10 Tips to double your Fat Loss

by Chris Ashenden

If you can avoid unplanned cheat meals, and keep your diet on the straight and narrow at least 90 percent of the time, you are going to double your chances at getting the body or performance you are looking for.

Ok – Here are 9 Easy Tricks I use and tell my athletes to implement from Day 1. Yes, that means you start from today.

Trick Number 1 – If it ain’t there, you CAN’T eat it

Take everything in your kitchen that is bad for you and throw it out or give it away. (if you need help determining what is good or bad, don’t worry, we are covering that in an upcoming article). This trick is so simple but it is SO important that I put it at number 1.

Do it. Now.

Category: control food access

Trick Number 2 – Eat before you dine out, every time

Eat something healthy to take the edge off your hunger before you leave the house to dine out. Every time.

The second you leave your house for a social event you have limited control over what is served, and if you are meeting other people, when it is served.

If you eat a tiny bit prior you can keep the edge off your hunger to avoid caving to craving if great food selections do not present themselves. You are also likely to eat LESS.

My favorite pre dining combo: a handful of raw organic almonds and some organic, grass-fed beef jerky, but even an apple is better than nothing.

Category: control food access

Category: never let yourself get super hungry

Trick Number 3 – Watch the dressings, condiments, and food prep ingredients

Not much point thinking you are eating a healthy meal if you are downing dressings or sauces full of sugar or countless grams of unhealthy fats.

Same goes for how your food was prepared. There are often going to be some oils and sugars in the cooking process, especially eating out, just watch how much and what is used. Coconut oil and olive oil ROCK. For everything else, ditch the oil and sugars and keep the cheat meals planned cheat meals people.

Category: control food access

Trick Number 4 – Eat nutrient dense foods regularly whenever you get hungry

If you find yourself starting to get very hungry, eat a healthy meal while you still have some self-control.

Some intermittent fasting has its uses, and while there are advocates out there for rampant fasting, I am not a big fan of the big fasts for a few reasons: 1) athletic performance (and daily productivity) bomb for me when eating this way when compared to other more regular feeding diets that have a surplus of adequate nutrition (try it without ANY caffeine, I dare you) 2) most importantly it is when super hungry that most serious binges occur, especially with beginners 3) cortisol management. The adrenal/cortisol axis is SO important to fat loss that it deserves its own book… don’t stress your body any more than you have to.

Especially at the start of any new diet, eat enough and regularly to never get super hungry – just make sure it is the good stuff.

For athletes, most especially those with a significant metabolic component to their training, keeping the nutrition coming in and energy going is the key to training hard and recovering quickly.

Then there is the question of energy and more frequent feeding: do your sense of body heat and your energy levels go up after you eat a meal? Coming off the rails is a big problem if you can’t get back on afterwards. Enough said.

Category: never let yourself get super hungry

Category: avoid deficiencies that will impair health or performance

Category: avoid brain confusion for EAT messages

Trick Number 5 – Keep some healthy snacks on hand with you at all times

Life happens. Have a selection of healthy ready to eat choices on hand at all times for those occasions when you are forced to go longer between meals than intended, or are stuck somewhere with only poor food choices (such as an airport)

Some readily portable examples: organic raw nuts, premade grass feed beef or bison in chili (ideally sans legumes) or as jerky, cold meat cuts from home, hard boiled eggs, low salt cans of fish, organic vegetables, organic seeds, organic nuts (I love almonds, macadamias, and walnuts) and if you must, low glycemic fruit (blueberries rock).

Category: never let yourself get super hungry

Trick Number 6 – Cover your nutritional bases, EVERY day

Eat nutrient dense foods from a variety of sources. Nature loves variety, and if you can eat a broad spectrum of all the good stuff daily, you will reduce the likelihood of having any nutrient deficiencies.

While this is great for health, it is also important for dieting. Your brain’s solution when it feels like it is missing nutrition? You get the craving to EAT, even if your caloric needs are already being met.

(This is so important, it is getting its own chapter one day)

Category: avoid brain confusion for EAT messages

Category: avoid deficiencies that will impair health or performance

Trick Number 7 – Get more quality sleep

Remember the comment above about the adrenal/cortisol axis? This might sound weird as a trick to improving diet results, but one thing is for sure, not only does not getting enough sleep mess up your good hormones, if your body is lacking energy, you will feel the pull to find it, somewhere, often from food.

“Fatigue makes cowards of us all” – a comment so true made famous by Patton, Lombardi, and others.

Getting enough REGULAR sleep aids in health, mood, superior hormone levels, a faster metabolism, higher daily activity levels, and general happiness. Put simply

you will find that with enough rest and sleep you will have faster fat loss results, and more energy and will power to keep going for what you want. Stay on the path, mate.

Category: avoid brain confusion for EAT messages

Category: maintain will power

Category: improve hormone states to maximize fat loss

Trick Number 8 – Have a cheat meal!

Yes, schedule it in, and MAKE SURE YOU DO IT.

Pick your favorite “nemesis” foods and for one meal a week, take that puppy down, BIG time.

Knowing you have a cheat meal coming up will keep your will power where it should be on the days when you are supposed to be behaving, which is so important for compliance. If done right it will also reduce cravings for days afterwards.

Having a cheat meal also allow you to enjoy some of the finer things in life while doing all sorts of wonders for fat burning hormones and muscle glycogen.

(There are a lot of tricks and pointers to ensure you are doing this correctly and getting the most out of it. Don’t worry if you have no idea how to do this, I am going to bring in the biggest names in the business to help you guys out).

Want to take it to the next level? Try to avoid fried foods and make sure your cheat meal has NO GLUTEN in it. Trust me, makes a big difference.

Category: maintain will power

Category: avoid brain confusion for EAT messages

Trick Number 9 – Don’t beat yourself up. Face forwards

Sometimes you are going to slip, fall, and pig out on the wrong stuff at the wrong time. Or eat the wrong type of food because there was nothing else available.

It is ok, one unplanned cheat meal is not going to end it all for you. Just make sure you stick to clean eating as often as you can, get back on the rails, and face forwards, positively.

Category: maintain will power

Those are my 9 Tricks – now go for it!

What little tricks do you use to keep your diet and clean eating on track? Let me know on Facebook.

Want a bonus trick that is MAGIC but with a bit more detail? Read on…

Trick Number 10 – Make every healthy meal a sequence of Protein, Good Fats, and Non Starchy Veges… In that order.

This trick, which automatically ensures a superior macro nutrient ratio for fat loss -has outstanding results with everyone who tries it.

1. Protein FIRST. Every meal, start by eating a clean, quality source of protein. What do I mean? (Grass-fed) meat, (non-farmed) fish, free range poultry, clean living or game meats, and free range eggs. Aim for a DAILY intake of 1 gram of protein per lb of bodyweight. Yes, I really said that that, and yes, it is harder than it sounds. Break this protein intake over each of your daily meals (3 meals is perfect and 4 is more than enough), and make getting in that quota your priority at every meal.

Yes, it is so important it is going at number 1.

2. Fat SECOND. After you get your real food protein down, ensure you are getting some healthy, quality, FATS at every meal.

 

If you cook in coconut oil and eat nothing for protein but grass fed meat, wild salmon, anchovies, and sardines, game meats and wild fowl, you are probably good to go without any supplementation whatsoever.

Since this is nearly NO ONE, everyone else needs to balance out their omega 3 to omega 6 ratios. You are aiming for a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio which are our ancestral dietary norms and NOT what is happening with the bulk of the food you eat (you need a LOT more omega 3 and a lot LESS omega 6 to get this balance, trust me). Take down a handful of fish oil with every meal. Work up to 10-50 GRAMS per day. Yes I said that too.

Daily amount as follows:

10 grams if you can see your abs even when sitting, never eat any grain fed meat, have no auto-immune or inflammatory issues, and none of your joints hurt, ever.

50 grams if you are more than 30lbs overweight, any of your joints hurt, or you suffer any form of auto-immune or inflammatory disease. If you are anywhere in between, I recommend you continually build up towards 50 grams until you CAN see your abs, then drop back down to the 10 grams per day level.

Divide your daily intake across your meals equally.

Trust me on this, it may take some working up to, but the results are outstanding.

What about eating grain fed meat? Avoid it whenever possible, but if you have to, go for the leanest cut you can (the fat on grain fed meat is BAD). PLUS automatic 10 grams of fish oil, every time.

You can also chomp away on almonds, macadamias, Brazil nuts or walnuts, but these can potentially increase your Omega 6 load (macadamias, brazil nuts and macadamias the best of the nuts but remember that ratio) so personally, get the fish oil in first and see how you feel. Any meal that is made up of grass fed meat, wild salmon, anchovies, or sardines, you can halve the fish oil.

3. Veges THIRD. Yes, third. Fill up (keep going until you achieve satiety) with green, nutrient dense veges. Just close out the meal and keep chomping until you are no longer hungry. You will get a TON of micronutrient goodness with very little calories, so eat away! Here are my favorites:

• Spinach
• Kale
• Broccoli
• Cabbage
• Baby Bok Choy
• Brussel Sprouts
• Cauliflower
• String beans

 

Just make sure you cycle through the vege choices, and don’t be afraid to add plenty more, variety rocks, and there can be too much of a good thing.

What about carbs you ask?

My answer: What about them?

Limit fruit, eat NO white carbs at all, and only drink sugar free, unsweetened beverages. This means water, tea, black coffee.

Sound extreme? Not really, extreme is forcing our bodies to survive on a diet that is terrible for us. The result, lots and lots of fat and miserable people. Don’t be one of them.

Ancestrally, we didn’t eat any processed carbs, or even a carb heavy diet. Move your body over to this, our more ancestral and evolutionary format for eating and quite simply… prepare to be amazed. The nutrient density of a meal like this alone is a world away from a modern, nutrient starved, about to make you fat and miserable “meal”.

Try this EXACT eating pattern and food choices for EVERY meal for 30 days. If you don’t love me at the end of it… … well, there is always a first time for everything.