fatlossandmusclebuilding Blog

This is an exciting time, a brand new year, a chance to wipe the slate clean and set your self up for a successful year ahead. To ensure that you get on the way to success in your fat loss and muscle building goals, you should ensure you do the following:-

 1. Get back to it ASAP! - It is so easy to delay getting back into training after those Christmas Holidays, the earlier you get back to the gym and get back on a good diet the faster you will on your way to having a successful year!

2. Decide upon your goals - what are your aims? are you trying to lose fat or build muscle? You need to be sure as to what your aims are so that you can focus your training and dieting for that specific aim.

3. Plan you diet and workouts - Alot of people don’t plan there workouts or their diets, this can be a huge mistake. If you don’t pre-plan your workouts, you can find yourself wondering aimlessly around the gym, using random machines with no particluar format. Your workouts should be focused and planned for best results. It is also a very good idea to plan your food, this will prevent you from unhealthy eating just because it is convienient. I find it best to make my food for the next day the night before.

4. Develop positive habits - This is important. It is a New Year, a chance to start a fresh, so do it right. Get straight into the habit of eating right, making every single gym session you plan. You do this long enough and it will become second nature!

I have an exciting year planned for the Blog, expect to see loads of diet and training advice and techniques. Also my secret projest will finally be revealed in 2010! So please keep visiting us so you don’t miss a thing!

Also remember to send me any questions or problems you have and will do my best to answer them for you, email me at jallmark@fatlossandmusclebuilding.com.

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick post to wish you all a happy new year! Hopefully the holidays haven’t done too much damage to your bodies, but if they have don’t panic! Over the next few weeks I am going to bring you some damage recovery tips, and how to set yourelf up for massive success in fat loss and muscle building over the coming year.

 Make 2010 your year for success!

Wishing you the best for the year ahead,

Jon.

There is an abundance of mixed information out there for both losing and gaining muscle, which ever your current goals may lie in. Unfortunately although there is a lot of good stuff out there, the majority of the information is absolutely useless! This is a huge reason why people struggle to achieve any good results in fat loss or muscle building. Alot of the time it really isn’t your fault that you are failing to reach your potential, it is down to being given bad information and advice.

The huge growth of the internet over the last few years, has made it possible to find out near enough anything you want, but only if you know exactly where to look! The fitness industry is a huge business,with ALOT of cash being thrown around, and unfortuanely due to this you are not always getting what you are led to believe that you are…

The fitness industry has become a billion dollar market, with big companies spending millions onmarketing and sales to bump up their profit margins, and they are very good at it! They are experienced and ruthless, they will make all sorts of promises to get you to hand over your hard earned cash. The supplementation company is one of the worse, trying to sell you products that “guarentee” you miracle results. The only guarentee that you really have is that willlead you disappointed! That is not to say that all supplements are useless, there are a small few products that may help improve your results, but even these can be done without.

Another problem which you may have is following the latest big thing in dieting. Alot of which will only give you short term results, that do not last. They involve following some crazy diet theory, which will just be impossible to stick to long term, and more than likely will leave you worse off than you were in the first place!    

When it comes to building muscle, it is easy to think that advice given by a guy who seems to have achieved excellence when it comes to their own body will work the same for you. When in fact you may end up trying to follow a plan that is either designed for a seasoned bodybuilder, or even a drug user! A routine that may be ok for a competetive bodybuilder with years of training behind them, will not work for a normal person.

I myself have made every mistake in the book, due to following bad advice and buying into numerous miracle products (the miracle was they didn’t work!). I eventually, after many painstaking years, and more cash than i’d like to remember, managed to sift through all the b.s and find what worked for me. By me I mean an average guy, not a genetic freak who can easily build muscle and lose fat at the same time and not a drug user. Once I had thrown out all of the useless info, I realised that the basics that had been used for years were what a normal guy like me need to concentrate on.

I have now managed to shed my unwanted body fat, and build lbs of new muscle, and all it really took was a bit of dedication and sticking with good training and diet practices. I’m now trying to use my blog to share all the great information that is out there with you. I want my blog to be a source of good information, that isn’t designed  toencourage you to buy the latest supplementation product available, but instead is designed to help the average person to achieve the results that I have managed to achieve myself. So please pay us regular visits, so I can pass my knowledge on to you. If you have any questions or would like any advice on a particular subject, please send me an email and I will try to resolve them for you in future blogs.

I have mentioned recently that I’m working on a bit of a project at the moment, which I am very close to finishing. Stay tuned and I will reveal all in then next couple of months… 

Hi Everyone,

I have to apologise about my silence and the lack of blog posts over the past weeks. There has been good reason for it,  and no it hasn’t been because of a really long holiday if that’s what you are thinking! 

Over the past few weeks have shut myself away in my office, away from any distractions to work on a project that I have wanted to do for years now, but never found the time to get going. Finally I have run out of excuses not to start this thing and have finally knuckle down to it. So what amI actually talking about? Well that i’m afraid I’m not going to reveal just yet, but let’s just say if you have an interest in losing fat, building muscle and increasing fitness (which I would imagine that you do if you are here on my blog!), then you will definately not want to miss this!

Although I have got the bulk of my ’secret’ project finished now, I have still got some work to do to get it just right. I will reveal exactly what I am creating soon, I’ll keep you posted on the progress. Until then I will be returning to my regular blogging activities, so please don’t be a stranger!

Also if there are any questions you have or there is some information that you would like relating to fat loss, muscle building or general fitness, send them in to me and I’ll try my best to help.   

 Train hard and expect great results…

Gaining fat when trying to put on muscle is a big concern for many people. If you have worked hard to get yourself a nice little six pack, but then decided that you want to put on some more muscle, forcing yourself to over eat can be hard. The thought of losing that six pack, that you worked so hard for can be unbareable!

I came across this excellent post on Tom Venutos Burn the Fat Blog, which may interest you. He gives some great advice to do with the subject of gaining muscle without gaining too much fat. He mentions the importance of controlling your calorie intake, which is a vital factor in muscle growth. There is some great advice here, definately worth a look…

I’m not one for over promoting supplementation, but I have recently recieved a few questions about the Glutamine-L supplement. For those of you who are interested in this supplement I’d like to point you in the direction of this useful article on Glutamine-L. This is an interesting little supplement, that has become extremely popular among the bodybuilding community. Glutamine-L raises the bodys natural growth hormones, which increase the body s ability to produce new muscle tissue.

My opinion on this supplement is the same as alot of others, if you are achieving good results using it, then go ahead and use it. I will say that as with any other supplement, it is not a miracle product and will not suddenly make your muscles huge. As with all supplements they are not a substitute for good diet and exercise, they are simple to be taken in addition to them if you want that extra bit of help to achieve your results.

I personally like to keep my supplementation to a minimum, and use natural food sources to get every thing that my body needs. Remember although the fitness industry may tell you otherwise, supplements are not a necessity, and great results are achieved without any help from any supplements all of the time.

A few wise words from fitness legend Jack Lahane…

“If you’ve got a big gut and you start doing sit-ups, you are going to get bigger because you build up the muscle. You’ve got to get rid of that fat! How do you get rid of fat? By changing your diet”

“Remember this: your body is your slave; it works for you!”

“The only way you get that fat off is to eat less and exercise more.”

“Yes, exercise is the catalyst. That’s what makes everything happen: your digestion, your elimination, your sex life, your skin, hair, everything about you depends on circulation. And how do you increase circulation?…Exercise!”

“You can’t get rid of it with exercise alone. You can do the most vigorous exercise and only burn up 300 calories in an hour. If you’ve got fat on your body, the exercise firms and tones the muscles. But when you use that tape measure, what makes it bigger? It’s the fat!”

This legend in the fitness world is 93 years old, he STILL works out, and still looks great! A great example of what exercise can do for your body and health. Definatelty an inspiration to anyone!
 

So many people out there are desperately trying to achieve weight loss, but there are so many different diets and so much different information about weight loss, that unsuprisingly people are still confused on the subject. Something that is still a mystery to so many people is the importance of calories. The popularity of some of the recent ‘fad’ diets, Atkins to mention but one, has confused peoples understanding of calories even further.

Diets such as the Atkins diet promote the idea that calories don’t matter in the slightest, and the controlled intake of certain nutrients, namely carbohydrates in this case, is the deciding factor in weight loss. Although people do achieve some short term success on diets such as Atkins, the fact is that in the long term they are unhealthy and totally unrealistic to follow and stick with. Also alot of the weight loss on these type of diets actually comes from loss of water, and even worse muscle!

The real truth is that if you want to successfully lose weight, calories are the deciding factor. Here is a sentence that you should remember when people are trying to sell you the false idea that calories don’t matter…

TO LOSE WEIGHT YOU MUST BEEN IN A CALORIE DEFICIT!

I’ll explain this a bit further. A calorie is basically a unit of energy, your body needs so many of these energy units to perform all it’s daily functions, this includes maintaining bodyweight. So if you need a certain amount of calories to maintain your body weight, it makes sense that to lose weight you would need to reduce the amount of calories that your body needs (this is your calorie deficit).

The food that you eat contains these calories that your body needs, so one way of losing weight would be to reducing the amount of calories that you consume in your food. You can also create this calorie deficit through exercise. When you exercise the extra work that your body is made to do, causes it to burn off more calories. This can also create the calories deficit.

The most efficient way to create a calorie deficit is by combining a calorie controlled diet, with a suitable exercise routine, unfortunately that’s not where it ends though!

You may be thinking now that you could just cut your calorie intake right down, the more you cut out the calories the better right? Wrong. You have to be careful that you don’t bring down your calories too much, otherwise you will start to lose muscle rather than fat, leaving you looking scrawny and unhealthy looking. You need to do a bit of experimentation with this, first try and find how many calories your body needs to stay at the weight that you currently are. Then from there drop it by about 500 calories and see how you go. Everyone is different, so this really is a case of finding it out for your self. Take weekly measurements of your weight and body fat, so you can work out if you are losing fat or muscle. If you are losing muscle, simply increase your calories! Find the happy medium using experimentation and body monitoring is the key.

So in conclusion. Ignore the latest fad diets, and believe me when I say that calories really do count when it comes to successfully losing fat.

Hey Guys,

I wanted to talk to you today about a touchy subject in the bodybuilding/sporting world… Steroids.

Steroids are well known for their miracle affects on muscle growth. They have unfortunately become a widely used easy answer to building pounds of muscle. With all the seen to be positive affects of this ILLEGAL drug, people often ignore the negative affects that steroids can have. I am proud to say I have personally never used steroids and I never ever would!

I firmly believe that they answer to building the body that you dream of is to work hard work in the gym, and eat well. For those of you who have ever been, or still are tempted to use steroids, I just wanted to point you in the direction of this article on steroids. Here you can clearly see the dangers of using this drug. It lists the many possible side affects that can occur if you use this drug.

Train naturally to achieve muscle growth, although it may be tough at times, when you do achieve your goals (and you will if you put your mind to it) you can be proud to know that you have done it through hard work, not cheating using illegal drugs. Trust me you will feel a far greater sense of achievement!

I’m sure they I will have upset many drug enhanced bodybuilders with my comments, oh well sure they’ll get over it! You stay natural it is the best and safest way! Is getting big muscles really worth risking your health over?…

Today we’re talking about negative calorie foods…

So what actually is a negative calorie food? The statement negative calorie food isn’t entirely correct, it is actually impossible for a food to have a negative amount of calories.

A calorie is a unit of energy, all food contains a certain amount of energy. When we talk about negative calorie foods, we don’t actually mean that they have a negative amount of calories. What we mean is that the food has that low of amount of calories, that your body uses up more energy digesting it than the food has in the first place. For example if a piece of celery has 15 calories, and the body uses up 25 calories to digest it. That creates a deficit of 10 calories, therefore that is a negative calorie food. Apples, brocolli, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes and onions are also examples of negative calorie foods.  

Negative calorie foods are not miracle makers when it comes to weight loss, but they can help you out along the way. Filling up your plate with these negative calorie foods is a great way of keeping the amount of calories in your meal down, but still leaving the dinner table feeling satisfied. For example you could have a piece of chicken breast, a small amount of sweet potato, then fill up the rest of your plate with brocolli or a similar negative calorie food.