“I run 30 minutes every day, so why is it that I never seem to look any leaner?”
Have you ever found yourself asking this kind of question? Lowering your body fat levels can be more difficult than building muscle if you let it be, but I get the feeling that many of us make it a bit tougher than it really needs to be.
Chances are that if you have been weight lifting for a decent period of time, you’ve managed to increase your metabolism by adding more muscle to your body. Each weight lifting session also burns calories and helps you get closer to your goals.
Adding cardio into your routine can only help out when it comes to lowering your body fat levels, but cardio is not the first factor you should be looking at to help you get leaner. A few tweaks to the way you eat might really be what you need the most to start seeing a difference.
When you’re trying to lean down and get rid of some extra fat, start by focusing you’re attention on the F.A.T.
F.A.T. = Frequency. Amount. Type.
This is a simple way for you to remember to get rid of fat by focusing on F.A.T., or the Frequency, Amounts, and Types of food you’re eating.
Don’t be one of those fools who runs their guts out only to come home and mess it all up by the way you eat. I know that you might feel that you’re getting something more out of running hard because it’s so tough to do, but seriously, do the easier things first and then move on to the tough things, especially if the easier things help you more.
Frequency: In general, if you’re one of those people that (more…)
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This post is part 2 of a 2 part series. In part 1, Starvation is Not the Answer, we talked about how under eating can slow down your metabolism and make you fatter.
Here’s a piece of information that some of you will be glad to hear – Eating enough food each day will help you to keep fat off of your body. You are going to have to forget the idea that cutting fat comes from just eating less food; it’s simply not the truth.
This is the part that is hard for many people to accept when you are trying to cut some fat. Switching to smaller and more frequent meals throughout the day will actually cause your metabolism to stabilize.
You might be eating more food overall throughout the day, but eating even amounts of food throughout the day will help you to keep your metabolism higher. The key will be to make the following things happen:
1. Feed your body: Like we discussed before, the amount of food you give your body will affect your metabolism. If you don’t want your body to go into survival mode and save all the fat on your body, don’t starve it.
Sometimes we think we are so clever.
We think we can just fool our bodies into looking the way we want it to. It’s funny what people are willing to try just so that they can lose fat without having to exercise.
This is the lazy way to try to lose weight, and it doesn’t work for very long. Whether you’re trying to lose a lot of fat or just remove that stubborn bit of fat on your gut, you’d better read closely, because the same rules will apply.
Contrary to what you might be thinking, people don’t always become overweight simply because they are overeating – there’s more to the story than that. I remember feeling so surprised when I once talked to an overweight person who told me he never eats breakfast, and then only eats a small salad for lunch.
I remember thinking “Sheesh, I really feel bad for this guy. His genetics must be terribly unfair to him”. But then I started to notice that this was a common theme among many overweight people.
Yes, fat can be gained by overeating huge amounts of food all the time, but it can also be gained by eating less food and slowing your metabolism down. I’ll explain what this means.
It’s Not That Simple
Let me start off by saying that how much fat you have on your body is not simple math. If you keep your energy expenditure constant but you lower your calories, you’ll lose weight. So it seems that if you lowered your calories even more, you would lose even more weight… it’s simple math, right?
Well, actually it’s not simple math. Your body doesn’t know the rules of your little calorie calculations, and frankly, it doesn’t really want to follow them either. Your body worries about survival first, and when you don’t give it enough food, your body does what will help it to survive — it saves what you eat as fat.
This is because humans haven’t always lived in a world where food was so abundant. The human species has had to endure a world where food may or may not come on any given day… or even week for that matter.
If weight loss really were simple math, and people could really burn 10 pounds of fat every week forever, then humans wouldn’t have been able to survive the hunting and gathering days of our past. They would have all starved to death long ago.
Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for us), our bodies are smart enough to adapt to the amounts of food we give them. When we eat less food, our metabolism slows down so that we can survive off of less food.
So let’s take a look at what happens to us when we severely cut our calorie intake to lose fat:
1. Loss of fat, muscle, and water: This is the part of most diets that gets all the attention. You start your diet and you lose a whopping (more…)
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