Guest Post by Drew Stegman
Thousands of people are always trying to learn how to lose weight. Unfortunately losing fat can be quite difficult, even with the best fitness tools at your disposal. But by simply using some of the techniques in this article, you can take your physique and health to new extremes that you never thought possible.It pretty much boils down to 2 basic principles. Let’s go into further detail.
How to Burn Belly Fat
Probably one of the biggest fat loss myths out there is the myth of spot fat removal, which basically states that you can lose fat from a particular area of your body – such as your belly. This simply isn’t true. When it comes to burning fat, you need to take a different approach than this and stop listening to the late night infomercials you see on television.
Strategy #1 – Make Small Changes to Your Diet
Probably the most important factor to your fat loss success is a proper diet. Now keep in mind that I’m not a big fan of diets that start off too strict. They’re simply not practical and when taken to extremes they can cause your metabolism to slow down, making it harder to lose fat.
The best approach is to make small changes to your diet on a daily basis and make slight reductions in calories and processed foods. Eventually, your diet will be nearly perfect and you will actually want to eat healthily. Changing everything at once is simply not practical because if you’re like most people, you will most likely not have the motivation or the willpower to do so and you will probably give up after a couple of weeks. A great way to go about this is to cut 100 calories out of your diet each day until you get down to how many calories your body needs to lose about 2 pounds of fat per week. Don’t slip too low on calories though, otherwise, you will start to lose muscle and your metabolism will slow down as well. In addition to this, replace 100 junk food calories each day with 100 calories of healthy food. For example, if you regularly consume sugary cereal every morning for breakfast, replace it with oatmeal instead. And if you love your fatty fried chicken, replace your fried chicken with a grilled chicken breast instead. After a couple of weeks of doing this, your body will be fully adjusted to your new diet. You will actually want to stay on your new healthy diet since the changes were gradual and your body had time to adapt. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to fat loss.
Strategy #2 – Exercise to Build Muscle
After you’ve cleaned up your diet, it’s time to get active. But despite what many people will tell you, doing cardio on a daily basis is not the key to losing lots of fat in a short period of time.
Although cardio will boost your metabolism temporarily, it doesn’t have the same calorie burning potential as lifting weights. Lifting weights will increase the amount of muscle on your body and the more muscle you have, the faster your metabolism will be, making it easier to lose fat. This is a primary reason why guys have an easier time losing weight than females because their metabolism is higher due to their muscle mass.
You should focus on increasing the size of your largest muscle groups like your back, chest, and legs, since building muscle in these areas will have the most significant impact on how many calories you will burn and will allow you to build muscle mass. Just remember – you can’t spot reduce!
I hope these tips have cleared some things up for you about what your diet and workout programs should look like if you want to lose weight.
