Did you already try several things to burn fat but nothing really worked? You cut your calories drastically, tortured yourself with fat burning workouts and survived endless hours of cardio training. On top of that you took all the fat burning supplements out there, but the results are still not satisfying! Well if you can’t lose your fat, you’re probably using the wrong approach. Instead of doing endless sit-ups, excessive cardio sessions or buying promising supplements you should integrate the following 4 methods into your daily life.
What you will learn in this article:
First step to burn fat fast: Build more muscle
Cardio sessions and fat burning workouts are not wrong in general. But they are a drop in the bucket when we take a look at how many calories they actually burn. Your body needs about 60 to 75 percent of the total energy expenditure just for the basic functions and up to 10% to digest, absorb, and convert food. That leaves only 15 to 30 percent for physical activity, and working out is only a small part of it. Remember, physical activity includes all movements you do over the day.
So how can muscle mass help you with this problem? Well, muscle mass increases your total daily energy expenditure. That means the more muscle mass you have the more energy your body burns during the day because it has to supply those muscles with energy. In other words: building muscle not only makes your body stronger but you also burn more calories even when you rest. So instead of only doing cardio sessions or fat burning endurance workouts, implement hypertrophy focused strength training as well to benefit from this positive effect.
Second step: Intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting diets could be seperated into two kinds. One restricts eating for several hours per day and the other restricts eating for longer periods per week. Longer periods are 24h and above. Here we will talk about the most popular one: the 16/8 intermittent fasting.
To get started, begin by picking an eight-hour window and limit your food intake to that time. Many people prefer to eat between noon and 8 p.m. This means you can use the night for fasting and skip breakfast. But you can still eat a balanced lunch and dinner, along with a few snacks throughout the day. However, you can experiment and pick the time frame that best fits your schedule.
Regardless of when you eat, it’s recommended that you eat several small meals and snacks distributed evenly throughout the day. This helps to stabilize blood sugar levels and keep hunger under control. Additionally it’s important to stick to nutritious whole foods and beverages for your eating periods, to maximize the potential health benefits.
So how can IF help you to lose weight? Well it supports weight loss by increasing your growth hormone and decreasing your Insulin levels. When you’re fasting your body uses forms of stored energy in order to make your body continue to function. In addition, because of the short eating window, Intermittent fasting can also lead to the consumption of less overall calories, which may also contribute to weight loss.
Besides from that, research suggests that intermittent fasting could have a variety of health benefits. In a 2016 study by Mattson et al. they found, it may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease and can improve brain function. Please keep in mind that there are no long term studies about IF yet, and that it’s not the holy grail of weight loss. But for lots of people it can work quite well because of the benefits mentioned before.
Third step: Calorie cycling
In order to lose weight most people just cut down calories. This may work in the beginning but after a while it might happen that your metabolism decreases. To counterbalance the calorie deficit your body tries to spend less energy and adapt its metabolism to the low amount of calories. If you now increase your calorie intake too quickly it might take a lot more time for your metabolism to upregulate again. The metabolic downregulation doesn’t necessarily happen in everyone, but it’s hard to predict, if it occurs or not. So just do whatever possible to avoid it.
When you use a caloric cycling approach you may avoid this effect because you constantly change your caloric intake. This gives your body the signal that there is no need to adapt the energy expenditure to a lower calorie intake. With that you might even boost your metabolism instead of slowing it down. So on one day you aim for a deficit so that your body can use stored energy. On the next day you go into a surplus, so that your metabolism doesn’t slow down. Of course you don’t have to switch every day and you can also do it differently (Picture 2)
Please make sure that you are still in a calorie deficit when you add up all days of the week. Otherwise this method might not work that well. To boost the effectivity you can add a metabolic day, which for most people is known as the cheat day. We call it metabolic day, because you should not think that you can stuff all the crap you find into your body. You only exceed the calorie amount to support an upregulation of your leptin levels again.
Fourth step to burn fat fast: HIIT or LISS Training
As already mentioned, intense workouts alone won’t fix your weight problem. But in addition to strength training, Intermittent Fasting and calorie cycling it can work quite well. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. It involves short bursts with high effort, followed by lower effort or total rest intervals. LISS, or Low Intensity Steady State, involves consistent effort at a steady pace for longer amounts of time (the heart rate is usually monitored here to identify effort).
LISS increases the amount of fat as its main source of energy over time. A HIIT workout on the hand, uses glycogen as its main source of fuel, because of its intensity and shortness. They both burn around the same amount of calories but HITT is more time effective and has a higher EPOC effect. EPOC stands for excessive Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption. This means that the body burns more calories in the following hours after the workout. This being said you should know that the EPOC effect is not substantial and you shouldn’t choose a HIIT training over LISS alone because of that. In the end it’s more about personal preferences than effectiveness.
All right now it’s up to you. Include these 4 tips into your life and you will see results. If you want a nutrition toolbox to create your own meal plan or workout programs that help you to build muscle, increase strength and boost your metabolism just head over to calimove.com. Benefit from our experience and make the most out of your time and potential.
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