Archive for the 'fat loss' Category

In this day and age, if there is one thing EVERY woman wants, it’s to have a hot sexy body that is toned, shapely and drop dead gorgeous!

So how do you get a drop dead gorgeous body at any age?

It’s done via a two pronged approach – by increasing the amount of lean muscle tissue you have and burning off your excess body fat.

This process is not called ‘losing weight’ – it’s called Body Recomposition.

Whether you are a professional fitness model or a stay-at-home mum, if you want a nice firm backside, shapely arms and shoulders, a slim waist and some abdominal definition – your goal should not be just to lose weight; it should always be to improve your body composition.

So today I bring to you My Top 10 Tips for Body Recomposition.

TOP 10 TIPS FOR BODY RECOMPOSITION:

1. Train with challenging weights in the 6-12 rep range

Adding lean shapely muscle (called hypertrophy) is best achieved with challenging weights in the rep range of 6-12.

Hypertrophy is the process of increasing the size of cells within an organ or tissue (such as muscle tissue), thereby increasing its overall size.

If you train with higher reps you surpass this stage and train your muscles for endurance rather than lean muscle gain. But, DON’T be afraid of building huge many muscles – it simply can’t happen as women don’t have enough of the male hormone testosterone.

2. Train at least 3 x week with weights

You need to stress the muscles often enough to elicit the adaptation response. The muscle then gets stronger and bigger, due to the stresses placed upon it. Therefore challenging weight training 3-5 x per week is recommended.

3. Eat plenty of protein

Protein will also help keep you fuller for longer and it has a thermic effect within the body, meaning that it takes additional energy/calories in order to break down the protein to be digested and used. So it’s great for muscle building, recovery AND fat loss.

4. Reduce your intake of carbohydrates but don’t eliminate them

You can’t burn fat in the presence of insulin and every time you ingest sugars or carbohydrates, your body releases insulin.

Yet carbohydrates are beneficial for brain fuel and for muscle recovery and are your body’s preferred energy source – so don’t eliminate them completely. The best time to eat carbohydrates is around your training times – before, and especially after a challenging workout. If you do this, you can be sure your carbs won’t be stored as fat.

5. Eat more veggies

Not only are fibrous veggies low in calories and packed with nutrients but they also have a high thermic effect so use up a lot of energy just to digest. And, cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts even help to counteract estrogen dominance, an insidious hormonal condition that many ladies suffer without even knowing.

6. Eat enough food

One of the biggest mistakes women make is not eating enough to fuel their body and assist with their fat loss and lean muscle gain goals.

You need to eat regular meals packed with protein, some complex carbs, lots of veggies and some good fats. Starving yourself is only going to slow down your metabolism and see you gain
weight long term, making it harder to get it off and keep it off. Not to mention, it’s no fun being hungry all the time.

7. Get enough rest and sleep

Many overlook the importance of sleep, but if you don’t get enough sleep you can’t function properly – and this has two negative outcomes.

The first is that you are unable to work to your full potential or hard enough in your training sessions. The second is that when you are tired, it messes with your hormones making it much harder to resist cravings.

8. Don’t overdo the cardio

If you want to lower your body fat and gain lean muscle too much cardio is counter-productive – especially the popular long, slow kind such as long distance running or cycling.

Muscle wastage occurs when performing a lot of long duration cardio, so instead try 2-3 short, high intensity sessions and only add longer, more moderate sessions as a last resort. Metabolic resistance training is a great option especially if you don’t have a lot of time.

The aim should always be to do as little cardio as possible if body re-composition is your goal.

Excess cardio also makes you hungry, and you’ll start to compromise your diet by over-eating.

9. Throw away the scale

When you change your body recomposition for the better, you add lean muscle weight (while reducing fat weight) so you may not see a huge drop on the scale but you will definitely see it in the mirror and by how your clothes fit.

10. Be patient
If you’re wondering how long it takes to transform your figure, an excellent time frame to give yourself is 12 weeks. If you are looking for rapid ‘weight’ loss, you will most likely find yourself losing a lot more precious muscle tissue than fat, becoming unbearably hungry and wrecking your hormones in the process.

If you need help in the area of body recomposition and are looking for a cost effective, practical solution check out my Ideal Body Blueprint program.

For a more personalized approach to getting a drop dead gorgeous figure, with coaching accountability and support, check out our award winning Body Makeover Programs

By guest blogger, Joel Marion

In Tuesday’s article, 5 Things LIMITING You From The FASTEST Fat Loss, we talked about just that—the 5 biggest fat loss “killers” present in most diet and exercise programs that are holding you back from achieving the most rapid results.  If you have yet to read that article, click HERE (page opens in a new window) to check it out as today’s article won’t make much sense without first having absorbed that content.

For those of you who have already read that article, today, I’m here to talk to you about the “fixes”. Let’s get right in to it:

Principle #1 – You must keep your body and metabolism happy.

As mentioned in yesterday’s article, dieting can do a number on your metabolism by screwing with important fat burning hormones like leptin, and rather quickly at that.  The answer to overcoming these adaptations lies in strategic high-calorie Cheat Days.

As you recall, leptin is heavily mediated by your calorie intake.  Decrease calories and leptin levels fall off, increase calories and leptin levels recover.

And while it takes roughly a week of moderate dieting for leptin levels to fall off significantly, it only takes one day of cheating, or overfeeding, for leptin to recover back to baseline.

By frequently resetting your metabolism throughout the course of your diet with strategic high-calorie Cheat Days, you can essentially have your cake and eat it too while watching your waistline continually shrink week after week.

Principle #2 – You must create a massive calorie deficit to lose fat rapidly.

There’s no way around it, a pound of fat is 3500 calories.  If you’re going to lose a pound of fat, you’re going to have to create a 3500 calorie deficit (while keeping your body in “fat burning mode” at the same time).  If you want to lose 10 lbs of pure fat, that’ll require a 35,000 calorie deficit.

SIDE NOTE: Please realize that 10 lbs of pure fat loss will probably equate to somewhere between 15 and 20 lbs of actual “weight loss” due to the simultaneous water loss that occurs any time you lose fat.

After a cheat day your body is uber primed for fat loss, and it’s prime time to take advantage with a mega calorie deficit.  On this day, we do two things:

1.  Consume minimal calories along with strategic supplementation to offset muscle catabolism.

2.  Ramp up activity to burn a ton of additional calories on this day

With this type of strategic set-up, it’s actually possible to burn a pound of pure fat in one day (considering that a pound of fat loss a week is deemed a “very good” rate of fat loss by most standards, that’s pretty awesome).

Principle #3:  You must tackle your fat loss goals synergistically through diet and exercise.

When you’re talking about the most strategic set-up and the most rapid fat loss, things get a little more complex than simply “do a lot of exercise”.  In fact, the type of exercise you do is just as important to your rapid fat loss goals as the frequency, duration, and intensity are.

With the Xtreme Fat Loss diet, you’ll see that there is a specific type or style of workout that we’ve purposefully chosen for each type of day to optimize and accelerate the results of that day.

Here is just one example:

Lactic Acid Training, which are very metabolically demanding, calorie-burning workouts, are performed on Depletion Days.

Because lactic acid workouts have the potential to burn more calories than other styles of training (because…they’re hard), they are the clear choice for Depletion Days when we want to create the largest caloric deficit.  Lactic acid training also depletes the body’s “energy reserve”, making them the ideal workout style for Depletion Days.

Principle #4:  You must avoid ANY positive weight gain.

When I first started teaching Cheat Days it was understood that there may be some positive fat gain as a result of a Cheat Day in order to yield MORE fat loss the following week (leading to a great net weekly fat loss).

For example, without incorporating strategic Cheat Days, let’s say someone is able to lose a pound a week (with each week’s weight loss becoming progressively slower leading to the inevitable plateau).

With strategic cheating that same person is able to now lose 2 lbs each week (with no drop off in metabolism and no plateau).  This is a result of a half pound gain in body fat from the Cheat Day and a subsequent 2.5 pound loss (net loss = 2 lbs).

Now, the latter scenario is obviously WAY better than sticking to the same boring, strict diet every day while achieving slower results, but it still leaves a half pound of fat gain resulting from the Cheat Day, which, if eliminated = faster results.

Within muscle tissue, energy is stored in the form of glycogen (carbohydrate energy) and triglycerides (fat energy).  With strategic training (like the lactic acid training mentioned in principle #3), these energy stores can be depleted or exhausted.

Why would you want to do that?

To make “room” for an influx of calories, carbohydrate and fat (for example, a Cheat Day)!

When glycogen and triglyceride stores are full, a Cheat Day is like pouring more liquid into an already full glass.  Some of that liquid is inevitably going to spill over and lead to a bit of a mess (in this case, fat storage).  But, if you dump out the glass and then refill it, there’s no “overflow”.

This is exactly what we do by performing glycogen and triglyceride depleting lactic acid training (while limiting carbohydrate intake) on the day prior to a Cheat Day.  We empty the cup making room for the following day’s influx of cals, carbs, and fat.

The result?  You get the same hormone-boosting, metabolism stimulating effect from the Cheat Day without the fat gain.  Instead, the excess calories and carbs simply go to refilling your body’s empty energy stores.  That, my friends, is what I call strategy.

And by eliminating any Cheat Day fat gain, you can easily increase your rate of fat loss by 25%!

Principle #5—You must maintain muscle mass to maintain metabolism.

This ties back in to some of the information I shared in Principle #3, the strategic combination of diet & exercise for optimal results, along with something else I haven’t fully touched on yet.

When faced with long-term calorie restriction, the body will choose to utilize muscle tissue for energy over body fat, leading to significant muscle loss and decreased metabolism for most dieters. Simply put, fat is more valuable to your body than “extra muscle” when it comes to survival, and it prioritizes accordingly in the face of long-term calorie restriction.

But, when you understand how to combine strategic cheat days along with high volume training to spark muscle growth even while you’re dieting, then you’ll easily be able to maintain (if not gain a couple pounds) of lean muscle throughout the course of only a few weeks.

Muscle = metabolism.  The more lean muscle you have on your frame, the higher your metabolism is going to be.  Muscle burns calories just sitting there.  Maintaining it as you lose fat is fundamentally important to continuing to lose fat at an optimal rate.

Another way this program helps you maintain muscle is via Principle #1 – keeping your body happy.  When your body remains in a “normal” state (instead of a “red alert” state like with long-term calorie restriction) over the course of a diet, there is no reason for it to resort to muscle tissue for energy.  By keeping leptin levels high week after week, you maintain your metabolism and program your body to continue to burn fat, not muscle.

Wrap Up

You now KNOW what’s limiting your fat loss along with my 5 top principles to overcome those limitations.  As you can see, it’s ALL strategy and every single piece of the puzzle makes a huge difference.

Thanks for the great info Joel!

Doesn’t reading that article make you excited about the fat loss possibilities that you are capable of? If you are ready to experience just how FAST fat loss can be when you unlock the power of strategic, synergistic program design, then next week we have a nice surprise for you! On Tuesday, May 1st, the discounted pre-sale will open and you’ll have the chance to get your own copy of the fastest fat loss diet in history. I’m even considering following this one myself.

Have an awesome weekend!

Sue