Monthly Archives: April 2012

The 4 Fat Loss Principles You Must Know to Drop Fat Fast…

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Welcome back!!

In the spirit of last week’s list of 5, here are 4 principles that you have to apply if you are going to see fast fat loss results…

Principle the First – You gotta keep your metabolism humming along…
Cutting calories like most folk do when they decide to lose weight (ie Fat) results in a dive in the various processes that make up your moverall metabolic rate.

You eat less so you lose out on the thermic effect of food. Eating lessbecause most folk

Keep your metabolism humming – but don’t do crap like this!!

severley cut their calories back means you have less energy and so you move less and exercising becomes difficult.

Your basal metabolic rate drops off as you body enters into good ole starvation mode.

These things then combine to deliver a thump to your hormones.

Leptin (the ‘okay we’re full stop eating’ hormone) levels fall off a clif in as little as a week of moderate calorie reduction.

So you fix this by cycling your calories or even easier if you are going low carb then you must make sure that you a ‘Cheat day’ – the trick here though is to eat with some sense –

Eaten intelligently even pizza can help you lose fat…

don’t gorge and overfeed, just allow yourself to have some processed carbs one day a week if you are on a serious drop fat fast diet. ne day of ‘spiking’ your carb intake will reset your leptin levels to pretty much normal so you can cut calories for ht efollowing week and then reset again with a ‘cheat day’ and so on…

This strategy works best if you workout hard the day before your cheat day. here is a program from renowned training Expert Craig Ballantyne that you can use:

Do a minium of 3 rounds and try for 5 if possible.

Rest 15 seconds between exercises and 1 minute at the end of the circuit.

Do as many repetitions as possible in the given time.

Make sure to do a bodyweight warm-up of squats, lunges, and
pushups before this circuit (2 sets of 8-12 reps each).

1) Lunge Jumps – 20 seconds
2) Pullup or Bodyweight Row – 30 seconds
3) Spiderman Pushup – 30 seconds
4) KB Swing – 30 seconds
5) Walking Prisoner Lunge – 30 seconds
6) Cross-Body Mountain Climber – 30 seconds
7) KB Goblet Squat – 30 seconds

Lunges – work!!

By doing this you deplete your body’s store of glycogen and when you cheat the next day these stores get refilled so the extra carbs not only reset your leptin they don’t 9unless you are foolish) create a calorie overwhelm that results in fat loss. In fact doing this can help predispose your body to burn fat as preferred fuel…

Principle the Second – You gotta cut calories a lot if you want fast fat loss…

You’ve read it here before a pound of fat is 3500 calories (closer to 7200 for a kilo) and the only way that you get your body to shift those pounds / kilos is for you to eat less so your body burns more…

Of course there is more to it than just eating less – what you eat, how often and and so on all has an effect but the base line info to grab onto here is that you have to create a strong energy deficit for fat loss to occur.

Which would you rather be carrying around…

Dropping 5 kilos (about 11 pounds) of fat equates to a energy deficit of around 38,000 calories..

if you’re hooked on thinking in terms of weight loss rather than fat loss then you need to understand that a pure fat loss of 5 kilos probably means a total weight loss of 7.5 to 10 kilos becuase of fluid loss that comes along with dropping weight.

Principle the Third:  You gotta use both DIET & Exercise to achieve your fat loss.

  I’ve said it before – you can’t out train a bad diet and you can’t lose fat unless you get a number of things working together.

Forstly – take as many of the processed, then the the starchy processed carbs out of your diet as possible. Replace these with loads more vegetables, lean protein and fruit.

Step up your exercise and use HIIT protcols to get your metabolism revved up. Lift heavy weights at leat once a week to keep your muscle mass intact 9if not increase it!0 and then use cheat days to keep your homones on your side.

Is there more to it than this? Yep – but just do the above and you’ll get results better than 80% of the folk who try to lose ‘weight’…

Principle the Fourth:  You gotta keep the muscle you’ve already got… 

I mentioned this above but it is worth locking down on its own.

Muscle is more metabolically active than fat. The more you have the faster your basal

Lift heavy once or twice a week to hold onto fat burning muscle mass…

(resting) metabolism is and the more calories that you burn at rest. Likewise when you exercise if you have muscle your body will burn more calories more quickly than if you were fatter with less muscle.

Most people lose muscle when they diet becuase once your body goes into starvation mode it tries to protect fat stores and turns to breaking down muscle to supplement your energy needs. But you can stp this. Dead. How? Lift heavy weights. It has been shown in a number of studies that lifting heavy weights once or twice a week makes your body preserve if not add to) your muscle mass and gets it to burn more fat – even if you are in starvation mode due to calorie cuts.

Well there you have it – 4 principles to follow for rapid fat loss.

See you next week.

Top 5 food rules for fat loss

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Welcome Back!!

Tear up the processed carbs!!

Short & sharp this week – how to get on track to shed kilos of body fat with these diet rules.

If you are following a program of challenging work outs then  following these five food tips consistently will have you dropping the bodyfat kilos quicklly and get you feeling like a Million Bucks!! Plus you’ll LBN**

1 Cut Your Calories

Half a kilo of fat (about 1.25 lbs) is 3500 calories – so although the process is NOT as simple as counting calories the inescapable truth is that you have to cut calories, create some sort of energy deficit so that you’ll lose fat.

So to lose fat, you have to gradually decrease your calories by eating less and cutting out fat depositing foods like processed carbs – yep bread, pasta, cakes, cookies, biscuits, most foods from a box these are the real culprits when it cpmes to putting on nd keeping on the fat.

2 Increase your Protein

To speed up your metabolism you have to increase your lean body mass – specifically your

Hard to beat – BBQ’s Chicken and fresh salad…

muscles. in order to support the growth and thr maintenace of muscle tissue you have to increase your protein intake.

This is a good thing as eating protein increased the thermic effect of food (you need to burn more calories to process protein than fat or carbs0 and that eating more protein leaves you feeling fuller for ;opnger meaning that you eat less (see #1 above!)

In other words, eat more lean meat, chicken, fish or eggs.- whatever lean protein source you choose. These foods help speed up your metabolism, keep you feeling full and provide important amino acids for body repair and hormone production.

3 Choose your carbs wisely

Carbs are not and never have been the enemy. Well the right types of carbs that is – vegetables and fruits are the right kinds of carbs to have – they promote fullness, provide fibre, do not cause fat storing insulin spikes,  and more importantly a host of vitamins, minerals, co-factors and phytonutrients and flavonals AND anti-oxidants. In other words as close to unprocessed as possible is the way to go. (NB frozen fruits & vegetables are just

The best source of carbs – forget the grain based, processed ones!!

fine to have – they may lose a litle vitamin C in the freezing process but have been shown to have the same if not higher nutrient content of fresh Fruit & vegetables!)

So which carbs are the one to avoid? Simple pretty much any carb that is grain based. So if it is baked or comes out of a box avoid it. Avoid heavily sugared foods and especially soft drinks / sodas.

In other words, eat less sugar and starches, such as processed grains. Eating too much of these foods can wreak havoc on your bloodstream, increasing the hormones – especially insulin –  that lead to fat gain.

4 Dose Up on Your Veges

Replacing processed, grain based carbs in order to get healthier and to lose fat is pretty challenging – grains are cheap to grow and have for over a century provided the big food companies with a way to create low cost products with a high sales value. We hav,e in a nutshell been brainwashed to view bread  biscuits, cake and cannolis are healthy or at least a part of a healthy diet.

You look like this if you get off the processed carb roundabout!!

If you are serious about re-conditioning your metabolism then you need tp support your body while you wean it off the sugar laden, infalammation causing processed carbs that you’ve been eating most of your life.

The way to do this is to increase your intake of vegetables and decrease the processed carbs. You’ll get more fibre, more nutrients and fell a lot better for it.

5 Tips to Boost our Metabolism

To support your metabolism, gradually replace bad fats with healthy fats. Adding things like olive oil, avocados, nuts, seeds and fish oils to your diet will help speed up your metabolism and lose bodyfat.

There you go – move more, eat less processed carbs and lose that fat.

**LBN = Look Better Naked

See you next week

4 Ways to Speed Up a “Slow” Metabolism

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Welcome back!

How my friend wants to go back to looking like…

I was talking a friend of mine the other day who is trying, to lose weight. (Long term readers will know that I consider this ‘wrong thinking’ we should be focussed on losing fat, not weight…)

The amount of weight in question is only 7 kilos (about 15lbs) so my friend is not obese yet she has been struggling with this same 7 kilos for years now…losing most if not all of them only to have them come back often with extra  ‘friends’…I’m sure that this sounds familar to many of you – it was certainly my experience in the past.(For my story and why this happens to so many of us sign up for the free report at the top right of this page)

You know the situation Lose 5kg.  Gain 4. Lose that 4.  Gain 6. And so on.

From our chat it was obvious that this pattern had been repeating over & over since her early 20’s. Having 3 kids in her late 20’s may have made it a bit worse, but nonetheless this weight has become a decade long issue. Her husband, a big athletic ex-kickboxer has also been fighting the same fight since he hit his late 30’s. This is not just a female or male only issue – we all want to look and feel healthy and the older we get the harder it becomes to get into and then stay in shape.

This is because our metabolism becomes de-conditioned. It is just not a matter of it slowing down – it actually becomes less efficient in a whole lot of areas all of which impact our health & well being.

This how we want see ourselves – lean & fit…

Now my friend & her husband are example so this. They get in shape about once a year through an all out campaign of huge exercise increase and dietary restriction. They drop weight (though not necessarily fat) look slimmer for a period of time and then the slow (or not so slow) weight regain happens and they end up being the same size as before if not larger. Even worse it takes more & more effort to get into shape each year and once there they are staying ‘slim’ for shorter & shorter periods of time.

Accepting a future of becoming ‘comfortably chubby’ is on the cards as far as they are concerned…My friend is concerned about this and wanted to know how she can speed up a slowing metabolism.

So how do you speed up a “de-conditioned” metabolism?

The bigger you are the faster your metabolism will be – this is simple fact. However if you took 2 people the same size and weight – the one with the lower body fat would have the faster metabolism and the easier time of it when it came to losing fat and getting healthier.

Why? Well because muscle – lean tissue – does increase metabolism more than fat, so less fat and more lean tissue keeps your metabolism running faster. A faster metabolism burns more calories and this means decreased fat.

Build muscle. The more muscle you have the faster you metabolism, the lower your body

Lift weigths, move more – get your metabolism reconditioned…

fat and the better you look naked – pretty good reasons to strive to get more lean tissue onto your frame don’t you think!!??

Muscle is more metabolically active at rest and when moving. Now some folk will tell you not to get too excited about this because for every 1 lb (500 grams) of muscle, research shows its only about a 9-15 calorie/day increase in metabolism. But as you know losing fat and looking better and being healthier is a game of synergy  and incremental gains What you eat, when you eat, how often you eat; when & how you work out, how much sleep you get, your stress level, your DN – all of these things work synergystically for or against your fat loss. So in the scheme of things burning an extra 9 or so calories a day at rest is not exciting BUT fat loss is a game of increments not huge differences!! It all adds up – so while 1 lb of muscle doesn’t offer a huge calorie benefit, adding on more muscle than that does.  Plus working out to gain that muscle has a ton of other health related benefits – including better calorie burn! If you work out properly you can be burining extra calories for hours afterwards.

Eat More.Unprocessed carbs and protein that it. It sounds contradictory but the other way

Eat more often & eat more protein with unprocessed foods…

to speed metabolism is to eat more. I have spoken about the Thermic Effect if Food (TEF) here: Metabolism-what-it-is-how-you-can-make-it-work-for-you-part-6

When you eat, especially if you eat protein and fibrous vegetables & fruits, your body has to use energy to digest & process your meal so your overall metabolism increases.  Protein, of course, does more to boost metabolism than either carbs (even unprocessed ones) or fats because it takes more energy to break it down & process it.  So make sure each meal includes a little protein — fish, eggs, chicken, turkey – skip the nuts, beans or soy their protein is not complete (they have to be eaten with foods containing a complete amino acid profile – ie flesh based protein) are less bio-available and does not have a) the same thermogenic affect and b) confer fewer health benefits.

Eat breakfast.  Eating a good solid breakfast after what is effectively at least an 8 hour

A family favourite at our place….

fast gets the metabolism rolling in quick order. Again though it is protein and fibrous carbs that do the trick. That oatmeal, boxed muesli or buttered toast are marginally better than skipping breakfast entirely but only just.and is likely to be causing a lot of other less desirable health effects. (Mmm – insulin spikes for breakfast just what I need to stay fat!!)

The best breakfast to rev up your metabolism is eggs with spinach, mushroom, onions and capsicum as an omelette, along with some cheese, some fruit and a small handful of nuts. (Colby cheese and pear is one of Nature’s great duos – right up there with tomato and onion, bacon & eggs, cauliflower and cheese sauce..)

There’s now some solid data suggesting eating eggs in the morning boosts weight loss above and beyond choosing toast, cereal or a bagel.

Do HIIT for your workouts. I’ve said it before (Interval-training-the-1-not-so-secret-fat-loss-tool) – long, slow cardio sessions do next  to nothing in terms of creating a post

When you’re fit enough sprints are a great HIIT workout…

exercise calorie burn (EPOC) when the workout is done.  On the other hand, shorter, harder intensity exercise bouts cause a much longer increase in metabolism, even hours after your workout is finished.  In fact, a number of studies show s much as a 14+ hour increase in metabolism after a high intensity bout of exercise.  This boost burned an additional 190 calories!  Again it is a game of increments so this will add up.

There you have it — 4 simple strategies to boost a slowing metabolism. If you’d like to know more about speeding up and reconditioning your metabolism go here and read the series.  How-you-can-fix-a-broken-metabolism-part-1

PS My firend & her husband have adopted the above and in addition have gone ‘paleo’. They’ve never looked or felt better. I’ll write about Paleo soon.

See you next week – be well.