These fundamental rules are the best ways to lose body fat for men and for women.
1 - Eating breakfast is the best way to lose weight and body fat. When you wake up in the morning from that wonderful beauty sleep, rested or not, your metabolism is running at the lowest gear of the entire day. Your body is running on fumes! The second you eat something, your body cranks into gear and metabolically starts working at a higher rate. That shower with the Irish Spring may wake your mind and your senses up, but that breakfast wakes up your metabolism.
2 - Do not skip meals! You should be eating every 3 to 4 hours. I suggest each meal should no have more than 300 calories and maximum 500 calories. Snacks between 150 and 200 calories. Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner should be the biggest meals of the day, breakfast being the largest and then lunch and dinner being the smallest. Each meal and snack should be a reasonable combo of high-fiber carbohydrates, lean protein, and healthy fats. When it comes to the number of meals, less is not more. In fact, more meals, means more metabolic revving, so eat wisely, but eat up.
- Always Front load your calories by getting the majority of your calories towards the front of the day.
- Don’t do the Sumo wrestler diet. Sumo wrestlers eats a huge calorie meal and then goes to bed and that is how they gain the large amounts of weight. They train their bodies to get fat by back loading their calories at the back end. Back loading is when you eat the large amount of your calories at the end of the day right before you go to bed in order to put on body fat.
- Eat slow, put your fork down between meals and until satisfied NOT stuffed. Most restaurants have twice the number of calories you need in one setting. AVOID simple sugars, white flower and processed foods.
3 - Include a lean protein source with every meal. Mirror, mirror on the wall, what has the highest thermic effect of them all? Protein! When you eat protein, it is like throwing lighter fluid onto the fire in that wood burning stove; therefore, include a lean protein source with every meal to get a little extra burst of metabolic power. When choosing your protein, remember our saying: "The less legs the better." Fish have no legs and are a lean and healthy source of protein. Turkey and chicken have two legs - take off the skin and don't fry it and you have a fabulous source of protein. With anything that is or comes from an animal with four legs, be selective. Lean cuts of red meat and low-fat or non-fat dairy are the only way to go.
4 - Exercise is a must! Keep your metabolism up though exercise and resistance training. Why? Because we lose 10lbs of muscle a year. When we exercise, we also have this great post-exercise period called "EPOC." Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption = more calories burned. The magnitude of the EPOC can change with different types of training. Weight training and circuit training where you have 40-70 seconds under tension per set will rev up the metabolism. More tension your body is under, the higher the metabolic response.
- Do interval training to get lean and drop body fat. Interval training will increase the amount of mitochondria in your body. Mitochondria are part of the muscle cell that actually burns calories. Interval training: It is when you workout by taking your heart rate to 80% of it maximum for about 15-20 seconds and then back down to around 60% for 3 minutes. Working very hard for a very shot period of time and then resting and repeating. Example: Sprints. Yes it burns but yes it works. If you want to get lean then you need to take your heart rate up.
5 - Drink green tea! Green tea has been proven to increase fat loss. Green tea has a natural component that helps to speed up the metabolism. Not Lipton sweetened green tea. I am talking about brew-it-yourself with boiling water and a tea-bag-type tea. Green tea contains substances called Catechins that stimulate the body to burn calories (rev up the metabolic furnace). Researchers have proven this and studies showing that four cups of green tea per day can help reduce body fat have been published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Added bonus? Catechins have been shown to have anti-inflammatory effects, anti-cancer properties, and may help control cholesterol levels.
6 - Don’t starve your self. Why? You will sends signals to the body that causes that fight or flight response which tells the body to store fat and not burn fat. Your body will hold on to its body fat and burn it’s muscle for needed fuel for the brain and internal organs. Muscle burns fat so if you lose muscle you will end up holding more body fat. And when you do decide to eat food, you will overeat and that causes weight gain.
- Have a cheat day every week. Eat what ever you want. You will notice the more you try to eat healthy, the more you don't want to eat badly.
7 - Two of the most dangerous ingredients: Get rid of these and you have a obesity cure and diabetes cure. They can cause disease and they contribute largely to weight gain and obesity in individuals. Read the labels of the packaged food you eat and you will see that 90% of packaged and processed foods have them included. All junk foods have these two ingredients in them.
- High fructose Corn Syrup
- Trans Fatty acids
- The word Enriched on labels-food that it has been enriched, means that may of its nutrients have been taken out that they need to be added back in. Not good.
8 - Eat slower: Don’t go for the blue ribbon prize in how fast you can eat, go for the bronze. Put the fork down every once in a while between bites. It takes 20 minutes for you body to know it is full. Try to take at least 15 minutes to eat your meals.
- Reduce Stress: Stress tells the body that something is wrong and so it stores fat.
The Sympathetic nervous system sends signals to your bodies fat cells to slow down its metabolism, reduce fat burning capabilities and shoots sugar levels all over the place which creates hunger cravings. You have to find ways to actively relax. Take yoga, take 3 or 5 minutes to breath with your eyes close, listen to your breadth for 3 to 5 minutes, listen to music. Do activities that help you relax. Relaxing allows the Parasympathetic nervous system to send signals to the metabolism to burn calories, it tells your bodies fat cells to bur fat and lose weight. It keeps your insulin levels and sugar levels steady and even so that they don’t rapidly rise and fall.
Always supplement with flax seed or fish oil everyday. It helps the immune system, speeds up the metabolism, and fights disease. These oils contain the good Omega 3, 6, and 9’s and help turn on messages in the body that will burn fat and create weight loss. Most fish and nuts have these good oils but the ones that are high in them are Salmon, Sardines and Trout, flaxseed and Almonds.
- If you want to lose body fat weight, like 10% of your body weight, eliminate the starchy carbohydrates from you last two meals each day.
- Go easy on the fruit and try to choose fruit that have a low sugar count (A low glycemic value) like an apple, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and grapefruits. The fruits you want to go easy on are bananas, mangos, oranges, watermelon, honeydew melon and pineapples. Usually the more the tropical the climate the fruit comes from the more sugar content it has. Plums, peaches and pears tend to me right towards the middle of the glycemic index. You don’t want refrain from eating your favorite fruit but you don have to realize that fruit is natures candy though it be better than regular candy, it is candy. And for any successful weight loss program, you have to keep your sugars in check.
