Everyone wants it to be quick and easy, but fat loss doesn’t happen without some planning and some effort. I know what you are thinking, what is this person talking about. The fat burner ads, the belly slimming devices, the exercise equipment, the latest ‘fad’ diet, the happy smiling people on the videos shown dancing away the fat and promising that it is easy. The drug companies, the sellers of cellulite creams and the diet centres also all promise that it is easy and effortless.
But you have two choices – you listen to what you want to hear, or you listen to what you NEED to hear. And if you want fat loss you need to hear the truth. A lot of the information about fat loss is incorrect and misleading. For the last 40 odd years we have been told that to lose fat we need to diet and do hours of low intensity activity.
Yet clearly this hasn’t worked as 50 per cent of us are on a diet at any one time and many more people do lots of easy repetitive activity and the number of overweight people now number two thirds of us and that number is climbing.
Fat loss needs proper exercise and eating right
What you haven’t been told is that to lose fat you need to exercise and eat right and that has nothing to do with dieting or ineffective exercise regimes. The very first thing you need to understand is that fat loss is best achieved by improving ‘metabolic fitness’ which means the focus in put on the balance of the body’s fat burning/fat storing hormones. When a person becomes overweight these hormones are seriously ‘out of whack’.
The big problem in our sedentary inactive world is an almost total lack of any meaningful muscular exertion and this causes our metabolism which is our body’s engine to become less healthy. The condition of this engine determines the rate our body burns fuel and if our muscles are allowed to become weak and flabby their energy requirements are lowered and this is the number one reason we become overweight.
A diet is only going to give you very short term fat loss
Things like dieting and low intensity exercise do nothing to fix this problem and that is why these strategies do not work 95 per cent of the time. Somehow we have to understand we need to restore the health and condition of the engine of our body for fat loss to happen. To try and make it happen before this health is achieved means the fat loss is very short lived if it happens at all.
When we add a restrictive food diet and hours of useless exercise we work against the body causing more damage and making our metabolism even more sluggish. For years people have been told they only need to do some ‘cardio’ type activity for fat loss but this is not going to tone muscles and restore the health of the metabolism and increase the metabolic rate.
There is only one type of exercise that will do this and that is proper strength training exercise with some effort put into it. Little pink dumbbells and silly little exercises are not going to cut it when it comes to rebuilding and re-toning weakened muscles.
But the good news is very little proper exercise is needed for fat loss to happen. Just a couple of sessions each week of maybe 30-40 minutes done correctly are all that is needed. Sure, at the start you will not be able to work intensely but as each week passes you will be able to put a little more effort into your sessions and the results will happen quicker than you can imagine.
To have the energy to put this effort in you need to eat right. A daily diet of mainly processed foods is not going to supply your body with the nutrients it needs to rebuild your metabolic motor. What are needed are nutrient dense foods in the form of quality protein and vegetables cooked from scratch. Yes, you will need to get your butt back into the kitchen but if fat loss is something that you want that is what you have to do.
Get these two things right and you can achieve all the fat loss you like. And yes it is easy as you are not wasting time doing things that do not contribute to your goal. You can zero in on the things that get you the most results. Every second you spend doing the right exercise and eating the right food will be taking you closer to your fat loss goal.
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