If you can do basic math, you can burn fat. No magic bullet,
no secret, zero-calorie food, and no supplement—legal or illegal—works better,
faster, cheaper or healthier than good, old-fashioned food.If you eat more
calories than you burn you’ll start to store said calories. They have to go
somewhere, don’t they? Usually that place is your gut. Fortunately, the same
mechanisms that made you a little more man than you’d perhaps like can also
help you achieve your perfect weight. You just have to adjust the content and
portions that you consume.
Nutrition alone will not make you lose fat or boost your
performance. Rather, the lack of nutrition kickstarts your fat-burning
journey. Nutrition is the biggest player you can adjust if you want to get
leaner and perform better. That’s because food gives you energy. Even those
evil carbs everyone harks about are useful for giving you the energy you need
to exercise. To lose fat through eating, all you have to do is follow these
simple rules. No diet. No rapid-weight-loss programme that has you abusing your
soup pot. And definitely no avoiding your favourite foods. The secret is to
create a new you using these easy-to-follow rules.
Rule 1: Eat
Little and Often
Even if your primary information source is the newspaper you
find in the toilet at work, you’ve probably heard that you need to eat upwards
of six small meals a day to lose weight. This strategy makes your body
constantly burn fuel and ensures that you’re always eating and never hungry.
It’s akin to the way our ancestors ate: by popping food into their bearded
mouths as they hunted or collected it. However, you shouldn’t eat six huge
meals a day. Rather, stick to palm-sized servings for snacks and servings the
size of two fists for main meals. Alternatively, you can keep all your meals
more or less the same size. Keeping all portion sizes the same tells your body
that food is abundant and that it doesn’t need to store any as fat.
The ‘eat six small meals a day’ mantra works well in a
perfect world in which we all work from home and are two steps away from the
kitchen. It’s not always practical, however, if you work in an office, are on
the road or are just plain busy. Fortunately, a recent study at Purdue
University (Leidy et al., 2010) found that eating three normal-size meals that
con-tain high amounts of lean protein can make you feel fuller than eating
smaller, more frequent meals. In the study the three larger meals contained
less than 750 calories each and were carefully portioned to encourage weight
loss. The researchers found that eating protein during breakfast and lunch—meals
one might not normally include protein in—made the system work and that
proteins such as meat, eggs and legumes were good choices. That’s a pretty good
excuse to order a tasty 250-gram steak on your lunch hour.
Rule 2:
Fill Up on Fibre and Protein
These two nutrients are the champion weight-loss tag team.
They both slow the rate of diges-tion so you feel full longer and can reduce
sugar cravings. What’s more, fibre also helps hustle calories out of your body
and helps get rid of your lunch quicker. A diet rich in fibre helps people keep
weight off in the long run. How much is enough? The current rec-ommended daily
allowance for fibre is about 25 grams, but don’t stop there. Eat as much as you
can. It won’t harm you as long as you drink plenty of water with it. The same
goes for protein; make sure you get plenty in every meal. If you’re trying to
add muscle—and you should be to maximise fat burning—eat about two grams of
protein per kilogram of body weight. If you were in Australia, that would mean
throwing another shrimp on the barbie.
Rule 3:
Ration Carbs
Since 1980 the food intake of the average bloke has grown by
500 calories a day, and nearly 80 per cent of this increase can be attributed
to carbohydrate. In that time, the prevalence of obesity has become a pretty
big burden on the world economy. Carbs are dense in calories, which your body
uses very quickly. This can often make you feel full to capacity after a meal
and then hungry enough to eat a low-flying pigeon less than an hour later. What
can you do to keep yourself at your fighting weight? Cap your intake of the
most carbohy-drate-dense foods, such as grains and spuds, at just a couple of
servings a day. Eat them before or after training or any time before lunch.
This ensures that you put these energy-rich foods to use in either fuelling or
recovering from an exercise session. You can go one better by always eating
high-fibre, minimally processed versions of these foods. That way, you’ll be
leaner as well as healthier.
Rule 4:
Leave the Counting to Accountants
Losing weight should never feel like you’re actually doing
it. It should feel natural and instinctive. Cravings for poor foods are often
caused by a lack of proper nutrients. By regu-larly snacking on the right
foods, you’ll elim-inate hunger and control your calorie intake. That will not
happen if you try to tally every calorie that crosses your lips.That doesn’t
mean you can smash as many healthy, all-natural foods as you like. Natural
foods such as fruit are often loaded with calories and are rich in fructose.
These can be as dangerous as sugar to the size of your gut. Limit yourself to a
few portions of fruit a day and choose to have more vegetables.
You can check out the calorie counts (www.nutritiondata.com)
of your favourite foods to get a feel for how energy dense they are.Most
important: Don’t avoid fat. Fat might be rich in calories but it is essential
to life because it increases your immunity and metabolism, boosts brain
function and helps you absorb vitamins A, D, E and K and anti-oxidants.
However, you need to discriminate between good and bad fats. There is just as
much place for unsaturated fat (olive oils and omega-3) as there is for
saturated fats (the white stuff hanging off the end of your steak). Both kinds
help produce muscle-building and fat-burning hormones, keep joints healthy and
protect your innards against a host of diseases. However, there is absolutely
no place for trans fats. You’re better off taking up smoking. Trans fats, which
can be found in most fried-food eateries, clog your arteries and stack on
weight. Junk food might make life worth living but it’s not worth dying for.
Limit yourself to one or two cheat meals a week from your favourite fast-food
pedlar. You’ll feel like you still get to eat your favourite cuisine and it’ll
taste twice as nice because you’ve had to abstain from it.
Rule 5:
Watch What You Drink
Gone are the days when drinking something meant quenching
your thirst. Nowadays the variety of drinks to choose from makes water look
pretty average. Fact is, you do not need any of them. Most of them will do you
no good from a health perspective and almost all of them—barring H20—will boost
your overall calorie intake. Sugary sodas, fruit drinks, alco-hol and other
high-calorie everages such as coffee drinks are all adding to the obesity
crisis.
With all we sip, we are getting far more calories from
beverages than we used to.Thirsty? Simply adopt a water habit and you’ll be
leaner. Water is an appetite sup-pressant, and thirst often masquerades as
hunger. Most importantly, water helps your body metabolise lard. Placing your
body into an arid state stresses your kidneys and stops them from functioning
properly. Ever felt a little lower-back pain after a night on the razz? That’s
your kidneys biting back. If your kidneys aren’t working properly, the workload
shifts to your liver. This old workhorse converts stored fat to energy and
can’t do its job efficiently if it has to pick up slack because you’re
dehydrated and your kidneys are overworked. In short, put down the fizzy drink
and stick your facehole under a tap. They’re not hard to find.
Rule 6: Eat
Your Breakfast
The morning rush means that breakfast is the easiest meal to
skip, but forgoing these valuable calories puts you at a disadvantage if you
want to shift your paunch. According to a recent study in American Journal of
Epidemiology (Purslow et al., 2008), men who got 22 to 50 per cent of their
daily calories from breakfast gained only .7 kilogram over 4 years whereas
those who ate only 11 per cent of their daily calories in the morning gained
1.4 kilograms. The very best kind of breakfast? Foods with a low glycemic
index, such as beans on toast or a big bowl of muesli, that digest slowly and
make you feel fuller for the rest of the day. Set your alarm eight minutes
early and gorge on this banquet. You’ll soon be saying good morning to your
abs.
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