Do these fundamentals for 12 months and we promise you’ll see results!
Prioritise Nutrition
If you’re serious about losing fat, you must make time for food shopping, cooking, meal prep, doing dishes, and keeping a food journal. If you don’t have time for this; make time. Cut down on time wasters like social media, web surfing, playing on your phone, or TV. Allocate days for the above the same way you would allocate days for your exercise.
As far as what to eat, there’s no rule that says you have to perfectly follow a particular diet. You probably already know what foods are getting you into trouble. However, certain aspects of certain diets are worth emulating. For instance, cutting down on processed foods and eating as ‘clean’ as often as possible will likely reduce your total daily intake of calories leading to improved weight loss. Its hard to go wrong with single ingredient foods such as vegetables, lean meats and complex carbohydrates.
Get Stronger, lift weights
No, weightlifting WILL NOT MAKE YOU BIG AND BULKY. What it will do is improve your physiology and increase the likelihood of you reaching your fat loss goals. While most people understand that getting stronger is important for building muscle and enhancing performance, it’s relevance for fat loss is often overlooked.
When your goal is fat loss, you want to burn as much fuel as possible. To do this, you want your body to be as fuel inefficient as possible. One of the huge problems with cardio for fat loss is that the more you do, the better you get at it and thus the more fuel efficient you become. With resistance training the opposite is true. The better you get at strength training, the more weight you can lift and the more it takes out of you.
Spending some of your training time getting stronger allows you to do all your other forms of training (eg, metabolic resistance training, conditioning) at a higher/faster level and this makes them even more effective for getting rid of unwanted body fat. Virtually everyone trying to lose body fat should gain some muscle. Even a few extra pounds of lean muscle means a lot more calories burned each day
If you’re new to resistance training, speak to one of our fitness team for more information, or to get setup with one of our personal trainers
Less is More
Fat loss training isn’t about what burns the most amount of calories during a training session, it’s about what burns the most amount of calories in a 24 hour period. Short, high-intensity exercise creates an oxygen debt and this results in a metabolic boost long after the training session is over. Switch up your long steady state cardio for one or two sessions of high intensity ‘finishers’ – 5-10 minutes to start should be fine.
Get more, better sleep
Bad sleep is probably the most difficult habit to shake and can easily have the biggest effect on weight loss. The more you sleep, the more likely you are to produce the hormones you need to help lose fat. Not sleeping enough will alter glucose sensitivity, elevate your cortisol, screw up your metabolism, and throw your hormones all out of whack. Regardless of how well you’re eating and hard you’re exercising, you could be working against yourself. By quality sleep we mean 7-9 hours of uninterrupted sleep in a dark, cool room with ZERO distractions. Ditch the phone even blackout the windows.
Go to your dark place and watch your performance take off.
Drink more water
Drinking water when you’re trying to lose weight is vital to improving your adherence and overall chances of succeeding where you may have failed before. Dinking 3 litres each day helps to flush out bacteria and toxins that are trapped within your system. Studies show that by drinking more water, the kidneys get rid of the waste and toxins that pass through the liver. Water can also curb your appetite and since its devoid of calories, it can help you reduce your overall daily calorie intake. Drinking 500 ml of water before each meal is a great way to do so. Oftentimes, when people think they are hungry, they are actually simply dehydrated. Drinking water will also help aid digestion and remove waste. So if you are having constipated bowel incontinence, drinking three litres of water a day will help that. Drinking water with a lemon in the mornings before breakfast can help bloating and digestion as well.
Putting it together
Right so what does all this mean?
Eat less junk foods, eat protein at every meal time and consume vegetables at least twice per day.
Lift weights, 2-4 times per week ideally full body workouts if you’re new to resistance training.
Do 1-3, ‘finishers’, at the end of your workouts. No more than 10 minutes, keep it short sharp and intense. An example of this would be getting on a bike, treadmill or even grabbing a battle rope and completing the following session: 15s all out effort, 45s slow 5-10 times. Trust us, done correctly this will be enough.
Sleep 7-9 hours per night in dark, cool room and limit your exposure to tech and artificial light.
Drink 1 litre per 25kg of bodyweight each day with more if you feel it necessary when training is hard.
Fat loss isn’t sexy nor is it complicated. Get good at the basics, be patient when implementing them if its new to you and refine over time. Do these fundamentals for 12 months and we promise you’ll see results.
As always, we are here for you should you want more information or help with any of the above.
