Fat Loss For Dummies
If you want to lose body fat and keep it off forever, without losing muscle, without slowing down your metabolism and without starvation, drugs or gimmicks, then you must find the motivation to stick to a proven system. It is understandably easy to get confused with the conflicting advice on exercise and nutrition that is so widely available but as the title suggests, (Fat Loss 4 Dummies), you don’t have to be an expert to succeed.
Conventional diets achieve fat loss at the expense of losing muscle, which downgrades your metabolism. That’s one of the reasons certain diets don’t work.
Diets don’t work because they are temporary. You need a program that teaches nutrition habits you can maintain for life.
Most people go about dieting to lose body fat the totally wrong way.
Almost every conventional diet program has one thing in
Common and that is extremely low calories. Many of these low calorie diets produce weight loss in the beginning. The problem is none of them work for long. If you are looking for a short-term fix that can bring about results fairly quickly then these types of systems are good, although some are not safe for a sustained period of time so make sure you don’t overdo it.
When you starve your body of vital calories, you also starve the muscle. When you starve the muscle, fat loss soon becomes muscle loss. When this begins to happen your metabolism slows down and your body enters a starvation mode. When this happens, fat loss comes to a halt as your body tries to conserve its energy. When the fat loss stops, you will undoubtedly gain back the fat you lost, or even put on more weight. If you decide to drop your calories even more, your metabolism slows down even more. So begins the cycle towards disappointment.
To lose body fat, you must create a calorie deficit. A
calorie deficit means that you burn more calories than you consume every day. You can achieve this in a couple of ways. Decrease your caloric intake from food, or increase the amount of calories you burn through exercise. The best and more productive way is to do both methods.
By using both methods you get to decrease your fat while at the same time maintain and tone what muscle you already have. Basically, the secret to fat loss is to allow you to eat more of the right foods and use exercise to burn off the fat. Don’t fall into the trap of slashing your calories to starvation levels and exercise little or not at all. This slows the metabolism, decreases lean body mass and begins the body’s starvation response. Exercise allows you to create the calorie deficit and burn fat without slowing down the metabolism.
A typical fat loss 4 dummies mistake is to confuse weight loss with fat loss. Weight loss and fat loss are not the same thing. Using scales for measurement can be very misleading. For example, a woman could weigh 105 pounds and have 33% body fat. In contrast, a female athlete could weigh 130 pounds and be quite lean, with body fat in the low teens. So put this in mind and focus on achieving fat loss goals more than weight loss. If you finally look great and find yourself able to fit into your old clothes again then what does it matter what you weigh!
Changing what you eat and how you exercise has to eventually become a lifestyle habit. It needs to be incorporated into your weekly routines if you are to keep the fat low and maintain a lean figure. The only way you’ll ever lose fat and keep it off permanently is to adopt new habits and keep them for life. Initially, your new dietary and exercise disciplines may feel uncomfortable.
Sticking with them will take some effort in the early stages. After a short adjustment period, you will discover that it gets easier until eventually your new behaviors become a part of your daily routine.