On a quest to melt the extra fat that’s accumulated around your middle in the last few years? If so, it’s important that you consider the different ways your body burns fat.
While it may seem like fat loss is just a one-step process, it can be achieved through multiple routes.
These include:
Reducing your calorie intake to achieve a negative calorie balance
Increasing your energy output through exercise to achieve a negative calorie balance
Enhancing your resting metabolic rate to establish a negative calorie balance
You’ll notice that all three of these methods do achieve the same effect – putting you in that negative energy balance. This means that you are burning off more calories than you are taking in, thus your body has to find an alternative source of energy for fuel – hence it turns to your body’s fat stores.
When you discover the most effective ways to reach this end point, that’s when you’ll be seeing excellent fat loss results. Remember fat loss is different than weight loss. Although the two can go hand-in-hand the more important thing is actual fat loss.
So let’s now begin looking at what we know is most efficient.
Carb Cycling Diet Plan
It’s no secret, low carb diets help you lose body fat. But, they also cause you to stall more quickly as well. This is because a certain hormone in the body called leptin down regulates heavily when you reduce your carbohydrate intake. Leptin controls your resting metabolic rate, so you can imagine what this does to progress.
Fortunately, you can offset this. A quick spike in carbohydrate intake can help trick your body into revving its metabolism, encouraging faster fat loss once again. This technique, known as a refeed is great for combating plateau’s. By doing a carb cycling approach, refeeds are essentially built right in as you have higher carb days mixed in with lower carb days.
Heavy Weight Lifting
On the exercise side of things, heavy weight lifting is something you’ll want to focus your efforts on. Lifting heavy not only encourages the maintenance of lean muscle mass tissue, ensuring that you don’t lose muscle on your diet, but also helps to raise your resting metabolic rate for up to 48 hours post-workout.
Many people regard weight training as a way to gain weight, not to burn fat but it can do both.
Take A Fat Burning Supplement
While there are a number of hyped up supplements on the market that will claim to help you burn fat but don’t deliver, there are some truly good products that will.
One such ingredient is ephedra, which accomplishes this in a few ways. First, it helps raise your resting metabolic rate so once again, you burn more calories each and every day. Second, it helps to suppress the appetite as well, which will help you maintain a reduced calorie diet. Finally, it can also assist with increasing overall energy levels, which may then lead to more spontaneous movement throughout the day, and a higher overall calorie burn1.
A product such as Lipodrene with Ephedra can be the prefect option here. It not only contains ephedra, but also offers other ingredients designed to accelerate fat burning and appetite suppression.
Eating In A Calorie Surplus
Now you might be thinking, how could this be? If you are in a surplus, you definitely aren’t burning fat, so how could this help you see better results?
Let me explain. When you eat in a calorie surplus and you combine this with strength training, you’ll be able to build more lean muscle mass. So you will actually gain weight, but the weight will not be body fat. What this does however is helps you burn more fat over the long run.
Your resting metabolic rate is heavily dictated by how much lean muscle mass tissue you posses as muscle mass is highly metabolically active. Therefore, if you build more muscle, you’ll burn more calories each and every day. When you then want to burn fat, you won’t be required to drop your calories as much to see great results.
Rather than eating say 1500 calories per day, you might be able to eat 1800 calories per day and still see the same fat loss because you have a bit more muscle on your body.
Sometimes you really need to focus on something else entirely for a while before losing fat. Or at the very least, take a break from fat loss every so often and switch gears so you’re building muscle instead.
References:
1. Colker, Carlon M., et al. “Effects of Citrus aurantium extract, caffeine, and St. John’s wort on body fat loss, lipid levels, and mood states in overweight healthy adults.” Current Therapeutic Research 60.3 (1999): 145-153.
