Friday, June 28, 2013

The Problem With Quick Weight Loss Plans

By Russ Howe


Have you ever felt like you can't lose weight on a low calorie diet no matter how much exercise you do in the gym? If so, you are certainly not alone in that situation. In fact, around 80 percent of gym members have hit this point at some stage in the past and don't know how to get around it.

The immediate course of action is to look at what you are doing right now and eliminate the things which are not working.

Most people who reach this point have two very big issues in common:

1. They eat less than 1000 calories per day.

2. They have a tendency to do hours of cardiovascular exercise.

If you see yourself in either of those two situations, there is a very clear reason why you can not achieve the results you are trying to achieve on the gym floor. The combination of overly performing cardiovascular exercise and eating too few calories per day is an absolute show stopper when it comes to curbing your weight loss efforts.

The most commonly made mistake is presuming that starting a diet means ditching all of your favorite foods and replacing them with lettuce. This is definitely not the case. We're in danger of killing off our own progress by essentially chopping our calorie intake so much that we begin pushing our body into starvation mode and locking our ability to burn unwanted fat. When we are taking in too few calories, our body reacts by switching to a defensive strategy in a bid to keep your system functioning as normal. If you are not eating enough you will notice it becomes significantly harder for your to lose fat.

In an attempt to curb your insanely low calorie diet from starving it to death, the body begins to adapt to this low food intake by storing as much as it can and holding on to what it has got. This is why you'll often see girls who spend hours in the gym and live on salads, yet seemingly cannot lose any fat.

On top of this issue, it's usually commonly associated with long steady state aerobic activity - which has been well documented for lean muscle breakdown. This puts you in a lose/lose situation, hanging on to excess body fat while losing lean muscle tissue!

If you have done this in the past, or are doing it right now, you need to change your approach if you are to see any upturn in the results you hope to achieve. Start by dismissing the notion of starving yourself and try to consume a calorie intake of roughly 12 times your goal body weight in pounds. If that is a massive jump from where you are at right now, then simply go up in stages week by week instead of a big sudden jump.

Likewise, your cardio routine needs a nudge in the right direction and that can be attained with the use of high intensity interval training, which will provide you with shorter and more enjoyable sessions as well as a more difficult workout overall. HIIT and weights are proven to be more effective for both burning body fat and building lean muscle tissue.

If you dream of owning a lean, defined physique typical of the type of body you would see on the cover of a fitness magazine or beauty magazine, you need to get your training and your diet in check first. If you can't lose weight on a low calorie diet the trick is to stop doing the things which are already not working for you. Change your approach, eat more food and exercise for less overall time but at a higher intensity level. This will fire up your body's metabolism and improve your fitness massively.




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