Don’t drink your calories
Here is why eating your calories is better than drinking them. First, because it takes longer to eat calories than drink them. The reason this is important is that your body has a feedback mechanism that is used to tell you when you have eaten enough food but it can take 10 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain to turn off that conveyer belt to your mouth. Now I can polish off two huge glasses of juice in about two minutes when I’m thirsty and the brain can’t react fast enough to shut down the drinking at the proper time, so obviously I would have drunk too much. Second, our bodies were not designed for high-calorie beverages, cavemen didn’t have orange juice and coke. They had to work hard to gather their meagre calories and they drank water, maybe milk.
The third reason eating your calories is better than drinking them is fibre. Fibre is good because it physically jams up your stomach and makes you feel full without adding any calories. Most juices have no fibre at all. Even if you get the orange juice with “lots of pulp” it has only a small fraction of what you would get if you ate a fresh orange. Part of what tells your brain that you have had enough to eat is the amount of bulk in your stomach, juice has no bulk so it takes a lot more.
Sleep the fat off
Sleep deprivation makes you burn muscle rather than fat. If you are dieting while sleep deprived, you will burn twice as much muscle and only half as much fat. The message is clear: if you are on any sort of a diet trying to get ripped you must get enough sleep or you will lose muscle instead of fat. If you are eating less in an attempt to lose weight, you must get enough sleep or the weight you will be losing will be muscle instead of fat.
Easy, slow fat loss
Anyone promising fast and easy six-pack abs is lying – it’s a lot of work to get them quickly. For most of you who are overweight, you didn’t get that way overnight. You got overweight by eating a slight caloric surplus, just a few hundred calories, for many years or decades. Just as you didn’t gain the weight overnight, you can’t lose it overnight either. To lose fat the easy way and uncover those six pack abs just waiting to see the light of day, all you have to do is reverse what you did. Instead of running a caloric surplus of a few hundred calories, you just run a caloric deficit of a few hundred calories. Anyone can do this – you don’t need to diet. You don’t need to watch what you eat nor do you need to weigh every portion of food. You don’t need to exercise. All you need to do is make one or two healthy substitutions in your diet every day. You will laugh at how easy it is to cut out 200 calories. You won’t even miss it.
A great example is what you spread on your sandwiches and lather on your burgers. Mayonnaise is the number one condiment in America and there are other countries that even use more per capita than the USA does. The thing is that mayo is almost 100% fat and even a thin layer can add up to 100 calories. So if you just substituted mustard for the mayo, you would save 100 calories. How do you save the other 100 calories? Well as I said earlier, the easiest way to lose weight is to avoid drinking your calories. Substitute water for that one can of coke you have a few days a week and you have made all the lifestyle changes you need to in order to get lean again. But remember: you can have fast fat loss or you can have easy fat loss, but not both. Slow and easy fat loss can take years.
Interval training
A lot of people are promoting interval training. Are you just wasting your time with old fashioned walking, biking, and swimming? You would think so from listening to everyone. Yes, interval training does burn off more calories per minute than any other kind of cardio. So is interval training the best way to quickly lose that 20lbs of fat to get ripped abs? Not in my opinion.
Well-meaning, highly-motivated people wanting to whip themselves into shape fast find this fact out the hard way every year. With their new year’s resolutions in hand, they do too much, too fast and end up injured and then hang up their gym shorts till the next January when they try again. Cross training interval training, and other advanced workouts are great but you need to establish a good base of fitness beforehand or you will get injured. It would be far better to just walk every day for a year than to sporadically do interval training. In the big fitness class called life, attendance is 80% of your grade.
Stay tuned, friends. If you have fitness goals and need personal training or meal plans I can help! Serious enquiries only. Email now to emmersoncampbell@gmail.com or call 661-5954.
