How To Shed the Pounds During the Holidays

Holidays are dreaded by those who are trying to lose fat. Everybody around you is eating heartily, while you sit there eating your salad without dressing, since the latter contains a lot of calories.

Eating is as much psychological as it is physical. Peer pressure will easily lead you to break your diet and consume unneeded calories that will end up in your waist.

At this point, you might be tempted to lock yourself in your house and become a social recluse in order to lose those pounds hanging from your belly.

But you don’t have to go to such an extreme. There are ways of not gaining a lot of weight without becoming a hermit.

To begin with, eat dessert and junk food with your friends and family but in limited amounts. While your friends gulp down brownie after brownie, you should attempt to consume one or two. If you can, try to find low-fat desserts on your dinner table.

But if you don’t find any low fat desserts at your party or family reunion, you may want to bring your own. Try to bring a whole tray of low-fat desserts, so that you contribute to the social atmosphere instead of bringing one for yourself, which will only isolate you from other people.

Another tip is to actually train before you go the party or social event! By training hard before a party, your body will shuttle all nutrients towards replenishing your muscles. As a result, you can consume more carbohydrates to restore the glycogen stores in your muscles.

But if you don’t have the time to exercise before a social event, you may want to load up on water, vegetables, and protein before meeting your friends and family. By consuming these essential nutrients in great quantities, you will fill up your stomach with healthy food that will prevent you from eating a lot junk food.

A different approach to take before eating at a social event during the holidays is to fast or diet hard the day before the event. By doing so, your body will be craving food, and everything that you eat at the party will not be stored as fat, but will rather supplement the calorific deficit you created before going to the party or social event.

If none of these approaches work for you, just try not to go overboard with eating junk food during the holidays. Some people think that eating a little junk food justifies eating great amounts of such food, but this is fallacious reasoning.

A little junk food will not harm your fat loss efforts, but eating tons of junk food during the holidays will make you pack on the pounds for sure!

Last but not least, try not to weigh yourself during the holidays, because it is probable that you won’t like what you see!

Just make sure to follow some of the above tips during the holidays, and the weight gain will be minimized. Once the holidays are over, you can go back to weighing yourself and being more disciplined with your diet and eating habits.

Basic Elements of Fat Loss

No matter what you may have heard, fat loss is simple.

The problem is that people overcomplicate it by reading too much information about losing fat, without implementing anything they read.

As a result, fat loss dieters suffer from information overload, which results in paralysis in analysis that never allows them to lose a single pound of fat.

So I am going to give you here the basics of fat loss that have always worked and will always work in the future.

First, you need to create a caloric deficit. This is an unassailable truth of fat loss. It is the foundation, the basis of every fat loss success.

Instead of going into complicated equations to determine your daily caloric needs, I am going to give you a simple rule of thumb for daily caloric consumption.

• Consume 10-11 times your bodyweight in pounds calories daily. For example, if you weigh 180 lbs, you should consume around 1800-1980 calories per day. Of course, you should adjust this according to your activity level, and how your fat loss progresses.

You can create a caloric deficit in two ways:

1. Eating below your maintenance level.
2. Exercise (cardio or resistance, or both).

Apart from caloric deficit, you need to determine your daily protein intake.

Protein is essential for any fat loss diet because it acts as a structural nutrient; in other words, it helps you to keep your muscle while dieting hard.

A simple rule of thumb for daily protein intake is 1-1.5g/lb of bodyweight. Women might need less than men, so you should adjust accordingly.

Once you have decided upon a daily protein intake, you should determine your daily fat intake.

To keep this simple, multiply your weight in pounds by 0.33 to obtain your daily fat intake. If you weigh 180 lbs, you should eat 180 *0.33 = 59.4 grams of fat.

But not all fats are made equal. Essential fatty acids (omega 3-6-9) are the most important, so make sure that the bulk of your fat calories come from these fats. The rest you can obtain from either saturated or monounsaturated fats.

Do not attempt a low-fat diet because they don’t work. Nowadays, we have low-fat all over the place, people are eating low-fat diets, and we are still getting fatter and fatter.

So don’t deprive your body of the essential fats because your body needs them (hence the name essential).

Once you have set your daily caloric level, and your daily protein and fat intake, you should set your daily carbohydrate level. This will depend on your activity levels. If you are very active, you will need a lot of carbohydrates to fuel your activities.

This is especially true for people who practice endurance sports such as marathons and triathlons.

If you are a sedentary person, however, you will need very few carbohydrates.

But if you are active, I recommend you consume your carbohydrates right after exercise, because then they will be transported to your muscles in order to replenish your muscle’s glycogen stores.

Rapid Fat Loss is Possible….if you do it correctly!

Sometimes you just want to lose fat quickly, because you have an upcoming wedding, high school reunion, or even a physique contest!

But experts and fat loss gurus will tell you that you need to take a sensible, slow approach to fat loss. If it took you all those years and months to gain fat, what makes you think you can lose it in a week?

These same experts also tell you that rapid fat loss often results in disaster. You end up losing more muscle than fat, your metabolism crashes to the ground, and you quickly regain all the fat you lost because you are tired of drastic caloric restriction required for rapid fat loss.

And guess what, the experts are right! If you become obsessed with losing fat very quickly, you will make some disastrous mistakes.

Let’s say that you set yourself the extreme goal of losing a pound of fat per day. In terms of calories, that is roughly about 3,500 calories.

If you want to lose these calories through dieting alone, then good luck! Most people need about 2,000-3,000 calories daily to maintain their bodyweight, so if you want to lose a pound of fat per day by eating alone, you will have to starve for an entire day!

The result: a loss of muscle mass! When you don’t give your body any carbohydrates, it will begin to obtain them through a process called gluconeogenesis.

Your body will then transform certain amino acids in your body into carbohydrates to meet the energy needs of your brain. And guess where the amino acids will come from if you don’t eat anything for the entire day? Your muscles!

So losing a pound of fat per day by dieting alone is a losing proposition. But what would happen if you were to combine exercise with dieting?

As we said before, a pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. In one day, you could lose 1,750 calories by exercising and 1,750 calories by dieting.

The problem with this scenario is that it is absolutely insane! To lose 1,750 calories, you would probably have to run for 3 hours straight without taking a break, and then you would have to close your mouth in order to create a caloric deficit. Do you think you can do that? If you think you can, then you are not human!

Thus far, we have seen the major hurdles of losing fat rapidly either through dieting alone, or by a combination of dieting and exercise.

By now you have probably given up hope of losing fat quickly. But hang on a minute because I have a solution for you.

The ideal way to lose weight quickly is to lose fat while keeping your muscle. The best way to keep muscle is to have an adequate protein intake.

Why? As mentioned before, your body will eat up your muscle in order to derive glucose from amino acids in your body if you don’t give it enough carbohydrates to fuel your brain.

By eating protein, you allow the body to pull the amino acids from food rather than from your body, so you end up keeping the muscle that you have.

A recommended protein amount for those who are dieting is 1-1.5g/lb of bodyweight.

Apart from the essential amino acids your body needs, you will also have to take essential fatty acids, such as omega 3, 6, and 9. You can cover your essential fatty intake by taking a good EFA complex.

Therefore, in order to lose fat rapidly, take only protein and essential fatty acids, while keeping non-essential nutrients like carbohydrates out of your diet.

Also, avoid exercising during this extreme diet because you won’t have enough energy to perform hard exercise.

In addition, try to take a break from this extreme diet every three or four days, or you won’t be able to keep up with this diet for long.

In summary then, if you want to lose fat quickly without losing your hard earned muscle, follow these simple steps:

• Eat about 1-1.5g of protein/lb of bodyweight to maintain your muscle mass.
• Take EFA capsules to cover your essential fatty intake.
• Avoid any other types of fat or carbohydrates. Eat foods like tuna, cheese, or chicken, that contain lots of protein with little fat or carbohydrates.
• Exercise just a little. You won’t have enough energy to do long, hard workouts.
• Take dietary breaks every 3-5 days.

Flexibility In Dieting

Talk to most people about dieting, and they mention words like “sacrifice”, “pain”, “self-control”, “strict”, and other words that are synonymous with deprivation.

But dieting should not be all doom and gloom. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Some dieters think that they need to be strict 24/7, that they can never eat cheat foods, or that they can never miss a workout. Dieting is already stressful on its own, so if you add perfectionism to the mix, you will end up going back to the habits that got you fat in the first place.

As a result, we should carefully consider the issue of diet flexibility. Don’t get me wrong: by flexible I don’t mean that you can eat whatever you want! Don’t start eating dozens of donuts, honey buns, and other junk foods, while singing hymns to the joys of flexible dieting!

Dieting is still dieting. Elements of self-control and sacrifice are always present when dieting. But these periods of temperance should be followed by periods of flexibility, where you take a break from your diet, and celebrate the pleasure of eating food.

Flexibility in dieting can be implemented in many ways. For example, you could have a cheat meal once a week. In fact, you could have an entire cheat day if you so desire, where you eat more liberally and take a break from exercising.

I recommend, however, that you don’t go overboard on cheat days. Be more open in your food choices than during your regular days, but don’t eat everything that you see, because this might take you back to bad eating habits.

The purpose of cheat days is not to eat huge quantities of junk food, but rather to take a psychological break from the grind of dieting. By doing this, you will recover your energy, and you will continue your diet with more passion and zest than before.

If you don’t have a cheat day, however, you risk losing all the motivation that you had at the beginning of your diet. Day after day of dieting, hunger, and self-control can take a big toll on the human mind.

In fact, some scientists and philosophers have suggested that willpower is like a battery: if you use it all up, and don’t recharge, you won’t be able to fight temptation.

So it is necessary to have days where you give your willpower a break. When you do this, you are not being weak, but rather you are allowing yourself to recover your strength from the hard work you did over the last six days.

Apart from cheat days, you can also have cheat weeks. As with cheat days, be careful that you don’t engorge yourself during cheat weeks, or you will undo your previous efforts.

But if you do them properly, cheat weeks can be of immense help to your fat loss aspirations. You will be restoring your mental strength, your metabolism, and you will probably feel more energetic than before when you were dieting. With this renewed enthusiasm, you can tackle another cycle of dieting and fat loss.

In summary, always remember to alternate periods of rigid dieting with flexible dieting. Don’t be dieting strictly all the time without taking any breaks, because sooner or later you will take a break, and you won’t like it!

The human mind and body were not made for 24/7, 365 days a year dieting. Give yourself the break you deserve, and you will see greater success with your fat loss efforts.

Exercise for Fat Loss

If you go to any online forums on fat loss, you will find heated discussions on the proper exercises to lose fat. You will also find that people take extreme sides: some say that high intensity interval training (HIIT) is the only way to lose fat, while others swear by LSC (long, steady cardio).

But as in any area of life, extremism is not healthy.

The ideal would be to combine both high intensity, short duration exercises with lower intensity, long duration exercises. In this way, you develop both the anaerobic and aerobic systems, and you lose fat while exercising (long term cardio) and also afterwards, thanks to the high intensity exercise that speeds up your metabolism for hours on end.

So you should always try to combine the best of both worlds. But this is not as easy as it sounds. A lot of fitness enthusiasts overdo the high intensity exercises and end up with severe injuries. Others overdo the lower intensity exercises, running for hours and hours, while injuring themselves due to the repeated stresses on the joints from long, steady cardio.

A good rule of thumb is to do two high intensity sessions per week, and about three lower intensity sessions per week. You should consider your lower intensity sessions as active recovery from the high intensity exercises.

Of course, these recommendations will depend on your fitness level, age, and weight. Develop and adjust according to what your body tells you.

As for exercise selection, there are many ways to keep your workouts interesting. For high intensity exercises, you can try sprinting, kettlebell swings, weightlifting with short rest periods, sprint swimming, sprint cycling, boxing, and any other activity that gets your heart pumping hard.

As for lower intensity exercises, you can try walking, jogging, long-distance swimming, cycling, and any other activity that you can do for a long time without getting excessively tired.

But before you put on your running shoes or go out for a bike ride, you should know that you are missing a major form of exercise that is essential for fat loss. Do you know what you are missing?

Resistance exercise!

Most gym-goers think that weights are only good for bulking up, and are completely useless for losing fat.

Yet this is far from the truth! In fact, weights are essential for fat loss.

Why? If you just do cardio and follow a strict diet, you will lose fat, but you will also lose muscle. At the end of the day, you will end up feeling weak and tired.

But if you add resistance exercise to your fat loss arsenal, you will be able to keep all the muscle you have while losing mainly fat. As a result, when you begin to lose the fat, you will be pleased to find muscle underneath the layers of fat rather than bones!

If you are a newcomer to exercising, or you haven’t exercised in a long time, you might even gain some muscle while losing fat if you perform resistance exercises on a fat loss routine.

In conclusion, you should try to combine many forms of exercise into your fat loss routine:

• High intensity cardio to speed up your metabolism and mobilize fat stores.
• Long term cardio to burn fat while exercising.
• Resistance exercises to maintain the muscle you have, so that your metabolism doesn’t drop significantly. Maintaining muscle will ensure that all of the weight you lose is fat, and that you end up having an aesthetic physique once you lose all the fat that you need to lose.

Proper Weight Loss

Overweight individuals say that they want to lose “weight”, so they weigh themselves on a scale to find out whether they are shedding the pounds or not. If the pounds go down, they are elated, but if the scale does not change, they lose their motivation and regress to the behaviors that made them overweight in the first place.

The problem with this way of thinking is that not all weight is made equal. Humans can lose weight through loss of water, loss of muscle, loss of fat, and loss of waste material located in your digestive tract.

Try this experiment today: throw out all carbohydrates, and eat only protein and fat. The next day you will probably be a few pounds lighter, and you might be pleased with what you see in the mirror. But before you get all excited about this sudden weight loss, please realize that you have barely lost any fat weight.

In fact, due to the absence of carbohydrates, you have lost water weight. If you don’t believe me, try eating a full plate of pasta and rice, and you will see how you regain all the pounds you lost almost immediately.

Also, try weighing yourself before and after eating a meal. You will notice that your weight has increased after consuming a heavy meal. Once your meal has digested properly, you will probably go back down to the weight you had before you ate the meal.

As for muscle loss, I have seen people go on extreme starvation diets, or fasting, in order to lose the pounds. The results are abysmal. At first, they are happy because the pounds come off pretty quickly, but after weeks or months of starving themselves, they realize that a lot of the weight they have lost is muscle weight!

Thus, they end up becoming “skinny fat.” These people look skinny when they are dressed, but when they take off their clothes, they look horrible because all the areas of fat storage stick out like a sore thumb.

So by now you should have realized that your main concern should be fat loss and nothing else. If you use the scale as your only reference, you will be misguided in your efforts to achieve the physique of your dreams.

In order to achieve proper weight loss, i.e. fat loss, you should stick the following principles:

• Eat enough protein to maintain your muscle. Around 0.8g of protein/lb of bodyweight should be enough for most people. You should adjust this amount according to your activity levels.
• Perform resistance exercise, like weightlifting, gymnastics, strongman, or whatever you like, to keep the muscle you already have, or even build more muscle!
• Always burn more calories than you consume on a daily basis. This is the only proven way to lose fat. Keep track of your caloric intake and perform some type of cardio, whether it be running, cycling, swimming, or boxing, to burn some extra calories.
• Keep track of your fat loss, not just your weight loss. Along with the scale, try to use calipers or some other method of measuring your fat loss. A simple way to do this is to measure your waist with a measuring tape. If your waist goes down, that’s a sign that you are losing fat, but if your waist goes up, then you are doing something wrong.

In this article, you have learned that not all weight is created equal, and that your main concern should be fat weight. You have also learned that using a measuring scale is not enough; you need other methods in order to measure your fat loss, not just your weight loss.

In terms of dieting, you now know that your goal is to keep the muscle that you have, and burn the fat. Losing weight for the sake of losing weight is not healthy. You must always be concerned about the type of weight you are losing, not just the amount.

I hope this information has shown you the path to achieving your dream physique!