Mistakes Dieters Will Make in the New Year

Most people make the same common mistakes when on a diet!
Just spent a week reading about the latest diet crazes where they all recommend cutting calories or fasting. So I decided to join a slimming club where I saw different people that seemed to be wasting their time and effort. They were allowed to continue to eat certain junk food. This sounded appealing at first but the members of the slimming club didn’t look the way I aspired to look like so I was left confused and worried.

And that's really sad. After all, almost everyone goes on a diet to get a flat stomach, but almost everyone never achieves his or her goals!

In fact, most people make the same common mistakes.

Mistake #1 - Routinely getting weighed

The biggest mistakes a dieter can make is setting their minds to reaching a number on the weighing scales every week or in some crazy cases every day! This repetitive behaviour is heavy on the mind making the participant feel incarcerated. It’s common for them to just focus on numbers without considering health & fitness or the quality of the food they are eating. This behaviour leads to frustration and unnecessary pressure.

Tip: The above system is nothing more than a marketing tool to help sell a diet; it has no benefit whatsoever. Getting weighed regularly doesn’t tell you if you are losing fat or which area of the body is changing shape. The best way to measure progress is using the mirror and/or to take tape measurements around the bum, hips, thigh, waist, chest and arms.

Mistake #2 - Counting calories

Ha! I wish it were as easy as just that. Eating X amount of calories will make you look like so and so. If this was true how come over 90% of dieters never achieve permanent results on calorie controlled diets? I will tell you why, it is because the quality of calories and which food groups these calories come from are missing from the picture. The most valuable piece of information a dieter needs always seems to be conveniently missing so not to upset the recurring revenue stream.

TIP: A basic understanding of food groups needs to be learned for best results, don’t worry because it is simple and quick to learn. There are 3 main food groups, Carbohydrates, Protein and Fat. Once you learn which type of foods comes from each food group it is easy to lose weight and fat. This is because you can begin to use ratios for your meals. The benefits of ratios are to monitor the amounts of carbohydrates you need versus protein to lose weight and fat. Calorie controlled diets fail to recognise this important step, that is why you see overweight people unable to lose weight and fat on low calorie diets.
Most people make the same common mistakes when on a diet!

How To Be a Success with Fat Loss - The Best Transformations don’t Become Slim by Accident

There has to be a reason for wanting to get in shape
All different kinds of success and achievements are born out of a goal. Goals are behind the worlds leading business tycoons and winning sports teams, and without a goal you are playing Russian roulette with your fat loss efforts. Success stories that happen by chance are few and far between. Every one of us needs a plan and needs to follow directions in order to get to where we want to go. This is regardless of whether the goal is for fat loss or other personal reasons.

The best fat loss transformations of the year don’t become slim and lean by accident. It starts with a goal. There’s no doubt that this sounds overwhelming at first to the overweight and out of shape person, but by breaking down the desire to become slim into little achievable goals it is easier to achieve each little step one at a time until the goal is achieved.

All it takes is a goal, not having a goal is one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make when embarking on any kind of diet. You have to be specific in order to get the best value from your time and effort. There has to be a reason for wanting to get in shape and change, the reason is your number one motivational tool that you can continuously refer to and remind yourself where you want to end up. By writing it down you can carry it around with you and use it to your advantage when the going gets tough.

Think about it for a few moments, what do you really want? A six-pack? Better health? Lose overall weight? Look great naked? Lose flabby body fat? Get rid of man boobs? Look younger? Feel fitter? Look more attractive? Feel confident? Live longer?

Whatever you want to achieve and change write it down and don’t forget to state the reasons why you want it. This is a powerful tool that can help you more than you realise. Once you have a goal in front of you all you will need to do is plan the steps required to reach it. Keep the steps as simple as possible or you will be more likely to fail. Remember you don’t need luck on your side because you are in control of what you want and what you get.
There has to be a reason for wanting to get in shape

Achieve Fast Fat Loss Results with Some of These Exercise Tips

How to look your best in the shortest amount of time
Just because you regularly clock in at the gym doesn’t mean you are on the road to fast fat loss results. Marathon type workouts and going at it half-hearted isn’t the way to train to look your best in the shortest amount of time.

It is time to stop guessing and livings in hope of miraculously waking up with a perfect body because it doesn’t work like that. What follows are brief excerpts of some of my favourite training tips guaranteed to carve you a better body with less body fat in less than a fraction of the time you currently spend.

Before embarking on regular exercise it is important to assess which muscles are tight and need stretching. The reason for this is because a tight muscle could compromise the technique of an exercise and over compensates other parts of the body causing overuse problems. Learning proper stretching techniques and investing time in holding the stretches in the areas you can feel stretch when you perform them will benefit your posture and help prevent injuries.

When you exercise you need to train intense but smart. This means training within your capabilities that allows a minimum of a good technique on everything you do. This mainly points to lifting a weight that is too heavy for you. Doing only part of the range of a movement or trying to force more reps than you can manage safely will probably result in quick and poorly performed repetitions. Properly performed reps are real reps; they are more demanding and achieve greater results. Poorly performed reps will take the stress away from the body part making it easier but less effective.

Exercise selection is important if you want fat loss too. Big movements are essential. The multi joint exercises works more muscles and burns more calories, whether if you want to body build, tone or reduce fat the big exercises will get you there quicker. Performed correctly they will also have the best carry over effect to functional ability to help you in work, sports and day to day tasks.

Think of exercises a bit like your diet, the more variety the better. I once learnt in a lecture that an average person eats no more than 12 different kinds of food in a typical week. Do you do the same with exercise selection by doing the same exercises week in and week out? If so, then it is time to shock your system. Train to achieve a response from your workout with the method of rotating your exercises frequently. Keep in mind there are many alternatives to the standard exercises; although you are basically doing the same movement you can change the response by using different tools and methods. You also have less chance of suffering from ‘overuse injuries’ if you regularly rotate your exercises.

To get the best results you will need to move quick between exercises without rushing the reps. The next time you are in the gym take a look around; chances are there are people lifting more weight than they are capable of lifting which will mean poorly performed fast sets of exercises. Now take a note of how long people rest in-between sets, I can bet you that the average time is a few minutes before doing the next set. It surprises me how many people on weight loss and toning programmes do this, they are resting far too long. They are taking the same amount of rest needed to achieve a 3-5-rep max. Decrease the rest time between sets for more intensity in the workout, it is normally the first variable I introduce in a programme to increase the overall intensity.

If you can’t make it to the gym don’t worry because you can achieve fat loss without any gym equipment. Have you noticed the physiques of gymnasts? You will never see overweight or out of shape gymnast, that’s because training against gravity is one of the best things you can do to look your best. The feedback I get from clients after doing bodyweight exercises is always that they are surprised how hard they are and how much effort is needed to perform them. Make sure to include gravity-based body weight exercises in your fat loss workout.
How to look your best in the shortest amount of time

Food Versus Food Supplements in the Quest to Build Muscle & Burn Fat

The good and the bad calories for Bodybuilding and Fat Loss
There’s a fine line between dieting for weight loss and building a good physique. Some bodybuilders have reverse anorexia and will compromise the quality of food just to get their desired daily calorie intake in the hope it will pack on the muscle. It’s not that easy and is one of the many misconceptions that dominate the thinking of a typical bodybuilder, especially the beginner bodybuilder.

Calories are not just calories; there are bad calories and good calories and even the good calories need to be properly balanced for best results. The same diet can have an effect on different people in different ways. Each and every one of us is unique in the ability to digest and assimilate nutrients; our individual genetic make up determines this.

Bodybuilding magazines are guilty of publishing diets with the inclusion of food supplements for building muscle and stripping the fat. Sometimes you have to look hard to see food on the list because there are so many recommended shakes and tablets for this and that. Nutrients from natural food always take a back seat with the recommendations you see in these mainstream magazines.

The bodybuilding-publishing world gets the reader to believe that certain supplements are essential and the most important aspect of a bodybuilder’s daily nutritional intake. These days there are food supplements crafted to any goal. It’s not hard to realise there is a hidden agenda to these magazines; they are all trying to sell something. If the magazine isn’t financially connected to the food supplement company that it recommends you could bet they need the advertising revenue from them to stay afloat.

The quality of nutrition will determine the speed of progress and the amount of results you achieve with bodybuilding. Lifting weights doesn’t and can’t turn a bad food into a good food. It’s impossible to reverse the effects of a bad diet with exercise. It is also impossible to cancel out the bad effects from poor nutrition by using food supplements.

Food supplements are designed to supplement the diet and not take over it. A few of the top brands can be beneficial for convenience and nothing much more. A closer look at these supplements and you would find a list of cheap processed ingredients mixed with artificial sweeteners. My recommendation is no more than 10% of your daily diet should be from food supplements. Food from organic and free-range sources is far more superior then powdered and tablet concoctions for building muscle and fat loss.
The good and the bad calories for Bodybuilding and Fat Loss

Burn Fat Like a Stone Age Man

Dramatically Reduce Body Fat
Have you seen the film Castaway starring Tom Hanks? This isn’t a film review but rather a review of how we live our lives today compared to our primitive ancestors. On the film Castaway the character played by Tom Hanks ends up stranded on a remote island for four years, having no choice but to fend for himself for survival just like a Stone Age man.

He didn’t sit around all day waiting to get fat, he was forced into doing exercise by needing to hunt for food for survival. There was no processed food, no soft drinks or limitless calories on hand. He was forced to work his body the way it was designed to by pulling, pushing, bending, twisting, squatting, lunging, throwing and even climbing his way through a typical day so he could hunt food and eat to stay alive.

This tells us a few things about our modern day existence.

1. We don’t need to do any form of exercise in order to make it through a typical day.
2. We have unlimited supplies of calories at our disposal without needing to exert our bodies for them.
3. The food choices we have are not all from nature.
4. The most convenient foods we eat today and over consume are man made. These contain added artificial concoctions, which are almost impossible to pronounce.

Compared to our ancestors we move less, eat more, have higher stress levels and eat poorer quality foods. The majority of us do very little exercise daily, sedentary lifestyles take over our day to day existence leaving our bodies under worked and over fed with the wrong fuels. Put all this together and you have an obesity problem.

Taking a leaf out of a castaway like Tom Hanks would dramatically reduce body fat in no time at all. Doing a little daily exercise and eating natural food is the quickest way to a six-pack and reduced fat on the body. But above all it is a healthier way to live your life.
Dramatically Reduce Body Fat

Important Advice if You Are Trying to Get Rid of Fat, Want a Six-Pack & Firm Muscles

How to eat to reduce fat
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day for fat loss and weight loss. You should never miss this essential feeding time slot if you want to get rid of man boobs and achieve a six-pack or improve muscle tone or build lean body mass. It is equally as important for dieters as it is for the above goals; especially women who want to reduce fat from the belly and arms.

Breakfast means to break the fast from the nights sleep, why is this important? During sleep the metabolism (the rate the body burns calories) slows down because of the lack of demand needed for calories. The worst thing you can do is to prolong the fasting and keep the metabolism running slow (the rate the body burns calories) by skipping breakfast. If you do this what chance do you have achieving fat loss results?

Proven by research
Research after research has proven time and time again that eating breakfast will help achieve more fat loss and weight loss for dieters, but it doesn’t stop there. The sooner you feed the muscles with quality nutrients the better, you need regular feeds to fuel and maintain as much lean body mass as possible to help keep the metabolism fire burning.

Why is this important?
Muscle has a greater calorie demand than body fat. Skipping breakfast will teach your body to store fat and rob fuel from the muscles causing them to break down and lower the rate your body burns calories. Some women get scared with any mention of muscle or maintaining muscle mass through eating smart and resistance training because of the misconceptions attached to it. It is easily achievable to get very strong and eat loads of clean calories and still lose fat if done correctly.

Setting your appetite
What if you haven’t got an appetite first thing on a morning? Don’t worry, I teach my clients to break it down if this is the case. You could start with setting your first goal so you eat breakfast before 10am every morning. Then during the weeks ahead try and bring the time closer to a more convenient time soon after rising.

"You should aim to get 25% of your daily calories at breakfast"

It may seem like a lot at first but it is the best and only way to jump-start the metabolism for quicker fat loss results.
How to eat to reduce fat

Why You Must Avoid Low Calorie Diets

Answers for Fat Loss
Did you know you have to eat to lose weight? You need calories to burn calories or your metabolism will slow down (metabolism is the rate your body burns calories). Following are consequences associated with skipping meals and not eating enough calories.

1. You don’t learn anything from dieting. All you learn is how to imprison yourself for months and even years. Nutrition is a lifestyle that needs to be taught so it can be applied for a lifetime!
2. You increase the number of fat storing enzymes each time you diet.
3. You decrease the number of fat burning enzymes each time you diet and create an increase in the size of fat cells.
4. You decrease lean body mass and basal metabolic rate. Each diet makes it harder to restore normal basal metabolic rate.
5. You create insulin and blood sugar handling problems, which most of the time creates fat storage and hypoglycemic symptoms = cravings!
6. With dieting which is a stress, more cortisol is released. When cortisol goes up, insulin goes up to protect the body. Both of these are converted to glucose and into fat = fat storing hormones.
7. Most people decrease the amount of good fat when dieting. Fat deficiency causes fat cravings, the kinds of fat you find in junk food.

The 7 reasons above are pretty scary. You can’t influence Mother Nature, in other words no matter how hard you try to drop a dress size or transform the way you look you can’t do it by reducing calories because evolution didn’t build us this way.

Low calorie diets also cause many people to be MAL-nourished, even obese people. If you are MAL-nourished how can you expect to be healthy and look good?

Even when on low calorie diets!

Another tip! If you live on processed foods it can cause toxic overload for the liver and make it difficult if not impossible to digest essential nutrients.

It is essential to detox and eliminate processed foods from your diet. The body needs nutrients from a cross section of natural foods to be healthy and work at an optimum level.

Once your body begins to assimilate nutrients you need less food because the body is sending signals telling your brain that you are satisfied.

Failing this will cause you to get hungry even whilst eating large amounts. If you get hungry you eat even more, if you eat more food you won’t lose weight and reduce fat from the places you want.

This is a brief insight into how the body responds to low calorie diets. Low calorie diets are usually a dieter’s first choice at combating the excess fat. A basic understanding about hormones and the eating habits associated with this kind of diet is enough to debunk the low calorie approach for future dieting.
Answers for Fat Loss

Easiest & Quickest Weight Loss Solutions – Keep a Food Diary

A Real Quick Weight Loss Solution
The reason for keeping a food diary is to let yourself know what goes in your mouth every day of the week. People adopt unhealthy habits that they become accustomed to and forget how much bad food they actually consume. Its time to be honest with yourself, without keeping a food diary you are likely to miss some vital information about yourself. It may seem like a tedious task but it will only take you a couple of minutes each day at the most.

Doing so will uncover your strengths and weaknesses.

Be patient and fill in your food diary a day at a time. The more accurate it is the more you will get from it.

Carry your food diary around with you everywhere you go for the next seven days and fill it in as you go about your business.

Below are some tips of how to describe how you feel after each meal. The window is from a few minutes to a few hours after each meal.

Different responses
Feel satisfied
Feel full but comfortable
Have renewed energy

If you get any of the above responses and you are progressing with weight loss and reducing fat you are on to a winner.

But on the other hand if you are experiencing any of the descriptions below:

Feel full but still hungry
Have cravings
Feel tired
Feel bloated

You will need to adjust your ratios or eliminate problem foods.

Even if you are progressing with fat loss and your weight is coming down your body obviously is not running at its optimum level.

It is advisable to keep experimenting and see what works best for you. Referring to your food diary for feedback and guidance is the easiest way to tweak your diet for fat loss results and for achieving good health.
A Real Quick Weight Loss Solution