It is not too late to shed some extra weight for this ‘summer’. With the right nutrition, training, supplementation and guidance, you will be able to drop some body fat fast.
Use these shredding tips to start now and get in shape in weeks rather than months.
Be more active
If you are mostly sedentary apart from your workouts, you are making it very hard to lose weight and burn fat. By increasing your daily energy expenditure through movement, you are much more likely to create the necessary caloric deficit required for losing body fat. For instance you can try:
● Walking for transport (if practical)
● Taking the stairs instead of the elevator
● Walking your dog
● Playing sports with your children
Look for opportunities to get up and move as often as you can for faster fat loss.
Consume less carbs and more protein
Protein and carbs have the same caloric value (four calories per gramme) but behave differently in your body. Protein is rarely used for energy and plays an important role in elevating your metabolism. In contrast, carbs that are not used for energy are readily converted to fat and have a much smaller effect on your metabolic rate. Also, eating carbs causes a more significant rise in insulin levels than protein and insulin inhibits fat burning.
Simply lowering your carb intake and raising your protein intake by the same amount is often enough to produce significant fat loss.
Skip a meal
To lose fat, you need to eat less. Opinions vary but most experts suggest you need to create an energy deficit of about 500 calories per day. While you could do this by weighing and measuring your food and then reducing the size of your meals, you can achieve the exact same result by simply eating one less meal a day.
Try replacing any meal of your choice with a scoop or two of protein powder in a shake or smoothie. The protein will preserve your muscle mass and pump up your metabolism but provide very few calories.
Look for small savings
Putting aside a couple of hundred dollars a day can add up to a decent amount of money by the end of the year. You can use a similar approach to speed up losing fat and getting shredded. Look for lots of small ways to drop a few calories from your food intake to end up easily and painlessly creating a bigger caloric deficit. Good examples include:
* Cutting sugar from your tea and coffee
* Drinking water instead of juice or sweet drinks
* Reducing your portion sizes
* Cutting out the mayonnaise and other high-calorie sauces
from your meals
* Replacing pasta and rice with vegetables
* Trimming all visible fat off meat
* Grilling or steaming instead of
frying
The more of these small savings you can make, the better your results will be.
Do supersets
Strength training is essential during a fat loss journey; it preserves your muscle mass and therefore prevents your metabolism from slowing down which is something that often happens when you cut calories. However, strength training itself is not a great fat burner – unless you take steps to make it so.
Rather than rest between sets and waste half your workout time doing nothing, superset everything to increase the energy expenditure of your training session. If you superset everything, you’ll get more work done in the same amount of time and that adds up to a faster fat loss.
Getting in shape might not be easy but it’s not impossible either. Yes, you’ll have to make a commitment to eating clean and training hard but if you do, you’ll soon be looking good for the summer. Start putting these tips into action today.
