Fat Loss - No Fluff, No Fads, No Lies, NO MERCY!!! - The Ultimate Fat Loss Explanation
Paul McCambridge
Fat loss is a complicated subject. More lies have been told by more people in order to sell more rubbish in this area than anything else we can think of. At this mag, we can't bloody stand it. Fat loss is science - applied. If you need to lose some fat, read this and you will not be tricked off track again with crappy diets, unnecessarily repetitive floor-based forward flexion drills or fad based vibrating rubbish (you know what I mean). It's still hard work, but it does really help if you know what you’re doing!!!
Fat Loss: An Idiot’s Guide (and a Smart person’s guide too!)
Well this should be a pretty easy article to write, eh? Just some simple guidelines on how to lower your body fat, how hard can it be? Well, unless it’s now fashionable to be fat maybe it’s more difficult than we suspect, after all most of us are too fat. Or are we? How do we know? Why bother about fat anyway? What affects your body fat? Is it just training and nutrition? Does eating fat make me fatter? What about hormones (cortisol, insulin, leptin, growth hormone)? What about stomach acidity and HCL? What about stress? What about sleep? What about belly-button piercings affecting acupuncture meridian lines and body fat?! What about electromagnetic pollution spiking your blood sugar and thus making you fatter?! What about spirituality and the fear of certain religious dogmas making people fat? Ha ha ha, sorry, getting carried away now (or am I?), but hold onto your hats for a typical, no fluff More-Athletic ride on a complete overview of Fat Loss.
FAT LOSS IN A NUTSHELL
Stop eating rubbish, train hard, ensure ample rest, and do all this consistently. Your number one weapon for fat loss is improving your nutrition and health. Number two is your exercise regime, with priority on resistance training, high intensity interval training and becoming more-athletic. If you want to become lean you need to be 9% fat for a real 6 pack, (although it is possible to see some upper abdominal definition at about 15%). If you’re more than 20% you are fat, over-fat, obese or a lard ass, you choose the word, that's not our concern. We want to help you change it as fast as is possible.
So, what to do.....
1) Eat better, get healthy
Cut out all grains and sugars
Sort your digestion
Eat more ‘clean’ protein and veg.
Supplement
Drink enough water
Sleep
2) Train hard and smart
Train to boost lean mass - this raises RMR
Train to do some damage - metabolic resistance training and high intensity intervals burns calories both in and after the session.
Train to be More-Athletic – this leads to better biomechanics, more horsepower, more fitness...more ability to work out, and more ability to stimulate results.
What happened to simply taking calories in from calories out?
It's not as simple as that! This equation is affected by so many factors:
RMR Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) is the energy required to perform vital body functions such as respiration and heart rate while the body is at rest. About 50% to 75% of one's daily energy expenditure can be attributed to resting metabolic rate. To make it as simple as possible for you, take two identical twins both at 90 kg. One is 30% fat and the other is 9% fat. The twin with the lower body fat will have a high metabolic rate at rest because he has far more lean tissue. Lean muscle tissue is the most metabolically active substance in the body, so just by being leaner you are using up more calories just lying in bed being alive. Improving lean muscle tissue, staying healthy and eating at regular intervals will increase your RMR.
Exercise and EPOC - Unless we are blessed with the latest exercise physiology lab equipment, it will be difficult to measure excess post exercise oxygen consumption. This will be explained in more detail during the training section but resistance training burns calories during your workout and after the workout. Steady state aerobic training burns calories just during the workout.
Set point - Everyone has a set point and just as you have no control over how tall you are, or what colour your eyes and hair, you also have no control over what your set point will be. Your body is biologically and genetically determined to weigh within a certain weight range.
When you go below your body's natural set point, your metabolism will react and start to slow down in order to try to conserve energy. Your body will start to sense it's in a state of semi-starvation and will try to use the few calories it receives more effectively. You may start to sleep more, your body temperature will drop, which is why you hear so many anorexics complaining of being so cold, and after too much weight loss many women experience the loss of their menstrual cycle. Basically their reproductive system shuts down because their bodies probably could not handle a pregnancy. Many people who are dieting also experience uncontrollable urges to binge. That is because your body is telling you that it needs more food than you are providing for it to function properly.
How often you eat – When you get into similar eating routines your body will get used to your habits of when nutrition is coming into the body. If you eat erratically or with little frequency your body will become more efficient at storing fat.
What you eat – 3000 calories from superb high quality foods will give your body excellent nutrition. 3000 calories from crap will take energy away from your body. It’s as simple as that.
Hormones – are the absolute key to fat loss control, and remember you can lose weight whilst getting fatter!!
If it was as simple as consuming 250 calories per day less than what you burn in order to lose a pound of body fat...people who did this for an extended period of time would disappear altogether!!
Body fat percentages explained
So what is 'too fat' then? Now forget the nonsense about Body Mass Index, if you want to read about that go elsewhere, suffice to say some of the healthiest people I have known would be considered obese on the BMI chart due to their lean muscle tissue weight. This article is about body fat pure and simple. Again it depends on whom you ask, the American College of Sports Medicine or Charles Poliquin, as to what is the ideal level of body fat. It’s usually accepted that for males, about 20-40 years old anywhere between 8% and 19% is healthy, and for females of the same age range 21-33%. The ACSM table (see link if you like to dig a bit deeper) is a bit more complex to understand through its use of percentile ranges but generally it is saying the same thing :- see it here
Do I agree that a female with 16% body fat has too little fat then? It’s all individually based but yes you can have too little body fat and a common issue with females in particular is that the menstrual cycle will stop if the body fat is too low. Nature is simply saying here that you are not healthy enough to have a baby. Some male bodybuilders can get down to less than 4% and there are claims that Bruce Lee died with a body fat at 2%. I like the American Council of Exercises table range (http://www.healthchecksystems.com/bodyfat.htm) for a decent guide.
I like this because it shows that some fat is essential. If it goes too low you will get hormonal issues and organ failure. If you have no fat you are dead, simple as that. Fat helps build brain matter and cell walls. Now you understand essential fatty acids, omega 3s, fish and all that…? It’s the fat that works wonders for you.
Let’s be honest now though. You are reading this not for a lecture on fat or because your fat is too low, you simply want to lose some or even become “ripped”. Ok then, the master of understanding fat loss, Mr Poliquin, states that if you are over 10% body fat as a man, or over 15-20 % body fat for a woman, then you are fat! Now don't get all offended and start hurling us abuse, It's a bit of tough love that's all. If you want peak health, ripped solid muscles, or a sexy lean-toned, shapely appearance with long sculpted muscles (I hope only the ladies were nodding at that last one), then these are the ranges. If you’re close, but not quite there, tough luck. You’re slicker than the average, but you’ve got work to do.
No doubt lots of abuse will follow but that’s what the great man says and hand on heart that’s also what I believe we should all be aiming for, regarding optimal health and fitness.
Nutrition and Fat Loss
Give up the grains and sugar
The first thing I would advise would be to limit your sugar and grain intake considerably, if not completely. Generally, anything sweet leads to spikes in blood sugar causing the relentless release of insulin that make your body store the excess sugar as storage fat. It’s way more complicated than this but that’s it in a nutshell. Keeping your blood sugar level even is key to fat loss. Stay away from sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup especially. That stuff is deadly and will make you fat. If you feel deprived without sweetness to your food, bear with it. You will get mad cravings after 4 days or so when the little parasites within your gut will be going crazy. Let them go crazy and kill them off. After 8 days you will be feeling superb. But beware, sugar is everywhere. It’s in all processed foods, drinks, meats and even cigarettes. It also has sneaky names but if you find the suffix “ose” anywhere on the label just regard it as sugar. I wouldn’t recommend any sweetener product, perhaps only natural green Stevia but the jury is still out on that and it’s illegal to buy in the U.K.! Beware Agarve Nectar due to the very high fructose levels.
I would even go as far as to follow the advice by Charles Poliquin to try to keep your carbs initially to 50 grams or less. Try this for two weeks then have a cheat day eating whatever you want, then return to the ultra low carb. diet and every 4th or 5th day have a cheat day. Approximately 75% of people are carb. intolerant and it is the grains that are making them fat. Initially eat only fish, meat, eggs, cheese and veg. Have a big breakfast with meats and nuts ideally rotating the protein source every day and have 5-7 gradually smaller meals throughout the day. Sounds a lot? This will rev you up into a fat burning machine like no other. Keep the food as 'clean' as possible, i.e. organic from a local supplier if possible. As you lean out, add high antioxidant-rich fruits like berries into the diet. Over time you can add everything back in, but lastly grains, and see how your body adapts. You will lose body fat on the way but you also need to get your body to absorb the nutrition and assimilate it effectively. Am I saying this is a healthy diet? Well yes, compared to what most of you are eating, especially if the food is clean. I keep mentioning clean food because if the food has toxins, they will end up stored in fat. However, I’m a firm believer in specific nutrition for individual people.
Before you look at the advantages and disadvantages, as Jonny Bowden would say, you need to approach your fat loss system like you should approach relationships: with daily attention… nurturing, support, crisis management, intervention, focus, consciousness, and mindfulness... It requires good negotiation skills. All the things we don't tend to have when it comes to food.
Advantages to a low-carb approach? It promotes muscle gains while reducing fat stores.
For 75% of the population Poliquin strongly believes that if you want to gain lean body mass while losing fat, the low-carb approach will do it better than anything. Insulin sensitivity tends to improve on low-carb. diets and fat loss is more sustained with this approach.
An indigenous Quetchas Indian who has done well over millennia on a near vegetarian diet may struggle with this huge intake of meat so if that is your background then consider something else. However, it is safe to say that you will no doubt lose some body fat on this diet, and it’s healthily too; but the body always needs variety in everything so find out what works well for you and do that in time, but try this eating plan to lose fat initially. If you don’t lose fat, then listen to your body and try something else.
Water
As I will mention later, water is key for digestion but this barely scratches the surface. As you are mostly just a big blob of water which controls billions of physiological functions in your body, imagine what happens to these functions when you are de-hydrated? Simply, you do not work as well. Digestion won’t be as good, hormones won’t be as good, performance won’t be as good, recovery won’t be as good, sleep won’t be as good, sex won’t be as good and I could go on and on. Drink your body weight in Kilograms multiplied by 0.033 to give you an estimation in litres of how much water you should be drinking. This is of course a base. When it’s very hot or you are training you will need more. Weigh yourself with accurate scales before and after training. If you’ve hydrated yourself properly throughout the workout your weight will stay the same. A tip is to sip on room temperature water during your training. Very cold water will take time to be absorbed and causes your gut to “shiver” as it heats the water up to body temperature. This can be detrimental to your training as your stabilizer mechanisms can be compromised. So drink water and plenty of it, sipping constantly throughout the day and throughout your training.
Alcohol
In the UK, as men we are conditioned mentally that we should drink. Sometimes it’s a sign of manliness how much we can drink. You are entitled to your own opinion but it’s a sign of how conditioned you are to alcohol and how much Alcohol Dehydrogenase you produce. Asians tend to produce little and thus get drunk very quickly. Is Bruce Lee less manly? Alcohol is a poison for your body full stop. All the stuff about red wine etc. being good for you is generally due to the antioxidants being produced by the grapes but alcohol is pure poison. It is a nightmare for your gut and the fastest thing in the world for causing a blood sugar crash, thus a mass insulin release.
Alcohol is used as a “carrier” agent in many hospitals because it bypasses the gut and absorbs into your blood very quickly. This is why you get a huge hunger crash at the end of the night on alcohol and eat that kebab in two minutes flat. It also ruins your digestion due to the damaging affects on your gut lining, never mind what your poor liver has to deal with. However, there is research in Russia and China that shows moderate consumption can reduce heart disease! If you must drink, be wise, don’t binge and have plenty of water with your pints. I know it might seem less manly when you order a pint of water in between each pint, but see who is more manly next time in the gym. And see what the girls prefer… a beer belly or a body fat less than 9%?
There is also plenty of research in mice (and replicated with Irish alcoholics!!) to suggest that when properly supplemented with high quality Omega 3s, they lose their addiction to alcohol. So if you really feel you cannot cut the alcohol then try some Omega 3 supplementation and see if this helps reduce the cravings.
Eat the veg. All of it!!!!
Secondly, simply eat more vegetables – lots more vegetables. That simple trick alone will help you burn fat. You might also consider gorging on the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage, as there seems to be an epidemic of "man boobs" in the UK. These vegetables are strongly anti-estrogenic, and including them in your diet could go a long way in eliminating this unsightly and decidedly embarrassing problem.
Sort your Digestion
Sadly most of us have weak digestive abilities. The stresses and strains of modern life, the shit we eat, and lack of movement affect our digestive capabilities. Often people have low levels of Hcl, stomach acid. Basically it doesn’t matter how good your diet is or your supplementation is, if you can’t assimilate and digest the nutrients it’s a waste. People can lose body fat or even increase lean muscle simply by adding some high quality digestive enzymes into their diet.
Another little tip by Dr. Batmanghelidj, from his superb book, 'Your Bodies Many Cries for Water' is that drinking water whilst eating can dilute your digestive juices making them less effective. Drinking about 20 minutes before and after eating is advised for better digestion. Paul Chek speaks of adding a pinch of high quality sea salt to each 500ml of water to replace any lost nutrition from the water. If you refuse to supplement, William Walcott (author of 'The Metabolic Typing Diet') advises that cultured foods, like Sauerkraut and the amazing Kefir (which is more popular in the UK thanks to the Polish influx) are ways to help aid digestive capabilities. I certainly don’t rate Yakult or Activa due to the high sugar content and lack of bacteria numbers and variety. Also the majority of your immune system is in your gut. If your immune system is weak, it’s harder to gain lean muscle mass and easier to put on fat. I’m spending this amount of time on digestion because it is essential with fat loss long term.
Supplement
To quote from Charles Poliquin again:- Omega 3 Fatty Acids from pharmaceutical grade fish oils are the most valuable supplement you can take. The subject should take 15g/day for two weeks if deficient, then reduce the dosage to 5g/day indefinitely after that. Fish oils will help burn fat and prevent fat gain. They improve serotonin levels (mood), make it easier to move nutrients in and out of cell walls, reduce joint inflammation, decrease the amount of sugar your body will absorb, improve blood pressure and decrease insulin output when taken with a meal. For more information, see links: here and here
You should take it throughout the day and rotate your source of EFAs every 10 days. Krill Oil is the best source as it also eliminates PMS and you don’t need high doses of this type of oil. I might add here that Charles doesn’t use Krill oil anymore as he believes it interferes with Canadian water's food chain supply and ecosystem, but that is a bit off topic!
At a Dr. John Bernardi lecture I attended once, he made a claim that by simply adding 4 capsules of quality fish oils a day, the effect of the base metabolic rate will be the equivalent of burning an extra 400kcals a day! That is with doing nothing different in exercise or lifestyle.
If you are too fat then stay off the carbs as much as you can. Even post workout when it is a great time for some to consume carbs to replace the glycogen, the fat person should be wary. Whey with Glutamine and Glycine would be one way to replenish the glycogen without getting too many carbs.
Training for Fat Loss
As outlined above you have 3 main considerations to bear in mind when training for fat loss.
1) Train to boost lean mass.
2) Do some damage, burn calories, leave your body reeling to recover
3) Get More-Athletic!!!
So lift weights, and do lactic training as well as always working on the quality of your technique and movement.
I touched on this earlier but stay away from steady state cardiovascular workouts. In the long run they will raise cortisol, which I will discuss more in the hormones section but in the long run cortisol can make you store fat.
A tip from that great man again, haha, Charles Poliquin (sorry but he is the fat loss master and I have no shame referencing his articles) is Lactic Acid training. Now this is not for the faint hearted but the title is fat loss, not fat loss for the faint hearted! One of the key hormones for fat loss is growth hormone, again to be discussed later. The aim here is to produce high levels of lactate which in turn will ramp up your growth hormone leading in lower levels of body fat. This is also known as German Body Composition Training. Consider that the typical amount of growth hormone that professional bodybuilders inject each day is actually a smaller amount than that released by the pituitary during lactate training! In fact, if the program is done correctly, GH production is 9 times the normal amount–enough to make an army of dwarves grow tall! For a sample workout from the Master, try this:
12 squats (at 12RM)
Rest 60 seconds
12 chins (at 12RM)
Rest 60 seconds
12 deadlifts (at 12 RM)
Rest 60 seconds
12 dips (at 12 RM)
It looks fairly easy but try it for three circuits and I assure you it is not. The key is getting the resistance spot on so that the 12th squat is an eye popping squat and the same for each exercise.
This is one way, and there are enormous variations, but the simple rules that you will read time and again on this website is to lift weights. Lift weights and lift them heavy. Light weights over 50 reps will not “tone” a muscle. Well to be fair the lower body tends to do well on high repetitions but generally, lift weights that are heavy for you. See my strength article for many ideas and mix this with interval training and remember the variation rule, change your programme every 4 weeks at least. Training hard like this will enable you to burn some serious calories during and after your workout and provide a growth hormone surge to build lean muscle tissue. As mentioned, the more lean muscle tissue you have, the more of a fat burning machine you become. Just remember when you train this hard, you will need to rest hard too.
Mobility training is probably not often discussed during a fat loss article although becoming More-Athletic and mobile will certainly boost your fat burning efforts. You don’t really see many fat athletes in sports that require great mobility like gymnastics, ice skating or even ballet. The simple fact is that the better you become at weight training the more musculature you will need and use. Try some of Gary Cook’s movement screening tests http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne6-eQ103OQ, the Daddy being the overhead squat. Improving your mobility for example to squat better and deeper, will enable you to train harder, lift heavier and simply do more damage down the line, burning more calories, building more muscle and thus losing more fat. Don’t neglect the mobility. See my flexibility article for a series of tips and techniques for improving flexibility.
What you need to know about hormones
The main hormones you need to understand are:
Growth Hormone – Healing and Growing Hormone
Insulin – blood sugar regulation
Cortisol – Fight/flight stress hormone
Leptin – Satiety Hormone
Estrogen –Female sex Hormone
Growth Hormone
The key hormone you want plenty of is Growth Hormone. The more lean muscle tissue you can grow, the more your body will become a fat burning furnace, and you will be burning fat simply trying to maintain your lean muscle tissue and have a wonderfully active Base Metabolism. There are supplements out there that may help with this but two things will blast your growth hormone levels through the roof. Correct training and sleep.
We have already discussed training but sleep is as important, in fact more so. Sleep deserves a whole article for itself but it’s well stated that as it gets dark your body hormonally prepares itself for sleep. During sleep is where your body repairs itself and will build lean muscle tissue. I mentioned in my Biomotor Strength article that ideally you should be asleep between the hours of 10.30pm – 2.30am. This is your body’s time for Physiological Repair. This is when growth hormone will flood your system and do its magic. Between the hours of 2.30am and 6.30am your body goes into a Psychological repair mode. This Psychological repair is prioritised by the body! This means if you constantly go to bed at 1am every night, you may get one hour’s worth of Physiological recovery but once you hit roughly the 2.30am mark your body doesn’t think, “Oh we only had one hour of Physiological recovery, let’s devote more time for this!” The Psychological is always prioritised. The simple point is that if you go to bed very late constantly you are missing out on some serious fat burning potential.
Without going crazy on this as I will write a sleep article in the future, T.S. Wiley in her remarkable book “Lights Out” explains we should be sleeping in a completely darkened room as we don’t realise what complete darkness is these days as we have so much light pollution. She claims a tiny infra red light from your TV is enough to be picked up by your skin receptors and trick your hormones into affecting your sleep pattern. Of course mobile phones or any electrical equipment being nearby are also bad news as, in Wiley’s words, they put your body in a fight or flight state when you should be in rest and repair mode. One final “out there” note on this point is that she blames modern day light bulbs as a major reason for us being fat! The theory is that we evolved through natural light and dark cycles. Your body over millennia realised that long days were summertime, a time of plentiful fruits and food. During this time your body found it easier to store fat as it realised this was essential as a period of winter and scarce food was around the corner. Only in the last 100 years or so have we been able to control light. We are surrounded by light in the evenings and apparently this constant lengthening of light has tricked our bodies in believing we are living in an “eternal summer”. A bit like C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’ but the other way around! As our bodies believe it is summertime, we are in fat storage mode constantly! So when it gets dark, dim the lights and switch off electrical appliances, but most of all sleep!!
Cortisol
This is another interesting hormone. If you store body fat around the middle then blame cortisol according to Charles Poliquin. Identify the stressors causing the cortisol (lack of sleep, crappy diet, love life problems) and deal with this to lower body fat around the middle! Is it really that simple?
Cortisol has a two-fold effect on fat. When the stress first occurs, fat is broken down to supply the body with a rapid source of energy. When we experience something stressful, our brains release a substance known as corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), which puts the body on alert and sends it into "fight or flight" mode. As the body gears up for battle, the pupils dilate, thinking improves, and the lungs take in more oxygen. But something else happens as well: our appetite is suppressed, and the digestive system shuts off temporarily. CRH also triggers the release of the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, which help mobilize carbohydrate and fat for quick energy. When the immediate stress is over, the adrenaline dissipates, but the cortisol lingers to help bring the body back into balance. One of the ways it gets things back to normal is to increase our appetites so we can replace the carbohydrate and fat we should have burned while fleeing or fighting.
It appears all is well and good if you're being chased by lions and you have that burst of adrenaline to mobilise fat. The cortisol then balances it all out and replenishes. If you have persistent high levels of stress, lack of sleep, etc. it seems that you could overbalance on the cortisol side. So chill out, it doesn’t matter!
Always consider things as if you were on your death bed. Sounds morbid but makes a huge difference to your thought process. Think about what would matter then. Will you look back and be annoyed that you didn’t work enough, or that some prick cut you up at a red light? Think about what really matters and only you know that.
To get even heavier on you, Paul Chek mentions something called the Faulty God Model. I won’t go into this in great detail but just to get you thinking about stress again. If you are Christian for example, and you have done things in your life for which you believe you are going to hell, thus burn for eternity in an ocean of flames, well that’s quite stressful. Imagine the cortisol release! Imagine the fat accumulation around the belly!
Leptin
What the hell is leptin? Leptin is a very important hormone and taking control of leptin is one of the most important things that you can do for your health. Leptin is a hormone that is secreted from our white adipose tissue or fat around our buttocks, hips and thighs. It controls our entire nervous system and hormonal system which governs the vast majority of our functions and the state of our health.
Leptin works by communicating with the Hypothalamus which is a small gland in our brain that governs the vast majority of our autonomic functions. This also shows us that the state of our physiological health governs our emotional and mental state. What occurs is that leptin levels rise in response to food being eaten. When leptin reaches a certain level it communicates with the Hypothalamus and instructs it to shut off feeding behavior and increase metabolic rate. This is excellent because in balance leptin will stop us from over eating and ensure our body weight is at a healthy level.
The problem occurs when leptin goes out of balance. This can occur due to stress, digestive issues, or most commonly eating too much sugar and poor quality foods or eating too often. What happens is that when we eat leptin levels still rise but they fail to communicate with the brain. The brain basically builds up what is called leptin resistance. Some of the signals that you may have leptin resistance are:
• Uncontrollable eating after dinner
• Hunger before bed
• Excess fat around your hips and buttocks
• Sweating quickly when doing physical activity
• Low energy after exercise
• Still hungry after eating, even though physically full
A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine reports that daily injections of leptin over one year led to decreased appetite and weight loss. The researchers studied a 9 year old girl with a genetic mutation that prevented her body from producing leptin. Before the study began, she weighed 208 lbs., of which 123 lbs. were body fat. Conventional methods had failed to produce any weight loss. After one year of leptin injections, the girl lost 36 pounds, primarily in body fat.
Basically if you don’t overeat you are unlikely to get fat so you want your leptin hormone to be working optimally. One thing that ensures the release of leptin is reservatol which you may have heard from regarding drinking red wine which contains reservatol.
Insulin
This is known as the hormone of ageing and fat gain. Insulin, as already mentioned, is flooded out when you spike your blood sugar. Long term, the goal should be to improve insulin sensitivity so that you can eat more carbs without disrupting glycemia, lipid profiles, blood pressure etc.
Insulin is the only hormone we have control over. By opposition, endogenous production of reproductive hormones is much more challenging, yet when controlled it can shred up a physique and pack on lean tissue.
My male clients will attest to this: it's rather simple (I did not say "easy") to stay at 6% body fat or less when you manage your insulin wisely. Again, it has to do with the genotype of the individual, but I strongly believe that after six months of an optimum diet and supplement program, carb intake can be increased progressively without any negative impact on health markers. The key is to choose your carbs wisely.
Most of the world population is carb intolerant. Only 25% of the population is carb sensitive. The most important type of carbs to eliminate for carb intolerant individuals are grains, particularly the ones containing gliadin. Clients who are carb intolerant can lose impressive amounts of body fat by adhering to a gluten-free diet. That means eliminating all wheat containing products, even soy sauce.
Dr. Mercola mentions if you are electromagnetically sensitive, a simple test for this is to see how you react at a petrol station. If you are someone who can’t stand the fumes you may struggle with a whole manner of hidden toxins. An experiment Dr. Mercola opened my eyes too which made me laugh somewhat was that electromagnetically sensitive people can have spikes in their blood sugar by being near electrical equipment like laptops and mobile phones. One such test had an electromagnetically sensitive lady on an electric treadmill. After 20 minutes of jogging her blood sugar went up! Apparently due to the electromagnetic pollution of the treadmill!
Estrogen
This being the female hormone is something to get in check for both males and females as it leads to easier body fat storage. Sadly, city living will effect your estrogen level due to high levels of pollution. Get out into the country as much as you can! Plastics, especially foods wrapped in soft plastics will flood your food with Xeno-estrogens which mimic estrogens on your skin receptors. If you have high body fat on your triceps and quads you probably have too high levels of estrogen. Also if you have man breasts this is a sign that your growth hormone may be low (for reasons mentioned above) or that high estrogen levels are counterbalancing this. Non organic meats that are flooded with hormones again can rocket your estrogen levels. Stay away from Soy! It’s also everywhere like sugar and processed salt and will mess up your estrogen levels severely.
And to get even more bizarre Charles Poliquin has stated that belly button piercings can affect your body fat % by up to 5% due to their interference with Acupuncture Meridian lines. Paul Chek mentioned something similar and their ability to affect deep abdominal wall muscle contraction. So much for calories in vs. calories out!
Watch out for the myths!!!!
There are a host of fat loss myths out there doing the rounds. It doesn’t matter how bizarre, unfounded or insane something is, if it is repeated enough we will gobble it up and accept it as fact. Don't fall for any of this....
Myth 1 - EATING TOO MUCH FAT MAKES YOU FAT
We seem to know more about nutrition and diet with gazillions of books and diet gurus out there yet we are possibly the unhealthiest civilisation ever and certainly the fattest of all time. The massive increase in body fat over the last 50 years has happened despite the fact that our dietary fat intake has considerably dropped! Yes you heard that right folks, we are eating a lot less fat than we did 50 and certainly 100 years ago yet we are considerably fatter. I know clients who are fat because they don’t eat enough fat! Forget all the crap you’ve heard about low fat nonsense, I could write a whole article on that alone but if you have any interest in fat then check out Weston A. Price’s book 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration' or Udo Erasmus’s book 'Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill for a whole new understanding on Fat'.
Think about it, Eskimo’s basically lived on the fat stuffs for millenia with disease almost unknown and they are not the only indigenous population to do very well with high fat diets. Before you have a heart attack, the fat you are most consuming is probably highly refined, processed, denatured and no doubt toxic. Your own body fat stores toxins to keep it away from the internal organs, thus toxins are another issue regarding body fat as I will discuss later, but for now I advise you to keep your fat clean. Truly organic (although it’s difficult to tell what is organic these days, unless you are Paul Chek and can dowse the fat!) clean fat through animals and amazing things like coconut oil are great fats for your diet.
Myth 2 - THE FOOD PYRAMID
Another myth is the food pyramid guidelines on how we all should eat. I will cover grains later but simply, as many great minds say, if you want to look like a Pyramid, eat like the food pyramid! Robert H. Lustig MD recently said on the radio that The Food Pyramid was devised by the food industry. I don’t want to start a conspiracy here but work that one out for yourselves!
Myth 3 - A CALORIE IS A CALORIE
Another myth, a calorie is a calorie. There is plenty of research out there to show that on equal calorie intakes people tend to store less body fat on higher protein, higher fat diets, than an exact calorie intake with a higher carbohydrate intake making up the calorie intake. I personally think it’s completely specific on the person but when hormones are discussed later for you scientists this will make more sense, especially when Leptin is discussed. For you simple guys like me, do your own experiment. Find a pair of identical twins, lifestyles, training whatever. Give one 4000kcal a day of organic meats and vegetables and the other 4000kcal a day of refined sugar products. Photo them before and after for a few years and tell me then if all calories are equal.
Myth 4 - DIET - RESTRICT CALORIES
Another gripe is our obsession with calories and the simple fact is, calorie restricted diets do not work long term. This is particularly true with females. In the book 'Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell', Debra Waterhouse makes it very clear that females come equipped with significantly more lipogenic (fat storing) enzymes and significantly less lipolytic (fat releasing) enzymes than their male counterparts. She also cites studies showing that a female's lipogenic enzyme count increases and lipolytic enzyme count decreases after a calorie-restricted diet, making it increasingly harder to lose weight with each and every successive diet!
A man's body doesn't appreciate dieting either. Paul Chek frequently states “I have seen many male back pain patients undergo hospital directed diets, lose 60 pounds, and gain it all back in as little as a month. Coming off a diet to start eating "normally" again is like the tide coming in!”
Myth 5 - SPOT REDUCTION AND EXERCISE SELECTION
The last myth I will discuss I will separate from the rest as I am unsure whether this is a myth or not anymore. A clever personal trainer will gleefully tell you that you cannot spot reduce fat. Working as a trainer within the gym you will frequently be asked “I want to get rid of this bit of fat on the back of my arms/lower tummy/hips etc. etc.” and the clever trainer will say “Your body cannot spot reduce fat”. You reduce body fat as a whole through lifestyle and good training. You can’t look at one area and just lose fat within that area by doing a certain exercise like a crunch for abdominal fat or a tricep dip for the fat on the back of the arms. When doing a tricep dip, the energy you use for the dip could be coming from fat energy on your calf or anywhere! The exercise may help to strengthen or increase lean mass of the muscle but it doesn’t target the fat in that specific area. So far most trainers will be agreeing with me. This is why crunches are close to pointless for losing tummy fat. Isolated abdominal training in general if done correctly will plateau after 6-8 weeks. According the Sir Charles Poliquin the only exercise to help with abdominal strengthening after this point is deadlifts and squats. So ease off the crunches, you are probably just hitting the hit flexors anyway, and learn to squat!
Back to the myth in question though. You cannot spot reduce fat. Clearly genetics plays a big role here. Before the 2006 world cup, The Sun newspaper showed a picture of Wayne Rooney stumbling along a beach with his parents. They all had similar posture and carried body fat in the exact same areas. Some people will have a predisposition to store body fat in certain areas compared to others no question, so choose good parents!
However, there are a multitude of factors involved that tend to be related to diet and hormones. Charles Poliquin has ingeniously designed a course called Biosignature. Skinfold. Body sites are measured at various parts around the body and in a nutshell various sites are linked to various hormonal issues. The sites individually are important as are their relationship with each other.
A biosignature practitioner measured my body fat last month. I was at 9.2%. This was fractionally higher than before. There were many reasons for this but I had relationship problems with my girlfriend that month and was relegated to sleeping on the sofa. I simply got very little sleep over a month. The skinfold site on my kneecap, yes you heard right, was higher in relevance to other parts of my body. The guy looked at me straight away and said I have a growth hormone issue due to a lack of sleep. Who would’ve thought the kneecap fat was so enlightening???
Belly fat is often to do with cortisol, your stress hormone, thus remove the stress and lower the body fat in that particular area. That stress may be financial, nutritional, electromagnetic so the secret is finding out the stressor. Triceps, not surprisingly, are an estrogenic site which in the UK we are all swimming in due to excesses in processed foods, soy products, plastics etc. etc. Poliquin also claims that rubbing Liquorice Root Gel on the belly can aid in lowering belly fat, I believe because of its effect on cortisol. I’ve not tried this so it’s up to you to have a go. So you CAN spot reduce body fat if you have an awareness of how to balance yourself out hormonally. I can’t say anymore on this course as my knowledge is limited, but Biosignature is the course to do in order to understand how to spot reduce body fat.
Bottom line to remember - you cannot spot reduce fat with exercise selection.
Myth 6 - CARDIO ON AN EMPTY STOMACH
Another myth, cardio on an empty stomach for fat loss. I’ve had a look at this and struggle to find the research to back this up. Poliquin has mentioned that it certainly doesn’t make you burn any more fat than any other time but doesn’t make you LOSE more muscle either. The point is that training on an empty stomach is not a magical time to exercise.
Myth 7 -The fat loss zone - low intensity steady state cardio is best for fat loss
Cardiovascular training for fat loss. Well you can certainly lose weight with this type of training. You don’t see any obese elite marathon runners do you. There are many ways to lose weight, getting extremely ill through cancer is one but I wouldn’t advise that either. Compare a sprinter with a marathon runner. Neither is fat, though the sprinter has less fat and a lot more lean muscle tissue. Doing any sort of continual aerobic training would go against their whole training protocol (See my Speed article for reasons why this would slow them down). The research is awash with intense interval training being much better than steady state cardio for fat loss. Since cardiovascular exercise provides very little post-exercise elevation of metabolism, your cells stop burning extra energy when you are done with your run, bike, swim etc. Compare this to a good, solid weight training session where your metabolism keeps nibbling away at that fat for hours.
To see this in action, look at any group of athletes whose predominant exercise consists of resistance training, or short, high intensity sprint work. Sprinters are some of the very leanest athletes in the world. Olympic weight lifters would rather be castrated than go for a run, yet they are predominantly a very lean group. Bodybuilders, by simple observation, are far leaner than those trying to lose fat by aerobics alone.
Weight training and intervals work well to increase your base metabolic rate making it easier for your body to burn off body fat. After a hard weights workout fat is used as energy in a higher percentage compared with any other type of training post workout. Your body will continue to burn calories throughout the day after weight training or intervals compared to just burning calories during the workout for steady state aerobic training.
Taking on a fat loss goal with just steady state low intensity cardio is like going into a fight with a blindfold, no weapon and no muscle. It's not a good idea, it's no fun, plus you will most likely get hurt and you have very narrow chances of victory. Marathon runners are not very fat though, so if you do want to lose fat the difficult way then you need to run for long long distances and several times a week - probably causing plenty of injury and muscle imbalance problems along the way. Yes you can lose some fat with long distance running, but for the majority of us with an hour at most daily to spend, training resistance and intervals is far more productive. If you still want to do it through continual training, lots of frequency and lots of time, maybe over two hours of continual running will be required to deplete your glycogen stores so much that you have to use up some fat! Doesn’t sound too much fun to me!
ROUND UP
If you have got this far you may be thinking that fat loss is way more complex than you suspected. Physiologically it no doubt is complicated but you don’t need to understand every little chemical reaction to lose fat. Get the key things right.
Step One Stop eating crap, and your two main enemies are grains and sugar. If you fancy a simple test, eat nothing but meat and veg (as much as you can handle), and drink water, black coffee and herbal teas for two weeks. Measure your body fat before and after. If it has gone down, which it will for 75% of you, then you are someone who has probably overdosed on the carbs until this point in your life. Becoming more insulin sensitive is the key and you will become more insulin sensitive the leaner you become. I know athletes who have cut out carbs almost entirely for a few months and then could add them slowly back in with little effect on their body fat. You have to earn those carbs! Drink plenty of water.
Step Two Train like a ba*sat£*d, rest like a cu*t (pardon me - train HARD but make sure you recover). Let’s face it you will have to train hard. Get a good training partner, good trainer or motivate yourself properly. Train to produce a response, rest to get that response.
Step Three Limit the stressors in your life. Stress hormones can cause all sorts of problems. Find out what is pissing you off in life: girlfriend, job, money, not enough time for yourself and do something about it. Sorting yourself out emotionally will sort you out hormonally also.
Step Four Supplementing with high quality supplements will help. My number one would be sorting out your digestion with certain digestive enzymes. For fat loss, high quality Omega 3s is essential. Beyond that you may wish to consider grape seed extract for reservatol, glutamine, zinc and magnesium but just as nutrition, supplements are different for everyone. Key though are digestion and Omega 3s.
Now get out there and lose that fat! No excuses, NO MERCY!!!
Paul McCambridge - Paul is no average personal trainer. Find an article, an idea, a course or any other fitness concept and Paul has done it, read it and can tell you all about it. From a degree in Sport Science to studying from the worlds best coaches, Paul is on a constant mission to find out everything he can about how to get stronger, fitter, leaner and healthier. He is also a food detective! If you can't digest, or can't get lean, he wants your blood!.. He will send it to the lab and sort you out. However, he is rumoured to be both a bad loser and a bad guitar player. You can hunt him down on his Facebook page.
