Revolution Nutrition | Training and nutrition tips - Quick and permanent fat loss program

Quick and permanent fat loss program

There is a New Year knocking at our door and with it all those good resolutions each year, a lot of people take the famous resolution of “losing weight”. Sadly, if you look at statistics - only 5% will finish what they started!

In this column, I will give you the essentials to realize a good, quick and permanent fat loss program.

Let's go ahead and get started!

The most important thing is your eating plan. In reality, nearly 80 % of your results come from your eating habits. It's easy to lose weight and maintain it with good eating but - at the opposite end - if your train like an animal and your diet is full of junk, it will be very hard to lose weight and impossible to maintain your results.

What are good eating habits?

Let's assume that the human body didn't evolve that much from the paleolithic era. 100,000 years ago, humans were eating only meat, vegetables, eggs, fish, fruits, nuts and sometimes seeds and roots. There was no agriculture and no processed food. Today, almost every one eats a lot of cereals , sugar, milk products, alcohol and trans fats on a daily basis... If you read on the paleolithic era, you will learn that humans were tall, muscular, there was no sign of cancer, no diabetes, etc . Ok – perhaps you will tell me the average life span was only 19 years old. However, in today's industrial lifestyle, a lot of young people are sick from degenerative illness like cancer, diabetes... as young as one year old and even younger! In my experience (15 years), the more closely you stick to what I call the “caveman diet” - the healthier you are and will be.

Now I will give you some simple tricks to build your own eating plan.

First you need to determine your weight in pounds. Secondly, you need to figure your master fat spot! Ok...what does that mean? Everybody has a master fat spot, a place where you easily put on some fat and where it's harder to lose it. For example, many men accumulate fat at the waist line and women tend to accumulate fat at the buttock and leg areas. Third, you need to figure your activity level. If you are sedentary - no exercise at all - versus someone who exercise four times a week, logically your caloric intake will not be the same.

The formula:

Your weight in pounds minus the weight you want to lose.

Ex:

200- 35 = 165lb after you take the result of this simple equation and multiply by 14 to find your maintenance caloric need. Ex: 165 X 14 = 2310 kcal, this is the approximative need in calories for a man or a woman of 165 pounds.

Now your activity level,

If you are sedentary and you don't plan to do more activities or exercises during your diet, what is a very bad idea by the way. Exercises will elevate your fat burning capacities by elevating your lean body mass (muscle mass). Always remember that 1lb of muscle burns 50 calories a day at rest! Exercise will accentuate your caloric expense: 1 hour of training burns around 400-700 calories. Keep in mind also that 1 lb of fat is around 3500 calories to burn!!! Just cut on calories will make you losing weight but a lot of this weight will come from precious muscle tissue! Ok let's figure out your caloric need if you don't exercise at all. 165 x 14 = 2310 – 500 = 1810kcal at this point it's the lower you can go under that you will lose too much muscle and sabotage your metabolism. When you are lowering calories like this, you need to rotate your caloric intake ex: 3-4 days 1810kcal and 1 day at 2100 and goes on... you need to take more calories 1 or 2 days a week dependently of the speed of your results to prevent your metabolism to go to low. As you can see it's not the best way to lose weight. I want to give you this option only because I know only 50% of people do exercise when they want to lose weight! A lot of those people will often attempt the more drastic and dangerous diets. With this method, even if it's not the best one,you don't do anything dangerous for your health.

Now for the most effective plan.

In the past, I have tried a lot of fat burning methods but I have found that the most effective one is the following. I have worked using method with hundreds of clients with success! When I mean success – we are talking lots of clients who have lost more than 40lbs in 12 weeks!!!

First, you take the formula I gave you earlier - the weight you want to have multiplied by 14 to calculate your maintenance caloric intake ex: 165 x 14= 2310. After this, you reduce by 250 calories for the first week (ex: 2310 -250 = 2060 calories). You only cut by 250 calories at this time as to not shock your body's stability too much. If you reduce your calories too quickly, your metabolism will slow down and that's the last thing you want! With this method, we will count more on caloric expenditure than cutting calories.

Your 2060 calories should be comprised the following to yield better results, 50% of your calories will come from protein, 30% from carbs and 20% from fat. Sometimes I will use a different ratio for specific needs but this one is good for most people.

You need to use this formula to know how many grams of each macronutrient you need each day. For the protein need in grams: 2060 x 50% = 1030 / 4 = 258g of protein a day. You need to divide your first result by 4 because each gram of protein contains 4 calories. For those who make the count it's near 1.5g of protein by pound of body weight. It's a lot but for these 12 weeks, it's necessary and no it's not dangerous for people without any health issues! After the 12 weeks of fat burning plan, you go on the stability plan of 33, 33, 33 ratio.

For carbs - it's 2060 x 30% = 618 / 4 = 155g of carbs a day.

And for fat, 206 x 20% = 412 / 9 = 47g of fat a day. For the fat, you divide by 9 because 1 g of fat is 9 calories.

Now you know you need 258 g of protein, 155g of carbs and 47g of fat per day. The best way to set up your daily diet is to separate it in 6 meals with equal caloric intake ex: 43g of protein, 26g of carbs and 8g of fat for each meal. To build your menu one of the best database is the USDA food database you have near 2500 different food with calories and all nutrients .You can have it on the USDA website.

Building a good diet is a bit complicated but you will be thankful for those abs and firm muscles!

The results

After the first week, you should lose around 3 to 5 pounds of weight, 1 to 2 pounds of fat and the rest from water. When you start, you lose a lot of water because when you cut some carbs - your body eliminates around 3 grams of water for each gram of glycogen you lose. After this first and maybe the second week, you should lose around 1 to 2 pounds a week, no more! If you lose weight too fast - your body will start a starvation mode. This will induce a cascade of hormonal and enzymatic process that will slow down your metabolism and make your fat burning plan very hard to realize. In this case, don't make the mistake of eating more than your plan even it's only one day because your body will become a storing machine!!! This is why a very low caloric diet is a bad thing. Statistically, people doing that kind of diet will gain back all the weight they lose plus 8% in only 3 months!

If after 2 weeks, if you are not losing weight - cut another 250 calories. Sometimes it is needed to cut a bit more, but never cut more than 250 calories at a time! Try to do more exercise or a more intense training program before cutting more calories. Read the last part of this article for a real fat burning training program!

The master fat spot

Like I said before, almost everyone stores fat in a specific area. For most men, it is at the abdomen (android type), while women tend to store in the lower body (gynoïd type). When you look in the mirror and see a barrel with two legs and two arms - it's because you are insulin resistant ,this means that you ate too much high glycemic carbs in the past and your body will become resistant to the insulin hormone. This is a very complex syndrome but it's very important to reverse this process because the chance you develop diabetes and heart diseases are very high. To reverse the insulin resistance, you first need to cut down your carb intake. It's even more important for a person with insulin resistance not to eat more than 30% of its daily caloric intake from carbs. Another very important thing to do is to incorporate polyunsaturated fat omega-3 in your menu. Around 10 to 15 grams a day from small fish is a good start. Omega-3's do a lot of things in your body like, lowering inflammation, stimulating fat metabolism, reversing insulin resistance. In North America, we don't eat enough omega 3, this is why supplementation is a must.

For the gynoïd type, it's another thing because the problem there is a bit more complex. The hormone estrogen is the case here. When a woman starts to stock more fat in the lower body than the upper, it is a sign that the body has trouble eliminating the extra estrogen - specifically estradiol - and a lot of chemicals called xenoestrogens. Those xenoestrogens come from, pesticides, herbicides, plastics, anovulant ... when the body is unable to eliminate properly this extra estrogen due to less than optimal liver functions and/or intestinal functions - the body starts to store this overflow of chemicals in the fat cells. Because of the affinity of the lower body fat cells receptors for estrogen, the fat deposition is more important in the lower body. For that reason, it is very important for people with that kind of fat accumulation to do a cleanse of 14 days. This cleanse is very simple but not easy to follow.

In these 14 days, you should eat only fruits and vegetables. From breakfast to lunch - it's only fruits. It's very important to mix up ex: If you eat a banana with strawberries the first day, you eat an apple with blueberries the next day. From the lunch right through to the dinner and even into the evening, you eat only vegetables. Every vegetable is ok but you must change them and offer your body variety. You need to drink 2 to 3 litres of water with the juice of a lemon. Fruits and vegetables are preferably organic. Organic fruits and vegetables are free of pesticides and herbicides. This cleanse is very useful to detoxify the body from all chemicals specially xenoestrogen. If when you do this, you feel side effects like nausea, bloating... this is normal for the first 2-3 days, this is why it's a good idea to start it a weekend. If you come more sick, start incorporating a meal with meat at dinner. The more side effects you have - the more intoxicated you are!

Now the training program:

For losing fat, metabolism stimulation is very important - this is why you need a high training frequency. For my clients, the best schedule is 2 days of weight training circuit 1 day cardio and repeat, one day off, yes you read well, it's 6 days a week! If you do less because you don't have the time, keep in mind the closer you are from this schedule - the faster results will come.

Example of weight training circuit for day 1:

	Exercise name	Sets	Reps	Tempo	Rest
A1	Leg press	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A2	Lat pull down	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A3	Leg curl	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A4	Bench press	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A5	Leg extension	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A6	Triceps push down	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	120sec

As you can see, it's 6 exercises in a row with 45 sec between each exercise. After you complete the circuit, take a 2-minute break and repeat 3 more times. The choice of exercise, the number of sets, reps, rest... can be adjusted with the physical condition of the participant. If you look attentively at the program, you will observe an alternation between exercises for the upper body to the lower body. I use this form of execution because like you know muscles need blood and oxygen to work and when you alternate upper body exercises and lower body exercises you force your cardiovascular system to work harder to supply muscles with freshly oxygenated blood. In the end, for the same time passed in the gym, you burn a lot more calories!

Day 2:

	Exercise name	Sets	Reps	Tempo	Rest
A1	Military press	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A2	Bb curl	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A3	Dumbbell side raise	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A4	Inc dumbbell curl	4-5	12	3-0-1-0	45sec
A5	Crunch on ball	4-5	12-20	3-0-1-0	45sec
A6	Standing leg raise	4-5	12-15	3-0-1-0	120sec

Day 2 is easier to allow you to be able to do the first two days - one after the other - with no chance of overtraining. Before each workout, it is important to take a little warm-up session on a cardio machine of your choice - between 10 to 15 minutes - to have a little sweat.

Day 3:

The cardio session.

30-45 min of cardio. It's not mandatory to do it in the gym, if you can its better outside in nature with fresh air! At the beginning, you should do it at a steady pace ex: 45 min at 3 miles per hour. Keep your heart rate between 70-75 of your maximum heartbeat capacity per minute. To know approximately the heartbeat you should have per minute, there is a formula: 220-your age x % ex: 220-40 x 70% = 126 bpm.

After 2 weeks, you should start doing interval cardio training. This means that you alternate slower pace and faster pace in a ratio 2 for 1 ex: 2 minutes at 70% for 1 min at 85%. You increase the difficulty each week. Your interval session is supposed to last for 20-30min of your 45 min cardio session. At the beginning your start with a warm up of 5 min and at the end you do a cool down of 5-10 minutes.

When you perform your cardio, it's very important to have a good sweat! When you are sweating - you don't only lose water, you lose a lot of toxins to!

Do this cycle two times in the week and the seventh day is OFF!

Recap:

Ok, let's say your weight is 200 pounds and you want to weigh 165. You take 165 x 14 to know your maintenance caloric need. After you cut down 250 calories to initiate a negative caloric balance to permit you to lose weight.

To calculate your macronutrients you divide your result 2060 calorie with the ratio; 50% protein, 30% carbs, 20% fat; 258g of protein, 155g of cabs, and 47g of fat. Then build yourself a menu with the USDA database of each meal of 43g of protein,26g of carbs, and 8g of fat. Keep in mind that your carbs should come mainly from fruits and vegetables, don't forget you are a caveman!

If you are a gynoïd type and your body fat is more important in the lower body, you should start your eating program with a 2 week cleanse of fruits and vegetables.

Then train like hell 6 times a week.

Follow this to make sure that this spring you will look fantastic and you'll be healthier than ever!!!

Good Luck and don't give up, you are a champion!!!