Exercises to Burn Fat

Yesterday was Canada day, a national holiday in Canada celebrated by BBQs, backyard parties and fireworks.

I love Canada day. I even went as far as to turn my Blackberry OFF for the day (which is a HUGE accomplishment for me!)

Even though I was able to turn off my Blackberry, I wasn't able to let go of my most valuable sidekick...my notepad.

Yep, I keep a notepad on me at all times (Moleskin is my brand of choice).

Call me old fashioned, but when ideas spring into my head, nothing makes them more real, more concrete than actually writing them down (typing them out just doesn't do it).

(A perfect combination for a great summer's day)

I took an hour during the day when my little girl was playing in the pool with her grandparents to go through my notebook and read through many of the old notes I have written down this year.

One particular note that stuck out to me was from a lecture I attended for physicians that was headlined by Dr. Stuart Philips from McMaster University.

Amongst my notes I found the following quote scribbled down:

"It is remarkably hard to increase exercise and decrease body weight."

which when translated to normal non-PhD talk means:

"It is really hard to lose weight by simply increasing the amount of exercise that you do."

How true.

Believe it or not, most research trials examining the weight loss caused by very low calories diets, found that adding exercise did little to increase weight loss.

The diets seemed to do all the work.

Take for instance the research conducted by Donnelly et al. that was published in 1991.

69 obese women were put on an extreme 520 Calorie per diet.

These women were then divided into 4 groups

Group 1 did not exercise
Group 2 did endurance exercise for 60 minutes 4 days per week.
Group 3 did strength training 4 days per week
Group 4 did strength training AND endurance exercises 4 days per week

At the end of the 90 days research trial all 4 groups lost a mind blowing amount of bodyweight, averaging over 40 pounds of weight loss!

(Once again proving that anyone who says “It is impossible to lose weight by dramatically reducing your calories.” has absolutely NO IDEA what they are talking about!)

The interesting finding was that there were no differences between the four groups in terms of the amount of weight or body fat that was lost.

This is despite the massive amounts of exercising that group 4 was doing every single week!

This conclusion has been found over and over again in published research.

Donnelly et al. did a second trial that was published in 1993 showing that weight training could increase muscle size while women followed an 800 calorie per day diet, but it could not increase weight or fat loss.

Similar results were found by Kraemer in 1997, Bryner in 1999 and Janssen in 2002, just to name few examples.

The truth is that if you have your diet in order and are following a diet program that allows you to decrease your caloric intake it will cause you to lose weight.

Adding 'calorie burning exercises' does not seem to increase this weight loss, but adding strength training can preserve or even help increase the size of your muscles while you are dieting.

So if you are one of those people who spends countless hours in the gym, pushing themselves as hard as they can but are not seeing results, maybe its time to change your approach.

Eat for fat loss, workout to preserve (or even increase) the size of your muscles.

You can easily accomplish this by following the Eat Stop Eat lifestyle of Flexible Intermittent Fasting and strength training.

If you spend your energy in the right places, weight loss can be easy.

BP

PS- While all of these research papers used extremely low calorie diets and showed impressive weight loss, you absolutely do not need to be this restrictive.

I would never recommend this type of low calorie diet, especially since simply fasting once or twice a week can cause great fat loss, while still allowing you to live a normal live and enjoying great tasting food.

After all, a great diet is all about quality of life while dieting ;)

How to Workout On Eat Stop Eat

There are many personalities in the fitness industry who are promoting the combination of 'fat burning workouts' with 'muscle building' nutrition.

When it comes to improving the way your body looks, I think this a completely backwards approach. Not only do I think it is backwards, but I believe it is highly ineffective.

Here's why:

It is very difficult to lose weight with exercise alone. It doesn't seem to matter if you using long distance running, interval training, high-intensity weight training or any combination of the three.

Despite what people tell you when they are pushing their "ultra fat burning workouts", the simple fact is exercise alone is a very poor stimulus for weight loss. Even if the workouts are metabolically demanding, the effect they have on calorie burning is actually pretty small.

Even the calorie burning that happens after hard workouts is only an extra 8-10 extra Calories per hour, and typically does not last the 24-36 hours that some authors say it does. The research on the benefit of this type of after-exercise metabolism boost is inconclusive at best.

There is also very little proof that any sort of eating style can actually build muscle. Again, I know lots of companies and people who promote certain methods of eating to gain massive amounts of muscle mass, but this just isn't backed by science.

I've been in full research mode now for the last 6 months working on my new book "How much protein?" and let me tell you, I am very disappointed with the lack of evidence that is available for any muscle building diet advice - This even includes ideas as simple as "eat an extra 500 Calories a day to gain muscle". Diet seems to have very little to do with muscle building.

Now, when you put these two concepts together you are in a real messy situation.

You are eating to gain muscle...eating multiple times a day, high protein, a little more calories than 'maintenance' and you are working out to burn fat, doing fancy weight training circuits, combined with cardio intervals, and lots and lots of ab exercises.

Since neither approach is effective, you end up spending a lot of time in the gym, and even more time planning your nutrition and worrying about macro-nutrient ratios and when to take your supplements. despite all of this hard work you still end up seeing very little results.

A much better approach would be to eat for weight loss, and workout to build or maintain muscle.

Research does support the rather simple concept that eating less will cause you lose weight. And that muscle building workouts will preserve muscle mass, even when on very extreme diets, thus ensuring that the weight you lose is from body fat.

This is why Eat Stop Eat involves a combination of fasting and resistance training. It is the combination of the two that leads to optimal fat loss with the least amount of physical or mental work.

So simply, the most ideal way to improve the way your body looks is to-

Eat for weight loss and exercise to build muscle.

It sounds ridiculously simple, but in reality it is very difficult to do. We are constantly bombarded with the latest and greatest new way to burn fat in the gym and it is very easy to get roped into this way of thinking.

The best advice I can give you if you are looking to change the way your body looks is: Keep your workouts simple and geared towards building muscle. Let your diet take care of your fat loss.

To accomplish this you have to follow a couple simple rules:

• Switch from high reps to lower reps (if you have been doing 15-20 rep exercises try increasing the weight and moving to sets of 5-8 reps)
• Remove most isolation exercises from your workout and use total-body multi-muscle movements.
• Get rid of crunches and sit-ups from your workout and spend that time on larger multi-muscle movements.
• Change your workouts frequently
  

And for your diet:

• Find the easiest possible method that allows you to eat less than it takes to maintain your current body weight, and use that method. (I know there are many other diet tips for improving your health, but for weight loss, I feel this is the only one that is truly important)
  

If you are someone who is stuck in the rut of spending hours in the gym every day and trying to eat in a way that supposedly maintains or builds muscle, try switching your approach and see what kind of an amazing difference it can make.

BP

PS- Once you have conquered the mindset of eating for weight loss and exercising for muscle building then adding in additional exercise like intervals or metabolically demanding body weight exercises may speed up the fat burning process, but only if you have the first two steps set into motion.

Does capsaicin burn fat?

I can remember back to my supplement industry days when capsaicin was a big deal. It had a couple studies showing it increased fat burning and more importantly customers would actually 'feel' their fat burner working when it had capsaicin in it.

Unfortunately, this 'feel' was mostly increased gustatory sweating (not your metabolism revving up 2017% higher than normal), and in my personal opinion all the capsaicin in the world isn't going to make you lose weight.

However, capsaicin isn't completely worthless. After all, it's the chemical in chili peppers that makes them "hot". And, from my experience most pungent components of foods such as capsaicin tend to have health benefits.

Lucky for us a company has finally found a great way to use capsaicin in one of their products.

(Lindt Excellence Dark Chocolate with Chili - Pure Awesomeness)

Rich dark chocolate and chili pepper extract. Trust me, it tastes way better then it sounds.


BP


PS- Happy Valentine's Day!