I’ll follow up my muscle building tips post with a few fat loss tips. I’ll tackled the two major factors–diet and exercise.
1. Diet
Remember that at least 90% of your fat loss results are a direct result of how well you have complied with your diet. While training methods do matter, the diet is going to be the most important factor in whether or not you lose fat.
*A good diet keeps you in a negative calorie balance for most of the time, meaning you are burning more calories than you are consuming.
*Most will find that manipulating your carbohydrate intake leads to much better results. I’m referring to low carb approaches, etc.
*Intermittent fasting is a simple and effective way to achieve a negative calorie balance.
*It’s good to have a cheat day/meal in order to give yourself a break and boost your metabolism.
2. Exercise
Exercise serves the purpose of burning some extra calories and (in the case
of resistance training) preserving (or building) lean muscle mass.
*Traditional steady-state cardio (like walking or riding a stationary bike at the same speed) has
the advantage of being relatively easy to do. It can be done by those who are unable to train intensely (or done by those who are fatigued from resistance training).
*Resistance training (weight lifting) has the advantage of preserving or building lean muscle mass. Any decent fat loss program should have a resistance training component. Body weight training also falls in this category for those who don’t have access to weights.
*High intensity interval training (HIIT) has several advantages, such as burning a high number calories in a relatively short amount of time. It also seems to have some hormonal advantages, such as temporarily blunting appetite.
