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Archive for June, 2010
Extreme Training: Real Fat Loss 4
June 25th, 2010categories: Diet and Nutrition, Extreme Training
Heavy Bags
It is Time to Put your Rear in Gear.
Heavy Bags
In the last article, Extreme Training: Real Fat Loss 3, we discussed the importance of Recognizing Patterns in your Eating and Exercising Habits as well as to access your Current Level of Motivation to Change.
You should also have a good sense of what has worked or not worked in your past attempts to build a Healthy and Lean Body.
Now it is time to get to work. The following Four Steps will get you moving in the right direction.
First: Make sure that you have a clear image of what you want to achieve. For example, lose 5 pounds of fat in 10 weeks while preserving your muscle mass. In order to achieve this goal your target should be to lose one-half pound of fat a week.
You should now have a pretty good idea how much you eat every day from your Food Journal.
The average number of calories you consume every day is not necessarily your base-line. It may in fact be an amount which leads to fat gain over time (this topic will be addressed later).
That’s OK for now. Let’s start with the assumption that your average caloric intake is your baseline. From there you will subtract the number of calories, per day, that it will take to reach your fist goal of losing one-half pound of fat a week. In this example, if you divide the number of days to your weekly goal from the calories in a pound of fat, 3,500, you will come up with 250 calories per day.
Your goal, simply stated, is to eliminate 250 calories from your diet every day for the next ten weeks.
Second: Write down your goal. It is important to have some way of measuring your process. For some people this can be as simple as keeping track of their waist measurements. If your waist is 35″ and all of your pants are size 32″ than tracking your waist size may be all you need to do to tell if you are moving in the right direction.
The scale can be a tricky thing. Especially if you are eating healthy and exercising. It is possible to lose fat and gain weight in the form of Muscle Mass. That is why the tape measure is more useful than the scale.
Keeping things simple, following the example above, your goal is to eat 250 less calories a day for the next ten weeks.
That’s it. Simple.
Third: Identify the Weak Areas in your Diet. Now, you can make this as complicated or as simple as you want. I believe that by keeping things simple you are much more likely to reach your goals. In other words, don’t make things more complicated than they need to be by measuring and weighing everything you eat. Also, don’t get caught up in the “optimal” ratio of carbs to protein to fat. Why? Because there is science out there which supports just about any kind of crazy diet you can imagine. And the crazier the diet, the less likely you will actually do it.
If your goal is to lose one-half pound of fat a week you need to eliminate approximately 250 calories a day from your diet. At this point forget about how many calories you burn up during exercise. Why? In very simple terms, the training you do should become a part of your lifestyle. If you exercise more – we will talk about that later – great. But for now, let’s keep focused on the first objective.
Now, look at your Food Journal and find the weak areas in your diet. These will be places or times where you eat more than you need to eat – or even want to eat. If you notice that you always eat a snack just before dinner of cheese and crackers, cut that snack out and eat something healthy, like a no-fat yogurt one hour before your usual snack.
Essentially you’re making trades in your current diet. The reason why you should try to eat the substitute snack – of lower calories of course – an hour earlier is to prevent you from craving your usual snack at the usual time. In order to achieve your goals it is critical to change your habits. In this case you may discover that some cravings can be held off by eating something healthy before the situation gets bad.
Another common area to make improvements to your diet starts with breakfast. Try eating a slightly larger breakfast by adding an egg or half a cup of cottage cheese. Follow this up by eating a smaller lunch. A small thing like eliminating french fries (or chips) from your lunch menu could, by itself, bring you to your fat loss goals.
The point is to go through your Food Journal and identify the targets that you will have no problem eliminating from your diet. Decide what to cut and what to substitute and go to work. Now.
If you have a passion for something that is really full of fat and sugar and are not willing to give it up, fine. What we are focused on now are total calories consumed. If you have to eat three cookies a day, cut out the equivalent number of calories from bread, or pasta – or, as is always a good method, just eat smaller portions of everything else that you eat.
The better alternative is to trade unhealthy snacks for healthy ones in smaller quantities. Remember, just because something is low fat does not mean it is low calorie. And the aim of this exercise is simply to cut 250 calories a day from your diet.
Four: Remember What You are Doing. The reason you are cutting calories is because you want to achieve a specific goal. If you can keep in mind the fact that the long term benefits of obtaining a healthy-lean body outweigh the short term pleasure a candy bar may provide, it will make things much easier to resist temptation.
The good news is, as you make healthier choices you will not crave the same things you do now. In other words, making healthy substitutions will, over time, become your new normal.
But again, without getting too complicated, the essential point to focus on at this time is to slightly reduce the number of calories you eat from your current baseline every day.
If you are exercising heavily you should add more protein to your diet to make sure that you are not losing muscle mass along with the fat. But, don’t dwell on this (this topic will be covered later in this series). A simple habit to start developing now is to have a protein bar or shake as close after your workout as possible.
Quick Review:
We are taking things slowly, step by step. And for now, this step is simply to begin eliminating a certain number of calories a day from your normal diet. In order to do this you will be required to Pay Attention to what you eat, Maintain Your Food Journal, and note where you have cut calories from. Take pride in your small victories. They add up, like calories, to big results!
Again, this Diet Journal information will be extremely valuable as we fine-tune your diet to make it as effective as possible.
In the next article we will discuss in greater detail some strategies which will help you reach your fat loss goals.
Disclaimer: This article is not medical advice but is intended for informational purposes only. If you have specific medical questions, issues or concerns, consult your health care provider. [Lawyers - got to love them.]
If you found this article helpful (or not) please leave a comment below.
Enjoy your training and your life!
Extreme Training: Real Fat Loss 3
June 22nd, 2010categories: Diet and Nutrition, Extreme Training
Weight
Permanent Fat Loss Requires Strategic Planning.
In the last installment of this series, Extreme Training: Real Fat Loss 2, the importance of maintaining a Food Journal was discussed. The basic idea is to record everything you eat and drink for at least a week. The reason for this is in order to make effective changes it is important to know what you are changing from. Improvement requires that you understand the dietary and exercise habits that contributed to your current situation (good or bad).
To Recap, Step One is to maintain a Food Journal.
Step Two is to Write a Diet History. This step can be as detailed or general as you want. Keep in mind that the more information you have, the easier and more effective it will be to create a Permanent Fat Loss Program.
Your Diet History should be an overview of your eating habits and to the extent you can remember, the changes in your Body Composition over time. For example, if you tend to gain weight in the winter and then lose some of it in the summer, this is important information to be aware of. In very simple terms try to figure out what you do differently at certain times of the year. It is possible that you simply play a sport in the summer, or do more activities outside while your diet remains relatively stable.
It is also possible that you will discover that in periods of stress you tend to gain weight (or in some cases, lose weight).
Keep in mind that you are looking for trends in your body composition over time. For example, if you identify that you only gain weight when you stop exercising, this is obviously critical information.
It is also helpful to recall and record times when things were going well. Times in your life when you felt great and were happy with your fitness level and condition. Try to remember what you were doing then, what your diet looked like, what your level of physical activity was.
Think of this information as signposts which will help direct you to your Fat Loss Objectives.
Once you have compiled all of the information you can, it is time for some Self Reflection.
The following list of questions can help guide you through this process:
1. Was there a time in the past when you were committed to a particular fitness objective and succeeded?
2. If so, what happened to change your committment?
3. If you have been unable to achieve a certain desired level of fitness, what would you say were your major obstacles or set-backs?
4. Why is it important now to achieve a certain fitness level or body-fat percentage?
5. What, if anything, has changed in your commitment level to your goals?
There are no right answers. The point of this exercise is to find reasons why achieving your fitness goals and body-fat levels are important to you. Important enough to take action to change certain aspects of your life.
If you are committed to living a healthy lifestyle, there should be nothing that stands in your way. Nothing should be more important than your health. Your health is your life. If you believe this and have an image of what you want to achieve, nothing should stand in your way.
In fact, the only thing that stands in the way of most people’s self improvement goals is themselves.
Without going into why people often become their own worst enemies – that is a topic for another time – it is enough to understand that if you exist in one shape, you have the ability to exist in another. In the end, it is up to you to make the small changes that will lead to great improvements in your health and condition.
One last point before we move on:
We are all Growing Older. What Worked in the Past may not Work in the Future. Just as everyone of us is a unique individual, over time we continue to change in our own ways.
That is Life. And, that is something we can deal with.
Go through the Exercises in this article and really try to connect with what it is that you want to accomplish. Knowing your individual history can help you prevent making the same mistakes again, or improving on something that has worked in the past. Information is Key.
In the next article we will outline the steps required to build and put into action a Permanent Fat Loss Strategy.
If you found this article helpful or have any thoughts, please leave them below.
Enjoy your Training and your Life!
Extreme Training: Real Fat Loss 2
June 18th, 2010categories: Diet and Nutrition, Extreme Training, Mental Muscle
What is this?
In order to get where you are going you need to know where you are.
What is this?
In the last article, Extreme Training: Real Fat Loss 1 we talked about 3 critical rules of fat loss: 1. Quick Fix Diets Don’t Work. 2. Exercise alone will not Eradicate Excess Fat. and 3. A Reduction in Body-fat Requires a Mixture of Diet and Exercise.
Now we take a look at the first step required to make a Lasting Impact on your Body-Fat Percentage.
Keep a Food Diary.
You need to keep track of Everything you Eat and Drink. Record what you eat and when you eat it. A small notebook can do the trick. Start this habit now!
Many people are surprised by the number of things that they eat during the day that they really don’t pay attention to. A chunk of cheese here, a candy bar (one of those miniature ones) there, a soda, a fruit smoothie (that can contain as much as 1,000 calories). The list goes on.
What you are looking for is Patterns. Is there a time of day when you seem to turn into an eating machine. Are there other stretches during the day where you go without eating anything for hours at a stretch.
What about Water? How Much Water do you drink during the day, verses coffee, diet or regular soda?
Once you have a sense of what your eating and drinking patterns are it becomes much easier to make adjustments.
But, in order for this to work you need to be honest - only you, or perhaps your trainer, will see the journal. You need to write everything down. It’s simple. Eat something, pull out your notebook and write down what it was and when you ate it. Got it?
After a week of keeping your journal you should be able to see patterns. Remember, observing these patterns is critical to being able to change things. In order to change it is far easier to know where to start. When it comes to diet, a small change can lead to big results. For example, eating 200 calories of snack food (approximately two medium size cookies) over the course of 17 days can easily lead to a Fat Gain of One Pound. Over the course of a year, those two daily extra cookies in your diet can lead to a Fat Gain of 21 Pounds! Do you know what 21 Pounds of Fat looks Like?
The point being, do not miss anything in your food diary – no matter how small or insignificant it may appear. Why? Because everything adds up.
Now, the good news is that once you have an accurate picture of your eating habits you can start to Target it on Specific Things to Change. For example, if you get hungry at 5:00, just before dinner and eat chips, and crackers and cheese and nuts and then a few pretzels (often whatever is around) you could try eating a yogurt at 4:00 and see if that helps you avoid the pre-dinner feeding frenzy.
It comes down to Numbers. If you can spread out what you eat over the day and cut down on a few things here and there – a cookie, a muffin, potato chips with dip because it is there, you can start to take control of what calories actually go into your body and when.
Will this make a difference? Absolutely. The first thing this does is help to make you aware that everything you eat has a consequence. Then, you will start to get a sense of where extra calories in your diet are coming from and can target them for action. If all you did was eliminate 200 calories of carbs and fat from your diet a day, that could either (depending on where you were in terms of your base-line calorie expenditure [more on this in the following article]) that could mean a Fat Loss of 1 Pound every 17 days or the Prevention of Gaining a Pound of Fat in that same period.
It all adds up. And, as you can learn from keeping a food journal, more of what you Eat is in your Control than you Might Imagine.
And, we are talking about making small changes which over time add up to big results. As a final example. once you find your calorie balance point – something we will discuss in the next article – a reduction of 100 calories a day will lead to a 10 pound fat loss over a year. Losing 10 Pounds of Fat a Year is a Tremendous Accomplishment. Especially when you consider that the reduction was so small it did require a radical form of diet (meaning it was not really very hard to do). And, if you don’t think a 10 Pound fat loss is a big deal, consider that in three years that number has grown to 30 pounds.
Of course, some people want to lose fat at a faster rate. With a higher level of commitment is can be done. It is possible to expect a fat loss rate of 1 Pound per Week. But for that to be a true fat loss amount requires hard work and focus. And all of that Work and Focus is based on understanding exactly what you did (or do) to get to where you are now. Once you know where you are, in terms of eating and drinking, you can create an Intelligent Plan for Fat Loss that is based on your levels of Commitment, Self Discipline, and Training Program.
No tricks, no secrets, and no magic formulas. The Process is Actually Simple.
In the next Article we will discuss how to use the information you have gathered in your food diary to design a Custom Fat Loss Plan.
If you found this Article helpful or have thoughts on this topic, please leave your comments below.
Until next time, keep track of what you eat and drink and get ready to make some Permanent Changes in your Body Fat Levels.
Have fun in your training and your life!
