What if you target one goal and achieve another success, which is not only most welcome but where the result exceeds your boldest dreams? I never knew that fat loss can be so easy, well, at least, after having made it a bit easier by adding a few ‘helpers’ to the standard detox program I followed.
To be honest, I was not completely surprised that my recently started detox venture would have weight loss as a side-effect, as I planned it that way. What took me by surprise is how fast the weight loss kicked in right from the start and kept going downwards – with some day-to-day fluctuations – but very consistently, when averaged over a time span of 2 days or more.
My decision to undergo a body cleansing program was triggered by my weight of 90 kg and 27% body fat, which is 5% rsp. 25% above my self-imposed “feeling-well-thresholds.” In the past, I used to submit myself to a fasting week once a year to detox my body, but stopped that practice for more than 6 years now. Realizing that I were objectively (slightly) overweight, I decided to look for a detox program again, which promised to kill two birds with one shot: detox and easy fat loss. And I soon found an interesting looking concept: the Master Cleanse, a widely accepted, reputable detox method. said to work well for many decades.
Yet, what I read about it, didn’t satisfy my scientific nature, which is always asking for objective data in order to prove the validity of claims. So I decided to produce such data myself, when going through my cleansing period of 16 days. My days consisted of (*):
- - 3 preparation days (Pre-diet)
- - 10 dieting days
- - 3 phase-out days (Post-diet)
(*) you are free to change the period!
The Master Cleanse (MC) is not a complicated, but a very strict procedure, which many people struggle to master successfully: nutrition is allowed only in extremely reduced, liquid form with an intake of barely 1000 calories daily. This spells many hungry hours and a clear lack of essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals. No wonder that there are MC antagonists too, who reject it mainly for its most unwanted side-effect – the loss of muscle mass due to its nearly complete lack of proteins during the diet period.
This fact motivated me to modify the MC with the goal of softening these two “weaknesses” by
- - expanding the nutritional variety
- - increasing the protein intake.
without compromising too much the original master cleanse. Those modifications lead to
The Smart Body Cleanse Diary
a freely downloadable 35 page eBook (from subscription on sidebar!), which summarizes in a precise (“scientific”) way my day-by-day experiences with the cleanse and its measured effect on my body.
What benefit will you get from the eBook? Not less than these four:
- - A link to a professionally written Master Cleanse introduction (109 page eBook), where you are introduced into the MC procedure and its benefits in all the details you need to know for a successful cleanse. Definitely my favourite of all intros.
- - A precise documentation of the physical changes in my body during the 16 day cleansing period, which are visualized with numerous charts.
- - My subjective experiences in that time, telling you exactly, what my bad days were, the major hurdles, when they occurred, and how I got over it.
- - All the nutritional additions I introduced in my revised cleansing method to make it easier for myself and everybody else and at the same time to limit the muscle mass loss. It comes in form of my downloadable Nutritional Data File (NDF).
As all my products (Diary & NDF) are yours for free, your investment will be only the (under point 1) mentioned Master Cleanse eBook (27 USD), which comes with a 60 day, unconditional refund guarantee for complete peace of mind.
With zero risk involved, you will not only learn about an unequalled efficient body detox method but get at the same time probably one of the easiest fat loss methods you can find in the market. This is not just one of those bold marketing statements you may have heard many times from the diet industry, as my
- - over 8 kg (17.5 lb) weight loss
- - reduction of BMI from 25.0 to 22.7
- - 5.3% less body fat
, achieved in 16 days, are well documented in numerous charts, therefore leaving no doubt about the effectiveness of the program even to the most sceptic aspirant of a healthier lifestyle.
Seeing is believing (!) – which is especially true in the world of the diet industry’s miracle fat loss promises, which neglect blatantly the universal energy conservation law of physics. My diary, on the other side, proves perfectly the correctness of this law. Convince yourself by reading my diary after subscribing to my “Diet Myths” ecourse!
In our preceding post, we looked at the theory for maximizing fat loss during cardio training. But all knowledge about how the training should be done does not help, if we don’t get going and maintain exercising for weeks, months, or even better – integrating and making it part of our lifestyle from now on, making all fat loss diets unnecessary from then on. So we have to dive into a bit of psychology to overcome the initial resistance to such training, which is so common in all newbies in the field of physical exercising.
Reduce your appetite – reduce your weight
The first matter to evaluate is ourselves. To enter into and stick to a training program, what we need more than anything else is motivation. Without enough motivation, just good will, it won’t take long and we are back on the couch in front of the TV with a box of potatoe chips at arm length. So the question is: is losing a few kilogram of our fat sufficient as motivator or do we need something in addition to overcome laziness and to leave the comfort zone behind?
For some it may, for some not. So there is nothing wrong to increase our chances by finding the sport, which is most suitable for us. In addition, we should right from the start aim at more than just losing a few kg. Ideally, we are getting on the road to implement regular physical exercising into our lifestyle, making easy fat loss diets a thing of the past.
First thing for us is to decide, if we are more a “solo or a team exerciser”. Suitable for the first species are walking, hiking, running, swimming, whereas soccer or any other ball game are classical team sports . A hybrid would be cycling or golf, where you can chose to practice it alone or with others. A wrong choice, when starting, is not such a big deal as one can easily correct it at any time later. Don’t force yourselve to stick with your original choice, if you are unhappy, as it only will get you frustrated, so that you may give up physical activity completely and put all your hopes back into easy fat loss diets.
From my own experience, if you happen not to be a complete loner, you will benefit and enjoy training more in a group. A group puts some pressure on its members to practice, which is specially needed on days, where you lack enthusiasm. When on our own, we will quickly convince ourselves that it might be ok today to skip the training session – some rain drops or dark clouds, a light headache, can be a welcome excuse. It is very easy to become tempted to make the easy fat loss training a bit too easy.
Reduce your appetite – reduce your weight
In order to make a cardio practice a life long habit, most people who succeed – I call myself lucky to be one of those since four decades! – will have adopted two elements, which they consider important for their lifes:
- >>> They want to feel good about themselves and how they look
- >>> They understand that cardio exercises are beneficial for their health and that they gain life quality, which they don’t want to miss anymore
There is a good chance that you will reach that stage after a few weeks or months too, if you expand your thinking beyond supporting your easy fat loss program by cardio exercising only for quicker fat loss reasons. If you can truly relate to one or both of the above listed elements, chances are you will meet your family doctor much more in the supermarket than in his/her practice for years and decades to come.
In order to maximize our fuel burning capacity at rest, our resting metabolism, we will have a closer look at training those muscles, which are only little or not used during cardio exercising. So we will talk about weight training in our next post “Get The Engine Running At High Revs While Sleeping”.
We are going to investigate in this post the benefits of exercising and how one should exercise for maximum fat loss. The following post then will deal with the psychology of exercising, in other words, how to achieve faster our set goal in our “Easy Fat Loss program”. It is one thing to understand the general health benefits of cardio exercising and how it helps in fat loss, it’s another thing to overcome the resistance to “self-torture”, as many of us like to call exercising. “Just do it”, as a sport shoe company tells us, is not enough motivation for the majority.
The benefits of regular cardio training are pretty well-known (but often not taken seriously):
- Strengthening heart and lungs
- Reducing stress
- Reduction in risk of heart disease and various types of cancer
- Relief from depression and anxiety
- Improved bone density (weight bearing sport)
- Increased confidence: looking and feeling better
- More stamina and energy
- Better sleep
- Better sex life (!)
- Ah, yes – nearly forgot: fat (weight) loss!
Obviously, there is a reason why I did put fat loss last in the list. Not because it is the least important but rather to encourage you to read first about all the “additional” benefits you get “free of charge”, while sweating and puffing to your original goal: the easy fat loss.
How should I exercise for maximum fat loss?
Now that we are convinced, there are many reasons to get up from the couch into our running/walking shows or on the bike, we need to know, which way of exercising burns maximum fat, this still being our main motivation – at least at the beginning.
Without being able to enter here into the concepts of exercise physiology, it is the aerobic cardio training (requiring oxygen), which is the only way to burn the unwanted fat, as it is generating the required energy from many types of molecules in the body: glucose, lactic acid, fatty acid, keto acids and many others. Since most people do have a big reserve of energy stored in their body fat (10 kg = 90,000 kcal or more), energy supply from the Aerobic Sytem can last very long. The two other energy resynthesizing systems, Phosphocreatine and Lactid Acid, are both anaerobic (requiring no oxygen), therefore don’t burn fat.
Most of our body fat is stored as subcutaneous fat, under the skin (this makes us look fat). Only a maximum of a few 100 gram is found as intramuscular fat, which is the majority of fat burned locally for energising the muscles during exercise. But it does not last forever, as e.g. a 70 kg non-overweight man has only 160 g of it (equivalent to 1440 kcal).
Exercising is differentiated into low, medium and high intensity training. The equivalent in heart rate in percentage of the maximum HR for each training level is 60 –70%, 70 – 85% and 85 to 100%. HR max is calculated as
HRmax = 205.8 – (0.685 × Age)
Now, regular training will lead to energy production from muscle fat oxydation between 30 and 60% of the required fuel. You will need to train 45 to 60 minutes at least 3 times (better 5 times) weekly at 60 to 70% intensity, where the percentage of fat used as fuel is maximised. Long and slow is the slogan for your Easy Fat Loss program cardio training.
To calculate your target heart HRtarget rate , you can use the following formula, where you must first measure your resting heart rate – best in the morning.
HRtarget = (HRmax – HRrest) × % Intensity/100 + HRrest.
Just be aware that the mentioned fat burning efficency only sets in after about 6 weeks, as the body’s fat burner needs time to settle in.
The choice of exercise is yours – according to liking and specific situation
There is weight bearing – e.g. running, walking – and non-weight bearing cardio training – e.g. cycling, swimming. Weight bearing makes your bones stronger but can become a problem for the joints, especially if you are overweight and/or running downhill, as they are of high impact nature. Elliptical trainers in gyms avoid these problems and have therefore become very popular. Swimming as a non-weight bearing cardio training is the perfect choice for obese people and can support very well their fat loss diet. Below a calories consumption exercise table.
All exercising should be done before meals, because eating will replenish the salt and muscle glycogen lost during training, so that your body gets back into nutritional balance quickly. If you have measured your spent calories during your low intensity training with your HR monitor and want to know how many grams of carbs you need to offset your exercise carbs loss, multiply the calories spent by 0.4 – e.g. 500 kcal x 0.4= 200 g – and ensure you are eating those 200 g of carbs, not more – ideally of low GI type.
No need to do the same with fat, just keep the intake low – remember 1 g fat = 9 Kcal! – so that you will see your body become muscular and less fatty in time. Otherwise you will lose motivation and will may not find the easy fat loss program so easy and helpful at all!
My Top Fat Loss Program
Is the answer to such question not all we need in order to be able to trust at least some of the promises of the mighty fat rsp. weight loss industry? Indeed, if we know the rules governing body fat reduction, we only need to check if the promises of the Easy Fat Loss marketers are in line with those rules. If given, we are entitled to some confidence that we could be on the road to success, when following their program accurately.
Because of innumerable claims from hundreds of weight and easy fat loss companies, regular news from the media and sometimes conflicting publications from the medical community, which clearly only can lead to more confusion of the consumer, I considered it helpful to summarize the acquired and widely accepted knowledge about fat loss principles. We will look for those principles in three categories: diet – cardiovascular exercise – weight training.
Before diving into any details, there is one simple principle, which will always be valid in this diet game, a kind of eternal truth of dieting: if you take in more calories than you expend, then you gain fat, if you expend more calories than you take in, you lose fat.
Diet
The first principle to understand is that not only fat but carbohydrates and protein in our nutrition are converted to fat too. This will take place if excessive glucose cannot be stored any more as glycogen in liver and muscles (carbohydrate metabolism) or when fatty acid is converted from amino acids, which is either oxidized or stored as fat (protein metabolism). All fat in our nutrition is stored if not needed for biological processes or energy production (fat metabolism).
Principle number 2 is that insulin is bad for easy fat loss as it inhibits the release of fatty acid from fat tissue. To avoid insulin spikes, our nutrition should be low in Glycemic Index (GI) or more precise: the Glycemic Load (GL) – the product of GI and grams of carb, divided by 100 – per meal should be less than 20 to keep a high fat burn rate during the day. This is the reason, why five or more meals per day is the superior concept for easy fat loss!
Principle number 3 is simple: fat makes you fatter as it cannot be converted to carbs or protein.
Summarizing all of the above can only lead to the following diet guide line:
* our easy fat loss diet should consist of little fat (>>> 1 g fat has 9 cal, whereas 1 g carb/prot has only 4 cal!)
* be low in calories (> less than consumption during fat loss program, equal consumption in maintenance phase)
* carb rich food can be ok, if low in GI and is combined with exercising to burn the stored muscle glycogen (to prevent fat storage from carbohydrate intake)
* five or more small meals (each <20 GL) daily to maximize the fat burning process.
* food with low calories per weight, which is fibre rich food like whole grain, vegetables, fruits, seafood, and skinless chicken/turkey (>>> see nutrition.data dot com website regarding “Fullness factor”)
Your easy fat loss program should contain three phases:
1. Investigative phase, where you establish your metabolism data, body fat and set your goals regarding fat loss.
2. Fat loss stage, where you run your easy fat loss program until you reach your goal (=target body fat %). This can take from a few weeks to many months depending on your situation.
3. Fat loss maintenance stage, where you can eat more or do less exercising as you don’t need/want to lose more fat. Clearly, from now on you have to balance intake and consumption of calories to keep what you have achieved.
So far, we have dealt with the main principles of dieting, which is the “calories in” section. What needs to be discussed further is the “calories out” part, which is the body’s energy needs for resting and moving, the resting metabolism plus exercising caloric requirements . The question here is: which exercises and how practised are specifically of high fat burning nature? We will tackle this matter in our next post, where we look into the benefits of cardiovascular exercising and weight training to achieve our goal.
In the meantime, you may want to get going with your fat loss program. We had a good look at the available offerings in this market and encourage you to explore the website referred to underneath. This is not only an excellent concept but very trustworthy too, as you can test it for 25 days for just 5 USD and only pay the balance, if you achieved good results.
My Top Fat Loss Program
In our last article, we presented three possible approaches to find a diet, which is suitable for us. Here we are going to have a closer look at approach number one – the “scientific way” – to see, if there is one, which deserves that title and can help us to provide a tailor-made easy fat loss diet for you and me.
To get a feeling for the enormous task, we have set out to master, let’s have a look at a website called “www.dietsinreview.com”, which lists in a very comprehensive manner an impressive and at the same time frightening number of diets, which they categorize as follows (number of diets listed in brackets):
- Calorie counting (44)
- Lifestyle based (165)
- Meal based (116)
- Diets supplements (340)
- Health related (43)
- Children diets (13)
In total 721 diet variations, which are amended by interdisciplinary categories like “Fitness based”, “Meal delivered”, “Food and diet products” and “ebooks”. We leave those out as their content overlaps partially with our bulleted list above and they are not all food/supplement based.
On the same site, we find a software tool with a bold and enticing statement: “Our new diet finder. Find the perfect diet for you“. When making use of this tool, we quickly realize that the selection criteria applied are solely concerning our lifestyle and the tools, we are comfortable with applying, when we are committing to a specific diet for the next weeks or months to come.
But this is only one part of the “perfect diet”, we are on the lookout for. More important I consider the question, if our body will be “transformed” into a healthier and slimmer state by this “perfect diet”. Here we are left on our own – note: 174 of the listed 721 diets are getting a 100% approval rating by dieters!- and without further help from somewhere, your guess is as good as mine, if your answer is “yes” or “no” for any chosen diet. We are indeed forced to follow our intuition and our preferences for certain food or ingredients for a final selection.
In order to find a solution, as a former scientist I would try to find the parameters, which influence/determine the wanted outcome and then set up an empiric equation
Output (fat & weight loss) = f (input) = f (var1, var 2, ….. var n)
, where var 1=actual weight, var 2= fat mass or %, var 3= health problem no 1, …..to var n=……
are all relevant body parameters to be changed/influenced by the diet and it’s recommended/prescribed daily quantities.
If this looks confusing to you, no wonder, as we are dealing here with the complexity of the human body with millions interactions taking place every split second and where the influence of diet ingredients are not known on a molecular level. Therefore, even a layperson understands that our system can never be described by a finite (limited) number of parameters, from which the perfect diet can be formulated. The variety is simply to large from individual to individual and is time dependent.
So where does that finally (not so surprising!) insight leaves us in terms of effective diets? Our list displays 43 diets, which are adressing specific health issues like diabetes, arthritis, breast cancer etc. Those diets contain elements, which are known to influence positively these diseases and therefore certainly can be considered in those cases. On the other hand, if any specific disease is absent, we are left with hundreds of diets to chose from, which all are promising easy fat loss in no time. We only can shortlist those to some extend by our individual lifestyle-preferences criteria.
This automatically brings us to approach two and three of our earlier post – the diet success stories and recommendations, either heard from our family, friends and acquaintances network or from trustworthy reviews. Fair enough, trust in other’s experiences is good but to be in control is better and control here means understanding the diet/fat matter in more depth.
Therefore I will summarize in my next article the available scientific knowledge regarding acquiring and losing fat in our bodies, so that you get a pretty solid basis for making the best possible decision about the route to go – which easy fat loss program to chose. Obviously physical exercising will have to be part of such summary.
