How to reduce fat fast
How to reduce fat fast? It is not as hard as people may think to reduce fat fast on your stomach and expose those 6-pack abs that you crave to see.
Contrary to popular belief, there are only two things we need to look at in order to attain the fantastic body we want: our diet and our exercise routines.
You need to change your diet
Firstly, and most importantly, we need to change our diet.
When we mention the word “diet” here, don’t confuse the it with “eating less”. While it is true that the first three letters of “diet” spell “die”, that does not mean we should be “dying for food”, we just need to eat different foods.
Before we go into which foods we should be consuming to help reduce fat fast, let’s explain why just eating less alone is not a healthy thing to do in the long-term.
Sure, if you eat less you will lose weight, however two things happen in your body that have a detrimental effect on your long-term health. Firstly, your body notices you are eating less food, so it learns to store fat more effectively. Secondly, your energy levels diminish. The food we eat is our bodies fuel, when we eat less we move less.
This is why when people diet by limiting their food intake that they feel tired, lethargic and sometimes irritable – they are quite literally running on empty.
This all has a compounding effect on your body when you start to eat your normal food again. Your body has learned to store fat more effectively, so now you put on weight more quickly, plus it takes a while for your energy levels to rise again, causing an imbalance in your fat/energy levels. This is often why many people, after a period of ‘crash-dieting’, end up bigger than they were before.
In reality, what we need to do is to avoid certain foods, and eat more of the foods which help to reduce fat in our bodies.
Here’s a list of our top 5 diet tips which help to reduce fat fast:
1: Avoid Refined Sugars.
Refined sugars, essentially, are just “dead calories”. That is to say they have a lot of calories in them, yet they give us very little in the way of energy. Well, they do give us energy but it is in the form of a “rush” which quickly gets absorbed into our bodies.
Just 1 teaspoon of sugar in your morning coffee or cup of tea in the morning equates to approximately 16 calories. 3 or 4 hot beverages throughout the day and all of a sudden you are consuming 50-70 calories that are pretty much doing nothing in your system, other than expanding your waistline.
2: Drink LOTS of Water!
Drink lots of water to keep your energy levels topped up. The major organs in your body, primarily the liver, need water to break down nutrients and burn fat. The amount of water we need each day depends on three factors – weight, gender and activity level.
However, calculating how much each person needs is an almost scientific event – there are so many contrasting reports out there on how much water we need on a daily basis. The mean average though, is around 8 glasses a day, although this should be increased if you are exercising more or in hot temperatures.
3: Know Your Good and Bad fats.
It is a myth that eating a low-fat diet is key to losing weight. What is key, is to carefully choose which fats we digest. Not all fats are bad for us, there are good fats and bad fats.
The easiest way to identify which is which is to say saturated and trans fats are bad, unsaturated fats are good. Although this is not true as some types of fatty food (fish are high in both), it nevertheless is a good rule of thumb.
Foods that are high in saturated fats include fatty cuts of meat (beef, lamb, pork), coconut oil, butter, vegetable oil, cheddar cheese, dark chocolate, processed meat and whipped cream.
Limit your intake of these foods and replace them with some on the unsaturated variety instead. Trans fats can be cut down simply by avoiding baked goods and fast foods which both have a high trans fat content.
“Good” fats include olive and peanut oil, avocados, walnuts, fatty fish (salmon, tuna, sardines) and peanut butter.
The key to using the fats we eat in a positive way to help reduce fat fast, is to eat more of the good fats than the bad. If you get the balance right, you will start to see a difference very quickly.
4: Make Your Meat Lean and Mean!
Replacing the fatty cuts of meat like beef, pork and lamb in your diet is not as difficult as you may think. For instance, while rump steak is high in bad fat, sirloin steak is much healthier (and tastier in our opinion).
Ham is better for us than cuts of pork, and a leg of lamb with the fat trimmed is a better option than other cuts. Choosing these meats while eating more chicken, turkey, and fish will drastically improve your diet and help reduce fat fast.
5: Keep Your Dairy Light.
Full fat dairy such as milk, yoghurt and cheese are all full of what they say – fat. They are not high in good fat either, it’s the bad, saturated kind. Switching from full to skimmed milk and choosing low-fat yoghurt and cheese will go a long way to helping your diet reduce fat fast, along with the many other health benefits like lower cholesterol levels as a bonus.
So, now we have a good idea on what food we should, and shouldn’t be eating – it’s time to focus on the other thing that is most important in our quest to reduce fat fast – exercise.
You need to exercise too
Without a doubt the best exercise to reduce fat fast is cardiovascular exercise such as running, walking cycling etc, anything which gets the heart rate pumping to roughly 60-80% of its maximum.
This is what is known as the aerobic heart rate, or “the fat burning zone” – the level at which our bodies burn the most fat calories.
Above 80% and you will start to enter the anaerobic heart rate, which burns more glycogen that is stored in the muscles, but less of the fat calories. Exercising within the fat burning zone also has other advantages.
It is great for beginners because it is a comfortable level and is a lot less prone to injury than those pushing themselves into the anaerobic heart rate zone. Therefore, if your maximum heart rate is 180, you should aim to train at a level which puts your heart rate between 90 and 144 beats per minute.
By simply employing these diet tips along with a regular cardio exercise routine you will be well on your way to reduce fat fast in your body, and on the road to possessing the slim, fit and healthy lifestyle that others only dream about.
