Nutrition

7 Keys to Rapid Fat Loss

Nutrition, Training

By Dr. Mike

Rapid fat loss has always been a topic that interests me. Initially, I think that I was attracted to the idea because it was very polarizing. One group of people, the traditional/institutional/science folk, would tell you that losing weight too fast is dangerous and bad for your health. The other group of people, marketers/sales folks, would tell you that you can lose as much weight as you want (see image below). But, they were either lying through their teeth OR the methods they proposed were actually dangerous to your health. I always thought that there had to be a different approach. Something that wasn’t bad for your health – that actually worked.

At the most basic (but not optimal) level, weight loss is about burning more than you take in – right? So where could things become dangerous? We know that athletes can burn an insane amount of calories each day without detrimental health effects. It isn’t like once you burn 3,000 calories in one day your body starts to fall apart. So the “calories out” part of weight loss = calories in – calories out equation wasn’t the unsafe part.

 

1. Intensity over Duration –

One of the overarching themes of rapid fat loss is preventing adaptation. When your body adapts, it becomes more efficient and burns less calories. Adaption occurs with lower intensity exercise. Running a mile becomes easy after a while. Doing max incline treadmill interval sprints never becomes easy. (Almost) Always choose shorter duration/higher intensity exercise over longer duration/lower intensity work (Tweet This). To be completely honest, most people don’t want to work harder.  They would rather grind it out on a treadmill for 60-90 minutes at a low intensity instead of doing intense barbell complexes for 15 minutes and being done with it. High intensity exercise gives you a molecular advantage as well. Bill Hartman, PT owner of I-FAST in Indianapolis, Indiana points out, “High intensity exercise improves both aerobic and anaerobic energy production, resulting in increased mitochondria [the energy powerhouses of your cells]. This effect does top out quickly, usually in 3-4 weeks. When you start working above your anaerobic threshold, you also get a cascade of hormones that can promote fat loss.” In the world we live in today, most of us are pressed for time and are looking for a faster, more effective way to get things done. When it comes to fat loss, crank up the intensity, reduce the duration, and reap the benefits (Tweet This).

 

2. Keep Your Carbs Low – There are a lot of ways to lose weight.  You can just count calories, create a calorie deficient, and lose weight – that works. But it isn’t the best method. When it comes to rapid fat loss, we are looking for the best way, the optimal way for you to lose the most amount of fat in the shortest amount of time. Cutting your carbs (notice I said cutting, not completely eliminating) is an essential strategy to do this. Lower carbohydrate diets are the best way to lose more fat in a short period of time because they create a hormonal landscape that is more conducive to fat loss compared to a traditional higher carbohydrate/calorie restricted approach. The main hormone that is optimized for fat loss with carbohydrate restriction is insulin. Insulin is your hormonal gatekeeper when it comes to fat loss, as it directly inhibits the mobilization (often called burning) of fat stored in fat cells. The most potent simulators of insulin are carbohydrates. Keeping the total carbohydrates in your diet low leads to less insulin being released throughout the day and thus greater metabolic ease (‘metabolic ease’ is definitely not a scientific term, but it conveys the point pretty well) of fat loss.  The pairing of weight training with a low-carbohydrate diet is the best way to maximize your fat loss. A University of Connecticut study compared low-fat diets against low-carbohydrate diets when combined with weight training. After 12 weeks, the low-fat diet group lost an average of 7.7 pounds of body fat, while the low-carb diet group melted off an average of 17 pounds. It is also important to note that the low-carb + weight training group was able to hold onto more muscle than the low-fat diet group. Weight training goes a long way in helping you maintain your muscle mass while dieting, but carbohydrate restriction seems to give you an extra edge in that department as well.

As a general rule, the more fat you have to lose, the less carbohydrates you should eat (Tweet This). As your calorie intake gets lower, you should also shift away from eating high carbohydrate dense foods (rice, potatoes, etc), opting for lower carbohydrate dense foods (green vegetables, berries, etc). This allows you to keep the volume of food that you are eating up (so you don’t feel like you are eating from the Kid’s Menu) despite the caloric value of your food being lower than normal.

 

3. Keep it Short – Rapid fat loss is a sprint (and not just literally in the gym) and you can’t sprint forever. When you are setting a rapid fat loss goal, it should be short (4-6 weeks) with a finite deadline. Make it short enough that you can go all out and long enough that you can see measurable results.  2 weeks is too short, 4 weeks is good, 6 weeks would only be for people with a high level of fitness that are willing to purposefully dedicate time to recovery (most are willing to do this).  It is my assertion that in order to really be successful with rapid fat loss, you need to push your body to a period of overreaching. You may have heard of overtraining, which is a negative situation in which the total stress load on your body is too much (e.g. life, work, diet, training stress) and this results in decreases in strength, immune function, and negative impacts on mood. We want to avoid this. Overreaching is sort of planned and controlled overtraining. Overreaching uses the accumulation of stresses on your body to force your body to grow and adapt. An old adage in pharmacology is the dose makes the poison. The same is true with rapid fat loss. You need to create a lot of metabolic stress to force your metabolism to respond but not so much that is causes your body to freak out, go into survival mode, and start conserving calories. Keep your rapid fat loss program short so that you can control the ‘stress dose’ to maximize your results.

My morning supplements (Fall 2012)

My morning supplements (Fall 2012)

4. Keep Your Biochemistry Optimized – When you embark on a rapid fat loss program with a finite deadline, everything you do matters. This is why you need to take advantage of every slight advantage you can get. The biggest area to pay attention to is your workouts. Exercise elicits incredible changes in your biochemistry that you should take advantage of. This mean preloading your body with amino acids prior to training and having your largest carbohydrate meal directly after training. In addition to these key nutrient timing points, you should also ensure that small processes your body carries out are functioning at optimal rates (remember: small hinges swing big doors) – this is done via consuming adequate vitamins and minerals. The big three here are vitamin D, zinc, and magnesium. Optimizing vitamin D levels will accelerate weight loss as well as potentially improve muscle building. I have only had one client that passed a zinc status test. Hard training, like the kind required for rapid fat loss, can also deplete zinc stores. Magnesium is a truly underrated mineral. Magnesium is generally under-dosed in multivitamins.  Due to its muscle relaxant properties, it can be a major player in your recovery strategy. Magnesium may also help with insulin sensitivity. Research shows that magnesium deficiency can lead to insulin resistance and supplementing magnesium can improve insulin sensitivity in individuals with type 2 diabetes.

 

5. Get Ample Sleep – When you cut your calories and ramp up your training, you can easily become an adrenaline machine. Initially, this might cause you some trouble regarding your sleep, but it will pass with time. I created the #sleeptoperform series to provide you with a in-depth multipart look at the importance of sleep, the physiological symphony that occurs when you are sleeping, and how you can optimize it.

Sleep directly impacts several important hormones that play key roles in fat loss – growth hormone, cortisol, leptin, and adiponectin. The negative impacts on sleep are immediate, as just a couple nights of sleep deprivation can cause negative changes in appetite hormones. A 2004 study published in Archives of Internal Medicine found that taking individuals who regularly got 9 hours of sleep per night to 4 hours of sleep per night resulted in 23% increase in reported hunger and 23% increase in appetite (Tweet This). The changes in hunger and appetite were the greatest for high-carbohydrate calorie dense foods.  While that study gives us information about how lack of adequate sleep impacts our desire to eat, more recent research conducted by a group of French researchers found that individuals consumed upwards of 550 more calories on days following sleep deprivation (4 hours of sleep).  The interesting fact about this study is that there was obvious individual variation.  Nine subjects ate more 36% more, while three subjects ate 15% less following the night of sleep deprivation  These individual variances could be explained by hormonal differences. Hormones like cortisol and adrenaline – which have acute appetite suppression effects. Despite this phenomenon, which seems to be pronounced in a smaller sub-population of people, sleep deprivation typically causes increases in appetite, hunger, and calories consumed. I recommend that you aim for 7-9 hours of sleep per night, to allow your body time to properly optimize your hunger hormones.  Make sleep a priority, and you’ll lose more weight (Tweet This).

 

6. Don’t Do Anything Crazy – When does rapid fat loss become unsafe? When you start doing crazy stuff. What do I consider crazy? A simple litmus test is: if what you are doing is not a more intensified version of what you would normally do, it could be crazy. For example, would you normally just have a drink containing lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper instead of breakfast? Probably not, so why do it for 10 days straight? Instead, just intensify what you normally do (and what works). Weight training, interval cardio, and eating a reduced carbohydrate diet works for fat loss.  So, if you want rapid fat loss, you just need to intensify these methods (Tweet This). With weight training, your rest periods become shorter.  With intervals, your work periods become shorter.  With diet, your carbs are reduced lower. From a consistency perspective, you need to get dialed in. For regular fat loss or for your regular diet, you may adhere to your diet plan 80% of the time.  This needs to become 90-95% for rapid fat loss. Don’t do anything crazy.  Don’t make up new stuff.  Just do what works with greater intensity and drive.

 

 

7. Make Sure You Are Ready For It – I created a diet and training rapid fat loss plan called Warp Speed Fat Loss with my colleague, Alwyn Cosgrove. I respond to people’s emails, encouraging them not to use the Warp Speed Fat Loss program more than any other program I’ve ever created. Why? Because you need to be ready for it. You can’t get off the couch and expect to jump right into a very intense rapid fat loss program, you don’t need to either. If you are just starting out, doing just about anything will cause you to lose weight. You should only venture into the world of rapid fat loss after you have developed a solid fitness base and core dietary habits (like the 6 Pillars of Nutrition). Without a solid level of fitness, you will not be able to achieve and maintain the level of intensity required to stimulate maximum calorie burning and fat loss. If your diet is less than ideal, jumping into a strict and rigid meal plan is setting yourself up for failure, not rapid fat loss success. Let’s say that you can make the dietary transition, and you do grit it out for 4 weeks. What happens on the 29th day when the diet is over? Back to chips and bagels? Get a solid set of dietary skills before you jump into rapid fat loss.  When the rapid fat loss diet is over, you’ll have quality nutrition habits to fall back on, so you don’t gain back the weight you worked so hard to lose.

7 Keys to Rapid Fat Loss Read More »

Meal Frequency Facts

Nutrition

meal frequency

The claim that you need to eat many small meals per day to “stoke the metabolic” fire and accelerate fat loss and control hunger, has been part of the mainstream diet advice for quite some time.
It seems to make sense at first.

When you eat, your metabolic rate increases as it breaks down the food. Thus, if you eat every few hours, your metabolism will remain in a constantly elevated state, right? And nibbling on food throughout the day should help reduce hunger, right?

Well, like many of the myths that seem to make sense on paper, they just don’t pan out in clinical research.

Meal Frequency and Your Metabolism

Each type of macronutrient (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) requires varying amounts of energy to break down and process. This is the thermic effect of food, and is the metabolic “boost” that comes with eating.

The magnitude and duration of that boost depends on how much you eat. A small meal causes a small metabolic spike that doesn’t last very long, whereas a large meal produces a larger spike that lasts longer.

So the question, then, is if more, smaller meals per day increases total energy expenditure over a 24-hour period than fewer, larger meals.

Well, in an extensive review of literature, scientists at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research looked at scores of studies comparing the thermic effect of food in a wide variety of eating patterns, ranging from 1-17 meals per day. In terms of 24-hour energy expenditure, they found no difference between nibbling and gorging. Small meals caused small, short metabolic boosts, and large meals caused larger, longer boosts, and by the end of each day, they balanced out in terms of total calories burned.

We can also look to a study conducted by the University of Ontario, which split into two dietary groups: 3 meals per day and 3 meals plus 3 snacks per day, with both in a caloric restriction for weight loss. After 8 weeks, 16 participants completed the study and researchers found no significant difference in average weight loss, fat loss, and muscle loss.

So, while increasing meal frequency can make dieting more enjoyable for some, it doesn’t help us burn more energy.

meal frequency

 

Meal Frequency and Appetite

A study conducted by the University of Missouri with 27 overweight/obese men found that after 12 weeks of dieting to lose weight, increasing protein intake improved appetite control, but meal frequency (3 vs. 6 meals per day) had no effect.

The University of Kansas investigated the effects of meal frequency and protein intake on perceived appetite, satiety, and hormonal responses in overweight/obese men. Unsurprisingly, they found that higher protein intake led to greater feelings of fullness, and that 6 meals actually resulted in lower daily fullness than 3 meals.

On the other hand, you can find studies wherein participants were less satiated on 3 meals per day, and found that increasing meal frequency increased feelings of fullness and made it easier to stick to their diets.

The bottom line is that there are many variables involved, including psychological ones, and clinical evidence shows that it’s incorrect to conclusively state that either more or fewer meals per day for hunger control will be best for everyone.

 

So How Many Meals per Day, Then?

You might be surprised to learn that I often recommend that people eat fewer, smaller meals per day.

Why?

Because, in my experience coaching hundreds of people, many are like me and prefer the feeling of more, smaller meals as opposed to fewer, larger ones. I personally don’t like eating 800-1,000 calories to then feel stuffed for several hours. I much prefer a 400-calorie meal that leaves me satisfied for a few hours, followed by another smaller meal with different food, and so forth.

As the cliché goes, the best dietary protocol is the one you’ll stick to, and reducing psychological stress goes far in increasing diet compliance and thus overall effectiveness.

That said, if someone can’t or doesn’t want to eat frequently, then we work out a meal plan with fewer, larger meals that fits their preferences or lifestyle. Our hunger patterns are established by our regular meal patterns, so it’s usually easiest to work around this, not against it.

 

Author: Mike Matthews

Meal Frequency Facts Read More »

Eat to Look Lean

Nutrition, Training

woman's muscular abs

When you’re at your ideal weight and want to look toned, you need the right diet and exercise plans

Q: I’m at the weight I want to be, and now I want to show off my muscles. What should I be eating?

A: This is a great example of how achieving your “ideal” scale weight doesn’t necessarily equate to the look that you want. We often get very focused on having the scale display a particular number when we get on it but don’t realize that when we hit that number, our bodies may not look how we’d envisioned they would.

In her most recent book, Drop Two Sizes, 2012 IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year Rachel Cosgrove notes that she consistently sees women drop two sizes with the scale only showing two to four pounds of weight loss. This is one of the reasons why it is very important to track your progress toward a weight loss/body composition goal via measures other than the scale such as pictures, girth measurements (waist, hips, etc), and body fat percentage.

Back to your question specifically: If you are at the body weight that you want but want to show off your muscles more, then you will need to lose a little more body fat while then adding on muscle. This will allow you to maintain your weight while giving you a leaner muscular look.

You can’t do this with diet alone. Resistance training is a key component, as if you want to show off your muscles, you are going to need to build them up a little. In addition, weight training provides a superior level of fat burning compared to traditional cardio training.

In her book, Cosgrove recommends that women in your situation do two or three full-body strength training workouts and one or two metabolic interval-style routines a week. The strength program should consist of compound movements performing all of the following movement patterns: squat, bend, push, pull, twist, lunge, and balance.

From a dietary perspective, this is a perfect situation for carb cycling. Carb cycling, as the name suggests, involves cycling your carbs between high and low days throughout the week. This also leads to calorie cycling as well, so that on days you train with weights, you will eat more calories and carbohydrates. These become muscle-building days. On days that you do interval cardio or don’t train, you will eat fewer calories and carbs. These become fat-loss days, as your body will need to pull more from its energy stores since you won’t be providing its normal quota of fuel.

The simplest (and my favorite) way to cycle carbs is by doing so based on types of foods. On high-carb days, eat meals that contain oats, rice, whole-grain pasta, sweet potatoes, and quinoa, and make sure to include fruits and vegetables with each meal. Then on low-carb days, abstain from those types of carbs, opting for beans, fruits, and vegetables as your primary carbohydrate sources.

This makes it easy to modulate the carbohydrates and calories of your diet since carbohydrate-based foods like oats, rice, whole grain pasta, sweet potatoes, and quinoa are innately more carb- and calorie-dense than fruits or vegetables. For example, 1 cup brown rice contains 200 calories and 43 grams of carbs, while 1 cup raspberries has only 64 calories and 15g carbohydrates and 1 cup cooked spinach has 41 calories and 7g carbohydrates. The volume of the foods is the same—a cup—but the calorie and carbohydrate contents are very different.

Regardless of the day, you should have protein (eggs, chicken, fish, tofu, etc) at every meal. Your weekly schedule might look like this:

Sunday: Off from training. Low carb/calorie day
Monday: Resistance training. High carb/calorie day
Tuesday: Interval cardio. Low carb/calorie day
Wednesday: Resistance training. High carb/calorie day
Thursday: Interval cardio. Low carb/calorie day
Friday: Resistance training. High carb/calorie day
Saturday: Interval cardio. Low carb/calorie day

Put Cosgrove’s exercise recommendations into play combined with my simple carb cycling approach, and you’ll be on your way to achieve the look you want.

Eat to Look Lean Read More »

7 Common Dieting Mistakes

Nutrition

Fat loss is a long, slow journey. It’s made even slower by dieting errors. Don’t fall into the same traps that I did! Read my mistakes, learn from them, and your fitness goal will be a reality much sooner.

by Karina Baymiller

Whether you’re just starting out on your journey toward a bangin’ new bod, or you know the ins and outs of health and fitness, you’ve probably made some mistakes in your nutrition. When it comes to shedding fat, we often fall into a trap hoping we are doing the right thing. In reality, we may be doing ourselves more harm than good.

There’s a lot of nutrition and diet information out there—it’s easy to get lost in the mountains of tips, rules, and new terminology. For all you know, “Paleo” could be a new type of deadlift. When I first started trying to lose weight, I had no idea what I was doing. I read what I could and made a lot of errors. And though making mistakes and learning from them is part of the process, you can make the road a little less bumpy with some good information. Here are seven mistakes I’ve personally made. I want to share them with you so your road to fat loss is as smooth as possible.

1 / Buying “Fat-Free” Food

If you find yourself buying food that’s labeled as “diet,” “fat-free,” or “sugar-free,” drop the package and run the other direction immediately. Many people see these buzz words and assume that what they are buying must be healthy. In reality, these words usually mean the food you’re about to purchase is anything but healthy.

When food companies remove a nutrient like fat to make a food “fat-free,” they have to add something back to make it palatable. These flavor-boosting ingredients generally include a hodgepodge of chemicals you can’t pronounce, refined carbohydrates, and ample amounts of sugar.

Together, these additives can be detrimental to your fat loss goals. Stay away from the processed, packaged, and pre-made foods. Stick with fresh, whole foods with minimal ingredients.

2 / Not Eating Enough

If you want to lose fat, the first logical step is to cut your calorie intake, right? It makes sense then, that the more calories you cut the more fat you lose. Wrong! Seriously cutting your calories may work for a short period of time, but your metabolism will slowly shut down and eventually come to a screeching halt.

If that’s not bad enough, when your caloric intake is too low, your body begins to use your hard-earned muscle as fuel, a process known as catabolism. If it happens, it could further hinder your fat loss. I realize that eating more sounds counterproductive to a fat loss goal, but trust me, more food is usually better. If you cut your calories too much for too long, you’re not going to see results.

3 / Going to Extremes

We live in an all-or-nothing world. For a lot of people, dieting is definitely no exception. I’ve heard it all: “You have to eat 10 times per day for fat loss!” “Make sure you get 600 grams of carbs.” “Never eat fruit or dairy products.” “You need these 30 supplements to be successful.” Sure some of these things may work for some people, but whatever happened to the middle ground? From my experience, going to extremes got me nowhere but right back where I started.

If you’re in this for the long haul, like you should be, remember that balance and moderation are keys to your success. My suggestion: Start somewhere in the middle. Slowly add or subtract until you find the right balance for you.

4 / Hopping on the Latest Fad Diet

If you’ve tried The Hormone Diet, the cabbage soup diet, the 3-Day Diet, the Blood Type Diet, or some crazy juicing thing, you need to listen up. Fad diet advertisements try to suck you in by presenting the “latest research” and showing stories of success. Generally, fad diets work. But, they only work for a short peiod of time. When you go back to normal life, don’t expect your body to join you.

The majority of these diets proves unhealthy, extreme, and shouldn’t be practiced for an extended period of time. I always tell my clients: “Don’t do anything you can’t or won’t keep up for the rest of your life.” Healthy eating should be a lifestyle change, and unless you see yourself eating cabbage soup everyday for the rest of your life, stay away from fads.

5 / Clocking Out (and I Mean All the Way Out) for the Weekend

I’ve been guilty of this on a few occasions. OK, you caught me—it happens almost every weekend. A cheat meal is perfectly fine, and can be beneficial mentally, and physically. But if you clock out at 5 p.m. on Friday from both the office and your diet, we may have a slight problem.

Stuffing your face all weekend with everything you didn’t eat during the week will not only slow your progress, but can stop it. Sometimes, it can even completely reverse what you’ve worked so hard for. Depending on your goals and progress, one cheat meal, sometimes two, is usually OK. Get back to eating your healthy foods as soon as possible. Don’t allow your cheat meal turn into a free-for-all cheat weekend.

6 / Ignoring What Your Body Tells You

Believe it or not, we have hormones that regulate functions telling us we’re hungry and when we need to stop eating. When we stop listening to these signals and eat right through the “I’m satisfied” zone and speed into the “I’m stuffed” zone, problems like obesity happen.

On the other side of the coin, eating on such a rigorous and inflexible schedule voids these hormonal signals as well. Sometimes, we get so caught up eating exactly 300 calories every three hours that we forget to listen to what our body is saying. I’m not saying throw everything you know out the window and stuff your face all day long, but when is the last time you really stopped and listened to your body’s hunger signals?

Are you hungry when the clock strikes every three hours? Are you so hungry you could eat the paint off the walls? Are you still hungry when you finish your meal? Experiment with relying on your body, not the clock to tell you when to eat. You may be surprised by what you learn.

7 / Forgetting to Live Life

Do you find yourself obsessing over every gram of broccoli you put in your mouth? Do you eat tilapia and asparagus at least four times per day? Do you have a panic attack if you can’t eat “Meal 4” exactly 2-1/2 hours after “Meal 3?” If so, it may be time to stop, slow down, and breathe. Don’t let the quest for health become an unhealthy obsession.

Call breakfast what it is—don’t say “Meal 1.” Go out with friends, eat a piece of chocolate; listen to your hunger signals. Smile, relax, and have fun. Don’t forget to live your life!

7 Common Dieting Mistakes Read More »

Are There Over 20 Nasty Chemicals in Your Burgers?

Nutrition

Whether you choose to believe the exact story that this popular video below portrays is up to you.  However, I think we all know that there are some major issues with the sources of food in popular fast food chains, and the amount of pesticide residues, hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, and other nasty chemicals in typical fast food meals.  Check this story out:

the bio burger

I know that the story in that video may sound a bit embellished, and that’s possible… however, I’ve seen news stories of dozens of these types of informal experiments that random people have done over the years with popular fast food burgers that won’t decompose even after years in their basement.

Seriously, if even mold refuses to consume these burgers and buns, is this really something that we (and our children) should be putting in our bodies?  What chemicals, preservatives, etc are in this fast food that is preventing even mold and bacteria from being able to consume this “food”?

And can we really consider this to be real “food” at all?

Here’s another example of these types of experiments below… about half way through this video, you see some shocking examples that this woman kept from her own experiments:

mcdonald 4 years old

I hope this gives you something to think about in terms of what we are putting inside our bodies if we choose to consume fast food.  Don’t we deserve better?  Don’t our children deserve better food?

 

Are There Over 20 Nasty Chemicals in Your Burgers? Read More »