Four Easy Fat Loss Tips

Don’t drink your calories!
Sleep the fat off!
Easy, slow fat loss.
Interval training.

Don’t drink your calories!

Here is why eating your calories is better than drinking them. First because it takes longer to eat calories than drink them. The reason this is important is that your body has a feedback mechanism that is used to tell you when you have eaten enough food but it can take 10 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain to turn off that conveyer belt to your mouth. Now I can polish off those two huge glasses of OJ in about 2 minutes when I’m thirsty and the brain cant react fast enough to shut down the drinking at the proper time. Our bodies were not designed for high calorie beverages, cavemen didn’t have OJ and coke, they had to work hard to gather their meager calories.

The second reason that eating your calories is better than drinking them is fiber. Fiber is good because it physically jams up your stomach and makes you feel full without adding any calories. Most juices have no fiber at all. Even if you get the OJ with “lots of pulp” it has only a small fraction of what you would get by eating a fresh orange. Part of what tells your brain that you have had enough to eat is the amount of bulk in your stomach, juice has no bulk so it takes a lot more.

Read more about why you should not drink your calories unless you are bulking.

Sleep the fat off!

Sleep deprivation makes you burn muscle rather than fat! If you are dieting while sleep deprived, you will burn twice as much muscle and only half as much fat. The message is clear, if you are on any sort of a diet trying to get ripped you MUST get enough sleep or you will lose muscle instead of fat! If you are eating less than your TDEE in an attempt to lose weight, you must get enough sleep or the weight you will be losing will be muscle instead of fat. (Annals of Internal Medicine October 5, 2010 vol. 153 no. 7 435-441)

Read the many more fitness reasons why you should make sleep a higher priority in your life!

Easy, slow fat loss!

Anyone promising “fast and easy sixpack abs” is lying – its a lot of work to get them quickly. For most of you who are overweight, you didn’t get that way overnight. You got overweight by eating a slight caloric surplus, just a few hundred calories, for many years or decades. Just as you didn’t gain the weight overnight, you cant lose it overnight either! To lose fat the easy way and uncover those sixpack abs just waiting to see the light of day, all you have to do is reverse what happened to you. Instead of running a caloric surplus of a few hundred calories, you just run a caloric deficit of a few hundred calories. Anyone can do this – you don’t need to diet. You don’t need to watch what you eat nor do you need to weigh every portion of food. You don’t need to exercise. All you need to do is make one or two healthy substitutions in your diet every day. You will laugh at how easy it is to cut out 200 calories. You wont even miss it.

A great example is what you spread on your sandwiches and lather on your burgers. Mayonnaise is the #1 condiment in America and other countries even use more per capita than USA does. Thing is, mayo is almost 100% fat and even a thin layer can add up to 100 calories. So do this, substitute mustard for the mayo! 100 calories saved. How do you save the other 100 calories? The easiest way to lose weight is to avoid drinking your calories. Substitute water for that one can of Coke you have a few days a week and you have made all the lifestyle changes you need to in order to get lean again! But remember: you can have fast fat loss or you can have easy fat loss, but not both. Losing fat this way, it can take years to shed the fat.

Interval Training!

A lot of people are promoting interval training. Are you just wasting your time with old fashion walking, biking, and swimming? You’d think so from listening to everyone. Yes, interval training DOES burn off more calories per minute than any other kind of cardio. So is interval training the best way to quickly lose that 20lbs of fat to get ripped abs? Not in my opinion!

“In the fitness class of life, attendance is 80% of your grade.” – Scooby Werkstatt

Well meaning, highly motivated people wanting to whip themselves into shape fast find this fact out the hard way every January. With their new years resolutions in hand they do too much, too fast and end up injured and then hang up their gym shorts till the next January when they try again. Crossfit, interval training, and other advanced workouts are great but you need to establish a good base of fitness beforehand or you will get injured. Its far, far better to just walk every day for a year than it is to sporadically do interval training. In the big fitness class called life, attendance is 80% of your grade! This was kind of a bait and switch because “interval training” is not the easy fat loss tip here – avoiding injury so you can be active every single day is the tip!