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Fat burning: read this first
Body World Fat Burner!
By Harley Gray
Read this first…
Realise that in terms of body fat and muscle tone, nutritional intake accounts for minimum 50% of results!! (and that’s conservative!!!)
Exercise and rest make up the rest, so understand that you must have the support of healthy eating habits if you want to change your body!
In terms of what kind of program is best for burning fat, there is no absolute ‘best’ way for everyone, but there are key ingredients that apply to everyone.
Basic Idea of the program
1) Improve metabolism
2) Reduce blood sugar levels, allowing the body to use stored fat as energy
3) Increase our energy requirements
End result: a leaner body!
1) Improving metabolism
Several factors will improve metabolism. Here are the ones we’ll look at.
a) Resistance training: This will increase our lean muscle mass, in turn increasing our daily energy requirements. This means that food eaten has a job to do in our body, other than being stored as energy for later
b) Cardio training: Improves fitness and stimulates circulation, which means we can train harder. Of course it also burns those calories down!
c) Most important to burn fat: Eating more frequently, small portions, and appropriate foods.
When you haven’t eaten for 4+ hours, your metabolism will start to slow down because your body is literally preparing for starvation. Eating more frequently will increase metabolism because there is a constant supply of nutrients.
Tip: Don’t go on a ‘diet’… instead, change your eating habits one step at a time. This makes it far easier to keep healthy changes in the long term! An example of this would be changing one meal per day, for instance, if you’re only having 3 meals, add another meal in somewhere.
2) Reducing blood sugar levels
Blood sugar levels are directly associated with fat burning.
The body has an order in which it chooses its energy sources:
1) Alcohol
2) Sugar/carbohydrate
3) Fats/proteins
Body fat is only used as energy when your blood sugar is LOW. Alcohol and carbs will always be used first as they are a more efficient and easily available energy source.
So, we want to burn fat, how do we reduce blood sugar levels?
1: Exercise
2: Nutritional intake – Consume less sugar/carbs/alcohol.
Tip: Reducing your carbohydrate intake can be a bit of a shock to the body. It can take 2-3 weeks for your body to get used to using your fat stores as energy, so if you’re a bit moody, have trouble sleeping, feel drained of energy etc, don’t worry, it will pass!
3) Increase your energy requirements
A simple way of looking at weight loss is the balance between energy expended and energy intake. Basically saying if you eat more than you exercise, you’ll put on weight, and vice versa.
‘Increasing energy requirements’ refers to our energy expenditure – whether while exercising OR while at rest. Just because you’re sitting at a desk or lying in bed doesn’t mean you’re not using energy!
Of course, you burn a lot more energy while exercising, BUT, think about how much time you spend (or even would like to spend) exercising every day. Some days you’ll do well (45mins to an hour), others you might not even get half an hour in.
On average, even people that go to the gym regularly get less than an hour of exercise in daily. That leaves another 23 hours in the day that you’re relying on your resting metabolism to burn off excess energy.
The good news is, after resistance training, your body needs and uses more energy to rebuild muscles, and bigger muscles need more energy 24 hours a day!
A leaner body…
Hopefully this has helped explain a few things and given you a better understanding of weight loss – an actual exercise program specific to this will be posted separately, in case that’s what you were looking for!
Questions, comments & discussion welcome!