Diets Don’t Work: How To Effectively Lose Body Fat

Up to now I’ve only covered the reasons why dieting fails so many people looking to lose body fat. It’s now time to discuss the ways in which you can lose body fat safely and effectively and keep it that way! The first thing is to do is to completely eradicate the notion of a diet from your thinking. From now on you don’t go on a diet, your diet has to be consistently healthy for your lifetime. It becomes a lifestyle change that sticks with you. This may seem like a daunting task, but I assure you once you get over the initial adaptation it will just as hard to stop eating healthy, as it is to start now. Your body willadapt to the change you put on it and not only that, you will start to feel better; I guarantee you will want to keep eating healthy. To do this you need to change the way you think, the power of your own suggestion is one that has full control over your actions. The more you think about eating healthy and the benefits that come with, the more your subconscious will see it as the norm. This will form a habit, and once you’ve reached this stage it will be very hard to go back. I will cover exactly what a healthy balanced diet consists of in my next series of articles. However having a healthy diet is only one variable that factors into losing body fat. It is important and acts as a solid platform to launch your fat loss mission from.

If you want to lose body fat, think lean! Lean mass burns more body fat at rest when compared with fat mass. Simply put, the more lean mass you have the more calories you burn. There is some debate as to exactly how many more calories are burnt from lean mass but the underlying fact is that a higher percentage of lean mass is directly correlated with a higher basal metabolic rate (calories you burn at rest).  Increasing your muscle mass will involve some strength training but don’t worry you can design your program so that you don’t necessarily have to increase your size/shape. It will simply have the effect of changing that doughy region of your physique to a more toned region. If your goal is to increase muscle mass then this is possible too, however it is not always easy to do this at the same time as losing fat mass. Again I will cover this in a future article.

Never drop below a minimum calorie deficit! As I have discussed in previous articles, dropping your calorie intake too low will cause your body to elicit a starvation response, an event that is counterintuitive if you want to lose body fat; remember you want to keep your muscle not burn it for energy. So set yourself a minimum calorie deficit and never drop below it. This can be worked out roughly as 22% below you maintenance level calorie intake. A very rough equation is to multiply your body weight in kg by 25 then subtract 22%. Keeping your calorie intake above this level will ensure your don’t experience a starvation response. You do however need to ensure you exhibit a calorie deficit to some extent. This is a basic rule of physiology. To lose mass you need to expend more than you intake. I recommend that you reduce your calorie intake by no more than 15% below maintenance for the first two weeks. However there is another way you can create a calorie deficit. Burn more calories from exercise than you consume from food.

Exercise to create a calorie deficit! If you can always chose to eat more and do more. These two things will not counteract each other. Exercising will not only burn calories, it will give you added physiological benefits and will never cause your body to go into starvation mode. Your body will only demonstrate a starvation response if you fail to consume enough calories, never if you burn off too many through exercise. If you exercise and eat more you get the double effect of increasing your metabolism by increasing lean muscle mass and by increasing the amount you consume. It turns your body into a fat burning furnace. So this is not an invitation to exercise and reduce your caloric consumption. If you burn the calories by exercising you should eat more; and still lose body fat. Different modes of exercise will have differing effects on your body’s caloric expenditure, however they will all leads to the same goal.

Increase your meal frequency! During hyper-energetic periods, (when you are burning a lot calories via exercise), increasing your meal frequency will act to preserve lean body mass. Not only this, increased meal frequency will have a positive effect on various blood markers of health; LDL Cholesterol, Total Cholesterol and Insulin to name but a few. Finally, increasing your meal frequency will help to decrease hunger pangs and improve your appetite control. Now before you think that I’m suggesting you eat 6 big meals a day, I’m not. What I mean by increasing your meal frequency is spreading your total calorie intake over a greater number of meals. Instead of eating 3 big meals a day, eat 5-6 but reduce the calorie intake per meal, this way you will still be eating the same amount of calories per day. Ideally you should be looking to eat every 3 hours. This will prevent you being in a negative calorie balance for any extended period of time and will keep your metabolism burning as high as possible. Think of it as ‘stoking the fire’, the fuel being body fat!

So hopefully you now know how to attack your body fat goals and make sure you don’t get sucked into the dieting culture that has swallowed so many wanting to lose fat. The key idea to take from this is to make sure you don’t stay in a negative calorie balance and force your body into a starvation response. Keep a healthy balanced diet that never drops below your maximum calorie deficit and use exercise to metabolise the fat!

Finally, what to do if your fat loss plateaus! This can be a very common part of trying to lose body fat. Your initial fat loss will be great but it will begin to slow as you body adapts to the changes your putting upon it, it’s an effect of homeostasis (one of the wonders of the human body). If this happens, do not start to reduce your calories further.  As you should know by now, this will only see to put your body into starvation mode. Instead, eat more. As odd as this might sound it will work. Going through a period of increased calorific intake will spike your metabolism and re-ignite the fat burning fire (be sure to only increase your calorie intake for no more than a 24 hour period). This method is known as ‘zig-zagging’ and is very affective at overcoming plateaus.

Sam @GBNutrition

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