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Get Ready For Summer - Part 1 - Fast Fat Loss (April 2008)

Welcome to the 3D PTS Edge April 2008 newsletter.

 

For us in the Northern Hemisphere summer is around the corner and shedding the layers of clothes has begun. But for many it's also a case of extra winter baggage still hanging on, which sees a lot of people taking drastic measures like semi-starving themselves to fit into their bathing suits and summer outfits.

 

This month we’re going to look at losing body fat the right way. To get really fast fat loss without starving yourself silly you need to eat right, move right and think right.

 

 

How do I think right?

 

Start thinking right by visualising how you want to look this summer, what you want to wear, how you want to feel when the sun’s shining. Setting that goal and holding onto it is the key to success, so burn that image and that feeling of vitality and confidence into your mind now.

 

 

Am I eating right?

 

Secondly you need to ditch the calorie restricted fad diets, cut out the foods that are well known for being badly tolerated by your body, and eat healthy. To do that you need to download our 21 day Elimination Diet, and our 21 Day Food Diary, which will help you identify what foods make you feel, and look, great.

 

While we’re talking about how important nutrition and your diet are in getting to your perfect weight and shape, we’d like to put a word in your ear about calorie restricted diets. A calorie is just a unit of energy, more specifically the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius, in case you were wondering.

 

Now to lose fat your body has to spend more calories than you’re giving it, but there are healthy and unhealthy ways of doing it. Calorie controlled diets starve your body and mind leaving you hungry and tired, lacking energy and vitality. They give you a short term result with long term problems.

 

After cutting calories your body sends a message to your brain saying "slow down the master regulator of metabolism" - otherwise known as the thyroid gland. 

An under active thyroid is one of the reasons people cannot achieve permanent optimal weight. Your thyroid gland reduces your energy output to balance the reduced calorie input which consequently slows down many of the body’s systems, which we experience as fatigue.

 

With calorie slashing diets the body starts using existing muscles for energy too, which further reduces the rate at which you burn energy, making it harder to lose body fat! Losing muscle mass gives people a false sense of fat-loss as muscle weighs more than fat and makes the scales lie.

 

This not a path to a happy life and will leave your body lacking essential nutrients, storing up a range of serious health issues for you. Don’t do it.

 

Eating right

 

So to lose fat you need to use more calories than you put in, but just completely slashing the calories is a no-no, so what next?

 

All calories are the same, it’s just a unit of energy after all. What isn’t the same is how you get them. A calorie from a slice of white bread has a very different effect on your body than the same number of calories from a serving of vegetables.

 

Only you know if you eat too much food. If you do, we recommend slightly cutting the amount of food calories going in while making sure that those calories are good quality – that each calorie also gives you essential fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals instead of that calorie either being empty, or worse still, containing chemicals or other substances your body finds harmful or hard to handle. To get you started, here are a few suggestions you might find useful:

  • Never diet, just eat right
  • Eat regularly to satisfy hunger, every 3 – 4 hours. This will increase your metabolism and keep your blood sugar levels steady. If you eat regularly your body thinks “hey, I don’t need to store as much of this food as body fat, because I am getting energy regularly”
  • Consume slightly smaller meals
  • Drink plenty of water. Ideally you should drink your 
    body weight in Kgs X 0.033 of water in litres per day
  • Decrease the amount of grains you eat (especially wheat)
  • Cut the dairy
  • Eat a source of protein (not soy), a good fat and a carb at every meal (if you’re vegetarian, eggs are great, or eat a bean or lentil with brown rice), your body needs all three macronutrients to function properly
  • Reduce your intake of processed food, bear in mind that most things that are white, like white rice, sugar, flour and salt, didn’t start out white in the field so they’ve been processed
  • Rotate your foods, get a great variety of whole foods into your diet

If you do that, you’ve just taken the second step on the path on looking and feeling great this summer…

 

How do I move my body right? Isn’t all moving the same?

 

Alright, so we know we might want to cut the food calories slightly and take care over the kinds of foods we’re getting our calories from, but to burn the fat fast we also need to move.

 

The first rule is to move your body every day. It doesn’t matter how, when or where. The second is to move it right.

 

For fast fat loss a good personal trainer knows exactly how you need to move, how much rest you need to take while working out and what kind of exercises are most effective. That’s what good personal trainers get paid for.

 

So firstly, cut the old ‘medium to low intensity, long duration’ way of doing cardio.  Let’s be clear, huge amounts of cardio will help you lose some fat, but it’s not going to get you where you want to go fast, with a body that is toned from top to bottom.

 

Big cardio workouts or using cardio workouts exclusively are a fat loss tool, for sure, just not a very effective one. It’s like using a spoon to create a sculpture, in the end you’ll have a sculpture, it’ll just take more effort and it’ll take more time, and you probably won’t have something particularly good to look at when you’re finished.

 

How to exercise and burn fat quickly

 

To burn fat you need to increase the neuromuscular demands on your body, and that means resistance exercise. Muscle is an active tissue that needs energy to sustain it whether it’s being worked or whether you’re asleep. That means calories.

 

Resistance exercise doesn’t have to mean big muscles though. It just means training functionally, with exercises that engage multiple muscle groups at the same time. A squat, for example, involves over 14 major muscles, a bicep curl exercises just a few, which do you think burns the most fat?

 

This type of exercise is also more effective than cardio when it comes to burning calories because post exercise oxygen consumption and your metabolic rate are higher after resistance exercise.

 

Does it mean you have to end up with a body like Arnold Schwarzenegger, ladies? No, activities like circuits, yoga and pilates develop muscle and use very little, if any, weights. Resistance exercise is best performed using the following types of equipment:

  • Free weights
  • Cables
  • Own body weight
  • Stay away from machines which work specific muscles (like a pec deck or leg press machine)

 

One great method to burn fat is through circuits. To perform a circuit put together 4 - 8 exercises that use as many muscles as possible, and perform them at about 65% (or above) of your maximum with no rest between each exercise.

 

When you’ve finished your circuit of 4-8 exercises, rest for 2–5 minutes, then start again. Perform 2–4 circuits in each workout.

 

Keep it fresh…

 

Every 2–4 weeks you need to change things around, introduce new exercises, more weight, change the intensity of the workout, the speed of your movement and / or the number of repetitions for each exercise. Otherwise your muscles will adapt and your workout will stop being effective.

 

If you don’t go for a circuit style workout (which will give you a pretty good cardio workout at the same time as working your muscles) but instead take a longer rest between your exercises, then add a 10 minute short duration, high intensity cardio blast at the end of your session. The most effective way to go about it is to work flat out for 1 minute then rest or take it easy for 30 seconds to recover, then go hard again for one minute until you’ve done 10 minutes. You can use any piece of cardio equipment, sprints, skipping, etc.

 

Big or exclusive cardio workouts are poorer fat burners, but you still need some cardio exercise, and this way of doing it is very, very effective.

 

Short duration cardio is essential as it allows nutrients to be transported to the cells via the bloodstream. When fat is released from storage centres (adipose cells) it travels through the bloodstream to be burned.

 

One other thing: aim to be asleep before 10.30pm and get a minimum of 8 hours sleep in complete darkness, as lack of sleep and rest will place stress on the body. When the body is stressed it protects itself, and one way is by releasing hormones to store fat. A good rule is every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours after in terms of recovery and repair.

 

All of the above and much more is covered in our 21 Day Roadmap to Health eBook, so if you want to feel fired up for summer, you could do worse than pick up a copy.

 

Wishing you all the best in health and fitness,

 

Craig, Matt and the 3D PTS team