Weight Loss Tips - Let's See Our Muscles

Some basics for losing the gut

Everyone reading (or writing!) this wants to see their muscles. In order for us to see our muscles, we must remove what is hiding them. This is often makes for a hard thing to do, as we know we need to eat less to lose the gut, but eating too little will mean we lose muscle. Therefore, it is vital that still eat enough to preserve our muscle, but not so much that the fat builds up. Here are a few tips that will help us achieve this.

1)      Aim to avoid ‘dry’ carbohydrates after 4p.m. Eating carbs is vital to our body, but on an evening aim to eat brown rice or wholegrain pasta and of course our vegetable rather than other carbs!

2)      Ensure that we eat good fats. Cutting fats from our diet is ridiculous, it is essential to our body. We must make sure, however, that we are eating the right fats.

3)      We should try to fill up on protein and vegetables. Eating good levels of protein will help us to feel fuller, for longer. This will help us to avoid overeating.

4)      We should aim to eat a good amount of fibre. It will help our body deal with dietary fat.

These are just some basic tips when we are aiming to lose our belly and still maintain the muscles that we already have.

Weight Loss Facts

I think that it is fair to say that some people just do not ‘get’ weight loss. Weight loss is not as difficult, in principle, as it is sometimes made out to be. Some things that I have mentioned in previous blog entries will also be discussed here but it never hurts to refresh the memory.

Calories are the key – the really key to weight loss is calories. The simple science is that to lose weight we must use more calories than we consume and it really is as simple as this. To lose weight we need to create a calorie deficit (burn more calories than we need). To lose a pound we must burn off 3500 extra calories, so a 500 calorie deficit a day will see us lose 1 pound per week.

Fat does not make us fat – this is a common misconception that is still around today and ‘low-fat’ food products are being produced. The simple truth is that we need fat in our diet. It is true that not all fats are created equal (avoid trans fats for example) but we must not cut fat from our diet.

Fat contains the most amounts of calories – although we should not cut fat out of our diet, it is true that, per gram, fat contains more calories than protein and carbohydrates.

Excess energy is stored as fat – when we eat more calories than we need we store the excess as fat. So basically, do not overeat!

Crunches does not lose belly fat - we can do as many crunches as we want, but the calories we burn from this will simply not be enough to burn belly fat and/or lose significant weight. This rule applies to other abdominal exercises too. 

Reduced risk of diabetes – through weight/fat loss, we reduce the risk of developing diabetes and for men, it is suggested that weight loss reduces the risk of heart problems.

You should eat when you are hungry – this is such a key one for me. I have heard so many people say they skipped a meal or that they felt hungry but didn’t want to eat because they are trying to lose weight. This is so ridiculous to me. Our body is giving us a sign that we need to eat, so we should eat. A major problem of skipping meals is that we send a sign back to our body that food is not available when we need it. Starving ourselves leads to the body storing fat for other times when we do not eat.

The importance of a treat

 Treats (listened to a great playlist while writing this, find it here)

When focussing on a fitness regime and diet plan it is very easy to get yourself in a mode where you feel you must resist all ‘bad’ foods. This blog post, however, will encourage the occasional treat and explain why it is (or at least can be) quite importan to weight management. 

It is important to understand that a ‘cheat day’ is not being promoted here. A bingeing session can easily undo all the good work that has gone on before. The point of this blog is to encourage the occasional treat in order to keep our fitness aims on track.

First of all there is a simple psychological issue to deal with. The less we are allowed something, the more we want it. If we have it in our mind that we are not allowed to eat cake, we will want it even more. Having a treat now and again will help to stop this craving happening and therefore we can stick to our regime far easier, without so much temptation!

Another problem is just how easy it can be to punish ourselves is we do ‘slip up’. This can lead to things like comfort eating (a big problem that I know all too well) and overtraining (which I have discussed here). It is important to remember that if we do ‘slip up’ we can always rectify it. We can easily change the diet plan to fit in treats and we can always put in some extra exercise sessions. 

It is also possible that, through depriving ourselves completely, when we reach our fitness or weight loss goals, we simply go off our diet plan and then all the hard work is ruined.

To conclude then, as long as we still get the right energy and nutrients from our diet through fruits, vegetables, wholegrain, protein and the right fats there is still a place for a treat. It is important, however, to know that they are a treat and should not replace meals. Be aware of the extra calories and alter the diet to incorporate them. Small treats every once in a while will help us to control ourselves but depriving ourselves of all sweets will more likely lead to binge and over eating.