A Guide For Losing Body Fat Naturally

Have You Set the Goal to Experience Fast Fat Loss?

If so, you aren’t alone. In a world where obesity is growing at an alarming rate, more and more people are aiming to achieve fast fat loss when they hit the gym.

There are also fat loss programs, both diet plans and workout designs, popping up all over the place, each promising superior results from the others.

For the person seeking fat loss, it can get very difficult to navigate through the waters and know which will actually supply the fat loss results you’re looking for and which will just waste your time and cause you to experience much frustration and disappointment.

Let’s go over some of the primary things that you must know if you want to be successful with your goal to lose fat so that you can make this the time that you do make the body transformation that you’re looking for.

Why We Store Fat In The Stomach Region

The very first thing that you must come to understand if you’re going to succeed with fat loss is why you store fat in the first place.

Fat will be stored whenever you are in a calorie imbalance where you’re consuming more calories than what you’re burning off each day through all your physical activity as well as whatever is required to keep your body functioning properly.

Essentially, eat too much food and move to little and you’re in for some serious problems ahead. Since the body has all this excess energy coming in, it has to do something with it, and the only thing it can do is convert it to body fat stores.

The Causes of Excess Fat Storage

You may be wondering what causes this fat storage in the first place. Well, it will come down to a number of reasons.

First, and likely the most obvious, it’s due to a high calorie food intake. If you’re constantly eating high calorie density foods, you’re going to be consuming far more than you need for energy purposes, thus this is one reason why you will begin to store excess body fat.

A second reason why excess fat storage may occur is because your metabolic rate is very low. If you’re suffering from a slow metabolism, this means that you’ll be burning off very few calories on a day to day basis just staying alive (as your metabolic rate accounts for all the calories used to keep your heart beating, your lunges functioning, and your brain working).

Those individuals who have a sluggish metabolism will have to decrease their food intake accordingly, so if they don’t, increased fat storage will occur.

Finally, the last reason for increased fat storage is because as a population, we’re becoming more and more sedentary. With computers, TV, and video games coming in as the primary forms of entertainment, we’re just not moving around as much as we used to thus this means our overall daily calorie expenditure is getting much lower.

Couple this with the fact that our calorie intake is getting higher due to the prevalence of high calorie snack and fast foods and you can see why there is such a problem with obesity today.

In order to see fat loss results, this situation needs to change so that we’re moving more and eating less.

Let’s have a look at some of the important points that you should know about fat storage and fat burning so that you can tilt your own situation in favour of fast fat loss.

The Worst Foods For Fat Storage

The very first thing that you need to take the time to get in alignment if you want to see fat loss is your diet. Diet is by far the most important element for fat loss since it’s so easy to overeat by a few hundred calories, while it takes quite a bit of effort to burn those same hundred calories off.

The most important thing to note here is which foods are worst for fat storage. Generally speaking, there are two main things to watch out for. First are foods that are high in simple carbohydrates.

These are especially bad if your goal is fat loss because they’ll cause a huge spike in blood glucose levels, which then causes insulin to come rushing into your body, which then sucks this excess blood glucose (and calories) up out of the blood and moves them directly to fat storage.

As it does this, it leaves you with very low blood sugar levels, which then causes severe hunger and food cravings, prompting you to eat more simple carbs to quickly bring your blood sugar levels back up again.

Getting onto a cycle of eating simple carbohydrates is extremely dangerous because before you know, you’re swaying between very high and very low blood sugar levels and taking in hundreds of calories in the process as you yo-yo back and forth.

The Second Type of Problematic Food is Very High Fat-Rich Foods

Now, it’s important to note that high fat, healthy foods are okay in moderation. The body does require some intake of healthy fats in order to function properly so you can’t go cutting these out of your diet entirely.

But, if you’re consuming high volumes of unhealthy fat-rich foods, then you’re going to be in for some problems. This is due to the fact that because fat contains twice as many calories per gram as both carbohydrates and protein does, you don’t have to eat very much of these foods for the calories to add up quickly.

If you’re someone who typically eats until your stomach is full, you’ll consume a lot more calories when feasting on high fat foods than if you were feasting on high protein foods instead. This then increases your total daily calorie intake and therefore causes that body fat gain that you’re trying to avoid.

So there you have the main two types of foods that you must learn to avoid if you want to experience fat loss.

The Best Foods For Burning Fat

This now brings us to the second element in that equation, which foods are best for fat burning.

When looking at foods that are great for fat burning, you want to turn to ones that are either high protein or high in fiber.

1) Protein rich foods

These foods will actually cause the body to burn up plenty of calories just digesting them, so you ‘net’ fewer calories overall. If you were to take in 100 calories from a pure protein source, you would actually only increase your total daily intake by around 75-80 calories as 20-25 of those calories would be used up digesting the food.

With 100 calories of carbohydrate or fat rich foods you would net 96 to 98 calories, so you can see the difference there. Protein rich foods also don’t increase your blood sugar levels like carbohydrate rich foods do, therefore they will do a much better job at keeping your hunger level under control.

2) Fiber rich foods

Fiber rich foods on the other hand are great to eat if you want to maximize fat loss because these will also break down very slowly in the body and cause high feelings of satiety after eating them.

When you eat high fiber foods you’ll feel full for hours at a time, thus this can really help to decrease your total daily calorie intake.

What’s more is that most foods that are much higher in fiber such as fresh fruits and vegetables will also be quite low in calories for how much volume they contain, so this means you can eat high amounts of them without suffering high calorie consequences.

Since when cutting back on your calorie intake one thing that many dieters struggle with is feeling like they’re hardly eating any food whatsoever, this solves that problem instantly.

So if you can start focusing your attention more towards these two types of foods and away from the other foods as listed, you’ll be much better set up for weight loss.

Below is a listing of the foods that are good for fat loss and a listing of foods that aren’t so good for fat loss to make things more clear for you.

Good Food Choices For Burning Fat

• Brown rice
• Chicken breasts
• Egg whites
• Fish and seafood
• Fruits
• Lean red meat
• Low fat dairy products
• Oatmeal
• Quinoa
• Small amounts of healthy oils
• Small amounts of nuts and seeds
• Sweet potatoes
• Vegetables
• Whey protein powder
• White turkey meat

Foods To Avoid When You Want To Lose Fat

• Bacon
• Baked goods
• Butter/margarine
• Candy
• Chips
• Cookies
• Crackers
• Fast foods
• Frozen/convenience foods
• High fat dairy products
• High fat red meat
• Pasta
• Sausage
• Snack bars
• Soda
• Sugary condiments and sauces
• White bread
• White rice

Now let’s move on and turn our focus towards the exercise component of fat loss.

The Best Forms of Exercise For Fat Loss

When structuring your workout program for fat loss, it’s vital that you keep in mind that not all exercise is created equally.

While all exercise will help you burn more calories during the time that you do it, only certain forms of exercise will cause your body to burn more calories after the exercise is completed, and that’s really what you want to be going for as far as fat loss is concerned.

Remember how we mentioned that some people have slow metabolisms and that’s one of the reasons they gain body fat? Well, if they choose the right forms of exercise for fat loss, they can change that entirely.

Some exercise will cause the metabolism to stay elevated for up to 48 hours after you’ve finished completing it, so if you can do this type of exercise multiple times per week, you’re really taking a large step forward in the right direction.

When it comes to the specific type of exercise that is going to produce this, turn to both weight training as well as interval training.

Weight training is excellent and a must-have form of exercise in your fat loss program because not only will it cause your metabolism to stay higher after performing it, but it can also help you build more lean muscle mass and this lean muscle mass will burn more calories 24/7 forever (as long as you maintain that muscle).

Muscle is a highly metabolically active tissue in the body so the more of it you have, the more food you’ll be able to eat without risking fat gain.

The second main form of exercise for fat loss is interval training. Interval training is far superior to steady state cardio training because it’s completed much more quickly, which is great for all of those out there who have very busy schedules, but in addition to this, it’s also going to cause your metabolism to skyrocket after you’ve finished it.

Just a few interval cardio training sessions per week and you will see marked improvements in your fat loss results.

The Best Exercises For Fat Loss

Now that we’ve covered the best types of exercise for fat loss, which exercises specifically will get the job done?

When looking at your weight lifting workout programs, think compound movements. The more muscles you can work in any given instant, the more calories you will burn. It’s really that easy.

To illustrate this point, which activity do you think would burn more calories? Tapping your finger on your desk or getting up and picking up a pen off the ground?

Obviously the latter would because it uses more muscles to perform the movement. The same thing goes for your workout.

The more muscles you can call into play at once, the faster you will see results. This means that your fat loss workouts should be focused around movements such as:

The Best Metabolism Boosting and Fat Burning Exercises:

• Barbell rows
• Chest presses
• Deadlifts
• Lunges
• Press-ups
• Pull-ups
• Squats
• Step-ups

When doing these movements, also aim to take shorter rest periods between your sets because this is what will really get your metabolism firing up and keep it revved higher over the long term.

You don’t want to cut the rest periods so short that you can’t sustain a heavy weight however, as lifting a heavier weight is important to maintain your lean muscle mass when on a calorie reduced diet. Just don’t let your rest periods drag on. 45-90 seconds is plenty of time to rest and recover before you move into your next set.

The Best Training Frequency For Fat Loss

When looking at how often you should be working out when aiming for fat loss, remember that more is not necessarily better.

One would think that the more often you can get into the gym, the faster you will burn those calories off meaning the faster you will progress towards your goal of fat loss.

This isn’t quite the case though. When on a reduced calorie diet your recovery rate from each workout session is going to be lower than if you were taking in the right amount of calories, therefore you will have to cut back on your overall workout volume and frequency.

Your best bet is to put together a full body workout session since this will allow you to work every single muscle fiber in the body each time you hit the gym (therefore causing the highest degree of overall calorie burn) and perform it three times per week with one day off in between workouts.

This allows you plenty of time to recover between those sessions and also allows enough days to get in your interval cardio training, which was the other form of very effective fat loss exercise we already discussed.

Always remember to have at least one, preferably two days off for complete rest as well when working towards the goal of fat loss so that you can start each week feeling fresh and energized.

Tips And Secrets To Help Accelerate Fat Loss

So now that we’ve covered both the diet and the training elements of fat loss, what are some final tips and secrets that you can use for success?

There are a few things that you should remember that will help you take your training up to the next level.

1) Pre-Plan Your Diet

The very first tip to remember if you want to see success with your fat loss goals is to pre-plan your diet as much as you possibly can. Those who have an action plan to follow with their diet are far more likely to see success because they’re taking all the guesswork out of it.

If you don’t have a plan to follow, there’s a much higher chance that you’ll begin to eat foods you shouldn’t while on the diet and this will seriously hinder the progress that you make.

Plan out all your snacks and meals along with when you will eat them each day and you’ll be setting yourself up for success.

2) You Must Stay Positive

Secondly, you also must make sure to stay positive at all times as well. Remember, making dietary changes to promote fat loss is a difficult thing and there will be hard days in there.

The trick is to not let these hard days get you down. If you let one little slip-up throw you off course for days at a time, you’re really going to do some serious damage to your long-term progress.

Instead, if you recognize that you made a mistake and then just put the focus on getting right back to it, you’ll only have minor damage done and will be moving directly onto the path to success again.

It’s not these little slip-ups that hinder your progress but rather how you deal with them, so always keep that in mind.

3) Keep Changing Your Workouts to Reduce Boredom

When it comes to your workout, one must-know fat loss tip is to make sure that they keep changing. Swap out different exercises every few days or change the order of the exercises that you are doing.

Just do something to shock the body so that it keeps guessing what’s coming next and keeps responding and adapting. This is vital to keep the fat burning process going.

Plus, continually changing workouts are also much less likely to become boring, therefore you’ll stick with them better as well.

4) Build Cheat Days Into The Plan

Finally, last but not least, make sure that you take the time to build a cheat meal into the plan every now and then. Cheat meals, when planned properly, will not set you back as long as the rest of the diet is designed well.

In fact, they can actually help accelerate fat loss because they’ll satisfy your craving so you’re less likely to cheat at other points in the plan and due to the fact you will likely be consuming more calories when having them, this will help to prevent the metabolic slow-down that often occurs when on a reduced calorie diet.

If you’re on a fat loss diet and not making progress and it has been a while since the last time you had a cheat meal, then you may just want to consider one. It might be the perfect thing to get you moving along in the right direction again and burning up fat at a greatly accelerated pace.

The Conclusion About Successful Fat Loss

So there you have everything that you need to know about successful fat loss. If you make sure to get serious about your diet and then plan smart workout sessions into your week, it won’t be long before you’re seeing noticeable changes in the mirror.

Just remember to work hard, stay committed, and try and enjoy the process as much as you can as this is what will guarantee that you reach your end goals.