One of the trickiest aspects of losing fat is knowing how to manipulate carbs the RIGHT way in your diet.

And that means that not only do you need to know the right kind of carbs to eat, but you also need to know the right time to eat them.

Last week we talked about the right kind of carbs, so this week I want to talk more about when to eat them – otherwise known as nutrient timing.

Check out the video below where I spill the beans about it all:

So there you go.

If you want to lose fat, you must restrict carbs to ONLY those two times during the day:

• First thing in the morning
• Immediately after a workout

Give this a try in your diet and watch how great the results are.

This is a huge secret to fat loss that very few people know, yet it is devastatingly effective. I hope you enjoy it!

Feel free to leave your comments and questions below.

Take care,

Yudi

P.S. If you enjoyed this blog post, please help spread the word by clicking the Share/Save button below and adding it to your favorite social bookmarking site.

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Everyone knows that you need to cut those refined and processed white carbs out of your die if you want to lose fat.

But one problem that many people have is that they don’t know what foods to eat instead.

If you want to lose fat but you love eating bread, pasta and rice and can’t imagine not having them in your diet then you need to check out this video.

In this video I share:

• What exactly  ‘refined’ carbs are and why they are so bad for you
• A healthier (and tastier) alternative to regular bread that is also packed with protein
• The BEST substitute for white rice (this one’s hard to pronounce though!)
• TWO amazing alternatives for regular pasta (very different from each other but both scrumptious!)
• And more!

Check it right here:

See? Healthy eating can be both easy and delicious!

Next week I plan on sharing some amazing healthy recipes that my wife and I have been trying out lately. As always, my newsletter subscribers will be the first to know about them, so if you want to be notified when I put those posts up the blog then make sure to put your name and email address into the signup box in the top right of this page.

I’d also love to hear your input about what healthy recipes and foods you incorporate into your diet on a regular basis. Leave your tips in the comments below – I can’t wait to read them!

Take care,

Yudi

P.S. If you enjoyed this blog post, please help spread the word by clicking the Share/Save button below and adding it to your favorite social bookmarking site.

Also, if you want to get regular email updates every time I make a new post, as well as getting exclusive access to lots of goodies like ebooks, videos, audios and other bonus material that I send out only to my newsletter subscribers, make sure you put your name and email in the box below:

Are Weight Loss & Fat Loss The Same Thing?

Yesterday, we spoke about weight loss and the various theories that underpin how to do it successfully. However, there was one key point that we neglected to mention – the distinction between losing weight and losing fat.

What? You mean you didn’t know there was a distinction?

Well, there is. And it’s a big one.

Why The Number on The Scale Can Be A Big Fat Lie

The problem that a lot of people experience when it comes to getting in shape is that they focus almost exclusively on losing pounds, not on improving their body by losing fat. Worse yet, they mistakenly think that they’re the same thing.

I’m here to tell you, they’re not.

Looks vs Stats

Let’s get the whole matter straight but defining the two different sides.

Losing pounds involves simply reducing the number that you see on the scale. It means that your body weighs less now than it did yesterday. The reason for this difference in value is ignored, even though it could be coming from many sources. By this measure, if someone lost some toned muscle and retained fat, they would still have lost weight overall on the scale, and so someone looking to lose weight would still consider this change a success.

Losing fat, on the other hand, involves making sure that when your body burns up some its stored excess energy sources, the sources that are used are fat sources and not muscle sources. In practice this could mean that the weight on the scale doesn’t change at all, or perhaps even goes up a little. However, the person will be able to see noticeable results in the mirror and with the tape measure and will look and feel better. According to this approach, scale weight is irrelevant – improving the way you look and feel is all that matters.

Ask Yourself…

Looking at the difference between losing weight and losing fat with the above distinction in mind, which of the two do you think is better? Would you rather weigh less even though you look worse and appear flabbier and softer than ever, or would you rather weight the same or more but look thinner and have a smaller waist?

It’s obvious to anyone with any common sense that fat loss is the goal, not weight loss. If you’re losing inches and getting lean and hard, does scale weight really matter? One word: no.

One Thing You MUST Understand If You Want To Succeed At Getting The Body You’ve Always Desired

One of the first things you need to come to terms with in your quest to lose fat is that in order to do so effectively, you need to build some muscle. This applies to both men and women. Due to the pumped up steroid freaks of the bodybuilding world, many people (women especially) have adopted the attitude that anyone who works out with weights will instantly become a hulking mass of muscle, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Firstly, even if you work out regularly with heavy weights, packing on muscle is not easy to do. Ask any skinny teenager who is desparate to put on some muscle and he’ll tell you – it’s HARD. So it’s nice that many people flatter themselves by thinking it will come easy to them but the truth is that just ain’t gonna happen.

Secondly, you need to realize that Men and women have different physiological and hormonal compositions, and so the same exercises are going to result in very different transformations to their bodies. Additionally, weights are simply a method to stress your body in a way that makes it burn fat and look better. That change results in a nicer looking body, whether you’re a woman or a woman. For men, that change will take shape in the form of a lean, strong, muscular physique. For women, that change will take shape in the form of a lean, toned and sculpted physique.

Think of male and female professional athletes who play the same sport. They train the same way, eat the same way, do the same exercises and movements, but yet they don’t look alike because one of them is a man and one is a woman. Here’s an example: tennis. Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer are both world class players. Do they have the same body? No way!

How To Lose Fat Instead Of Weight

Alright, now that we’ve got you comfortable with the idea of building lean muscle using resistance based weight training, we can go back to discussing how to make sure that you lose fat instead of weight.

Essentially, when you put your body in a caloric deficit, by consuming fewer calories than you burn, your body is going to respond by eating up some of its stored tissue. That tissue can come from one of two sources – either fat or muscle. It’s got to be one of the two (we’re forgetting things like water retention and such for now because they’re beside the point).

Therefore, if you lose muscle, you’re going to still have a bunch of fat left behind. Additionally, since muscle weighs more than fat, what will sometimes happen is that you will actually lose weight, but not look any skinnier or smaller. This is commonly known as the ‘skinny fat’ phenomena, where someone has a generally weedy overall look but still has saggy fat in all the wrong places. If you’ve ever found that you’ve lost weight only to have even more loose skin and flab than ever before, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is a great example of why focusing on losing weight can be counterproductive.

Conversely, if you lose fat, what you’ll be left with is toned, lean muscle instead. In real life, this will take the form of a ‘hard’ body that looks better in the mirror and has lost inches in all the right places. Of course, since muscle weighs more than fat, you may not have actually seen much of a change on the scale, but you’ll look noticeably better to both yourself and others.

So, with that all said, it’s obvious that the key to getting a great body is to focus on losing fat and building muscle. Now, many people will tell you that you can’t do both of these at once but I’m here to tell you that that’s wrong. If you’re eating well and exercising well, you absolutely can improve your body dramatically by both putting on lean muscle and dropping fat at the same time, especially if you’re a beginner.

Losing Fat And Building Muscle: The 4 Step Process

Making this all happen is much simpler than it sounds. All you have to do is follow these easy steps:

1) Maintain a negative energy balance every day so that your body has to tap into its fat stores for energy.

• Eat healthy, calorie light foods like lean proteins and veggies for your meals so that your meals are less calorie dense.
• Move around as much as you can during the day and make sure to get in your micro workouts and regular workouts in order to burn more energy.
• Put these two together and you’ll soon be burning more energy than you’re eating, creating a negative energy balance.

2) Ensure that your diet includes plenty of protein.

• Protein is the building block for lean muscle. In order to build muscle, you need to ensure that you’re getting lean proteins like chicken, fish, eggs and soy at every meal.

3) Use resistance-based exercise to ensure that you build and maintain your lean muscle.

• In order to build and maintain muscle, you have to be using it by doing resistance exercises. These can either be weighted or bodyweight exercises – the key is that you overload your body through putting progressive ‘stress’ on it.
• Resistance training will also ensure that your body maintains its lean muscle and uses your fat stores for energy, instead of the other way around.

4) Use interval training and micro workouts to keep your workouts short and focused on burning fat, not muscle.

• Long workouts, especially traditional cardio workouts can be counterproductive when it comes to building muscle and losing fat. Ditch them and use high intensity interval training and micro workouts instead to make sure that your body burns away stored fat, not muscle.

That’s it! Simply maintaining these good exercise and nutrition habits over the long term will result in losing fat, gaining lean muscle, building a fantastic body and ensuring your health and wellbeing.

Summing it All Up

Well, this blog post has been quite a journey. We skipped from one rant to another, debunking various fitness myths along the way. And we ended up with not only a solid rationale for why eating and exercising right are so important for fat loss, but also with an easy to follow 4 step blueprint that can be followed every single day to ensure that you meet your long term fat loss goals.

Let’s put it all together with a few axioms, shall we?

1) Fat loss and weight loss – definitely NOT the same thing.

2) Losing fat should always be our goal, losing weight is irrelevant.

3) Training with weights and adding lean muscle will make your body look better, whether you’re a man or a woman.

4) Being lean and toned is the goal, NOT being skinny fat.

5) To build muscle and burn fat, you need to eat well and exercise the right way – both of those are inextricably linked. You can’t have one without the other.

Clear? I hope so! As always, if you have any questions or thoughts of your own that you’d like to add, feel free to do so in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this blog post, please help spread the word by clicking the Share/Save button below to add it to your favorite social bookmarking site. Also, if you want to get regular email updates every time I make a new post, as well as getting exclusive access to ebooks, videos, audios and other bonus material that I send out only to my newsletter subscribers, make sure you put your name and email in the box below:

Do I need to count calories to lose weight?

(Photo by Imnop88a)

Every field of study has one or two major seminal arguments that underly the basic philosophy of understanding in that subject.

Biology has the whole ‘nature vs nurture’ debate. Music has the whole ‘learning by feel vs learning by studying theory in depth’ debate. And of course, celebrity culture has the whole ‘Paris Hilton vs Nicole Ritchie’ debate (ok, scratch that last one).

Weight loss is no different, and despite the tremendous advances in the exercise science field over the last decade, there still rages on a heated argument that divides fitness enthusiasts everywhere.

The Simple Formula For Losing Weight

Traditional theory has always been that weight loss is simply a product of one simple formula:

Calories in vs calories out = weight change

Essentially, what this theory states is that if you eat more calories than you burn over the course of a day, you end up with an excess of calories which gets stored by your body as excess weight. Conversely, if you burn more calories than you eat, your body is left with an energy deficit, and so as a result needs to consume some of its fat (or muscle) stores to make up the difference.

What this means in practice is that weight loss is pretty simple. If you want to lose weight, you simply make sure that you burn more calories than you eat on average.

How? Easy! You either eat less food (or healthier food that has less calories) in order to take your calorie intake down, or you increase your level of physical activity and exercise to increase the amount of calories that you burn up. Or, if you’re really savvy, you do both!

That’s ‘Side 1’ of the great debate. Sounds pretty reasonable right?

Is Quality More Important Than Quantity?

Maybe not so much if you think about it from another perspective. ‘Side 2’ proponents believe that this argument is oversimplified and ignores many other important factors in weight loss.

Take, for example, the following scenario: I take 2 people. I tell them both that they must restrict their caloric intake to 1500 calories per day. However, participant A must eat only fruits, vegetables and lean protein to make up that 1500 calories, while participant B must eat only McDonalds hamburgers and fries to make up that 1500 calories. Both participants are undertaking exactly the same workout plan and are burning up the same amount of calories per day. Technically, according to the calories in vs calories out theory, those two people should experience the exact same weight loss or gain while on that nutrition plan. Since calories in vs out are identical in both cases, there should be no difference.

Does that seem right to you? Me neither.

The Great Weight Loss Dilemma

So what’s the answer? How do we reconcile these two differences and find out which factor has the most important determination on weight loss – the amount of calories or the type of calories?

The truth is that as yet, science has not provided us with a cut and dried answer. So, as usual, it’s up to us to use our logic to find the solution that seems most logical. And as is pretty much always the case when you’re dealing with two dogmas in the fat loss world, the answer in my opinion lies somewhere between the two extremes.

Does weight fluctuation depend on calories in vs calories out? You betcha. Does the type of calories that you ingest matter? You betcha.

(In fact, I’d also add that the combination of calories in vs out makes a huge difference on the outcome as well – someone who is losing weight by taking in only 600 calories a day while doing no exercise is VASTLY different to someone who is losing weight by eating 1700 calories a day but burning up 2000 calories a day. But that’s another story for another blog post.)

The way I see it, the basic underpinning argument of calories in vs out just makes sense. It’s hard to argue with the fact that if your body has a surplus of energy it will store it, and if it has a deficit in energy it will lose some of the weight that has previously been stored. But there’s no way that eating hamburgers can ever be equal to eating fruits and veggies when it comes to health and weight loss. Even if you’re eating a reasonable number of calories when on your fast food diet, how is your body going to get the vitamins, nutrients and energy it needs to be able to exercise efficiently? How is your body going to be able to build muscle instead of fat when it is missing the essential lean proteins it needs to do so?

What You Can Learn About Weight Loss From Two Construction Workers, Some Sticky Mud And A Rickety Wall

Here’s an example to illustrate my thinking:

Take 2 construction workers. Give them both the same tools and the same procedure to follow, and ask them to build a 10 foot high wall for you. However, you provide one of them with good quality cement and bricks, and the other with sticky mud and roughly hewn pieces of square rock with which to get the job done.

If both of those workers follow your procedures as instructed, they’ll both get a wall built in the same time and to the same specifications. But the quality of the walls will be vastly different. One of them will be rigid, sturdy and completely solid. The other one will be fragile, filled with holes and gaps, and could probably be easily toppled after a short period of time.

Weight loss is the same. Watching your calories in vs calories out is like adhering to the specifications of the wall. If you follow the guidelines and maintain a negative energy balance then sure, you’ll lose weight (initially, at least). But the quality of your calories, which is analogous to the quality of the materials used to build the wall, is also of critical importance. If you eat terrible food and all of your calories are from empty, junk sources, then the wall that you just built isn’t going to be very sturdy. It may be standing now, sure, but it’ll be so weak that just a little bit of effort will topple it down and crush all of your efforts. Likewise, if you eat poorly, you’re likely to end up lacking the essential nutrients that your body needs, meaning that sooner or later you’ll cave and fall into bad habits again. Or maybe you’ll weigh less, but all of the weight that you’ll lose will be muscle instead of fat, leaving you lighter on the scale but looking saggier and flabbier than ever. Is that really what you want?

So that’s why the answer to the great debate, in my opinion, lies somewhere between the two extremes. And that’s why I believe you should never listen to ‘celebrity’ trainers or diet books that tell you that the way to weight loss is to drastically reduce your calories. There’s a whole lot more to the puzzle than that.

What are your thoughts on the subject? I’d love to hear them, whether you think I’m wrong, right, or somewhere in between. Feel free to leave them in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this blog post, please help spread the word by clicking the Share/Save button below to add it to your favorite social bookmarking site. Also, if you want to get regular email updates every time I make a new post, as well as getting exclusive access to ebooks, videos, audios and other bonus material that I send out only to my newsletter subscribers, make sure you put your name and email in the box below:

A couple days back I wrote about the power of micro workouts and gave you a little taste about what they are and what they can do for you.

However, a lot of people have been asking me to elaborate further and give a bit more insight about micro workouts and how to do them.

So I made this video below to tell you:

• My rationale behind creating the concept of micro workouts
• The 7 different broad types of micro workouts that you can do
• Why they are so effective
• Why you’ll love doing them

Give it a watch and see what you think:

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts or comments.

Are you excited to get started with micro workouts?