Posts Tagged ‘diet’

Achieving Fat Loss and Muscle Growth in 2010

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

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.

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Do Calories Really Count For Fat Loss?

Monday, September 1st, 2008

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.

  

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Posted in Fat Loss Diet, Fat Loss Training, fat loss | 1 Comment »

Negative Calories Foods for Weight Loss

Monday, August 25th, 2008

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.

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Posted in Fat Loss Diet, fat loss | 1 Comment »