bodybuilders eat so much! I have experienced muscle loss when I tried losing fat too fast. It took me 2 months of weight lifting to gain back what I had lost in about 2 weeks - plus I gained back the fat! I have a problem with patience. I want everything yesterday! But I’ve learned that it will eventually take LONGER if you try to lose weight quickly. Stick with my ‘20% less calories than you require’ rule.
For a long time I wanted to get really lean, and really big at the same time. I wanted to be a ‘marathoning bodybuilder’. But, who’s ever heard of that? After a long time of trying to grow and cut, I will say that you will not get significant results. Although some may argue, I would recommend focussing on one OR the other. Not both. Many professional body builders divide their training into bulking and cutting cycles. For getting lean: cut calories, do cardio after taking an ECA supplement, train with lighter weights and higher repetitions. Then when you want to muscle up, just focus on muscleing up: add calories, minimize cardio, train heavy with lower repetitions.
I wasted my time trying to bulk and cut at the same time. (I used to do weights 3 times a week and cardio 3 times a week on alternating days, eating a moderate amount of food. It didn’t work too well.) But remember, this is MY body. Your body IS different. Do whatever works for you, but consider my advice.
Some body builders go through the fall and winter just bulking and eating, then start dieting and cutting in spring and summer. You could also try one month of bulking, on month of cutting. Whatever works for you and fits your schedule. Everyone’s body is different, so to are their reactions to different diets, training programs, sports supplements, and hours of sleep.
Finally, make your training fun! Dieting shouldn’t be a restraint. I love knowing that everything I put in my mouth is going to benefit my body! Get off the boring treadmill and go for a bike ride or run outside. I prefer trails to the road. The hard impact of the cement gets annoying when you run, and can lead to injury if you’re not careful. On trails, you have the soft impact of wood chips (in some cases) and its much more enjoying running through God’s creation than along roads that you drive along every day. It will make you more motivated, and you’ll end up running longer, and burning more fat. Another good idea for running (or training with weights for that matter) is to do it with a partner. They can motivate you, you can motivate them, and it will add some healthy competition. Also, your favorite music is STATISTICALLY proven to keep you exercising longer. Buy a walkman!
Just remember, the key is consistency. The best way to loose fat is to do it slowly. Eat a well balanced diet with all the food groups, and record your progress. Keeping a training diary that includes your weight, your waist size, and your nutritional plan is great for looking back for reference to see what works best for you. Have fun, and sure, eat a donut once in a while, but just remember how long it takes on the treadmill to burn 400 calories, and think to yourself, whats easier: avoiding the donut, or eating the donut then burning off the 400 empty calories doing 30 minutes of excercise? Idealy, you should avoid the donut AND do the cardio! But don’t worry, you’ll eventually come to a time in your training when donuts will seem like poison to you, and you won’t look twice at one.
However, having one ‘free day’ is often recommended each week. On this free day, eat whatever you like. Ice cream included. This will satisfy you mentally, as well as keep your metabolism from dropping. Ideally it should be mostly healthy food, but just try to eat more calories in general on this day. This prevents your metabolism from dropping after dieting for a week straight.
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