Your Diet Sucks
I don’t care if you’re on the paleo diet, keto diet, slow carb, whatever you want to call it. If you’re eating too many calories, you’re not going to lose fat. In fact if you’re eating too much you’ll probably gain more fat.
When it comes down to this or that, you need to eat less food.
On the opposite end of eating too many calories, is not getting enough calories. A very common mistake is deciding to go on a diet and dropping the calories too low.
Eating too few calories can slow down your bodies metabolism, which makes it much more challenging to get that shredded physique.
It’s not sustainable, and when you go back to a diet that’s something you can adhere to you’re more likely to regain all the fat you lost plus more.
So those 10 lbs you lost on that 800 calorie diet are going to be short lived.
The key is to adjust your caloric intake so you can eat as much as you can while you’re still losing body fat.
Eat a diet full of awesome foods.
You’re Not Training Heavy
If you want to seriously shred the lbs start training heavy.
When you’re cutting calories, and cutting fat, you’re going to inevitably lose some strength as well as muscle mass.
Muscle mass helps keep your metabolic engine high consuming more calories, and helping you lose additional fat.
Strength training, and training heavy will help maintain that muscle mass.
Stick to a training plan that has you lifting heavy, cut the rest periods shorter (within being able to lift safely), or do a form of cardio acceleration during your rest periods to speed up fat loss.
Too Much Cardio
If you’re doing too much cardio it will lead to an overproduction of cortisol (we’ll talk about that in a minute), which will lead directly to even more abdominal fat and other issues.
Next time you’re in the gym look at who is on the cardio equipment, think back a year ago… who was on the cardio equipment? How much of a difference Little to none in most cases.
Now the people walking, or consistently doing the stairmaster at a slow to medium pace, if they started out with a lot of weight to lose, they are probably making some serious headway, and that’s exactly what yo’ure going to do.
Stick to HIIT, and long walks if you want to do cardio that won’t do as much damage to your long term goals.
Stress Management and Hormones
Hormones contribute a great deal to fat loss, right now we’re going to go over cortisol, and leptin. Two of the ones a lot of people know little about, but hear thrown around a lot.
Cortisol and Stress
Hitting on the above point, if your body is producing cortisol you’re probably stressed out.
Cortisol is a glucocorticoid (also known as hydro-cortisone). Your adrenal cortex produces it in response to stress. This can be physical stress, or emotional stress. So lack of sleep, working out, fast paced job, pretty much every thing that’s stressful in any way can lead to a higher cortisol production.
Your body is designed in a way that the cortisol levels should be increased only during the time of the stressor (when the lion is chasing you, or your DVR didn’t record the last episode of Mr.Robot)
The thing is our lives, our society is constantly full of stressors. Your boss texting you, your mother calling you, traffic on the way to the gym, your alarm going off even though your body needs 2 more hours of sleep.
So let’s get down to it.
Awesome if a lion is chasing you, terrible if you’re cat just puked on the floor.
All sciency stuff aside, increased cortisol can lead to increased belly fat.
Find ways to take the stress out of your life, get enough sleep, and have some fun.
Leptin
This hormone is released from fat cells. Leptin interacts with your brain and gets your body to eat less and burn more calories.
If your releasing too much leptin you can become leptin resitant. When this happens your brain won’t receive leptin’s signal.
Increase your leptin sensitivity by eating a ton of berries, and green veggies. Get a full nights rest (re-occuring theme might mean it’s pretty important).
If you’ve been on a deficit for a while have a cheat meal. This can boost your metabolism and up leptin production.
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Never Settle,
Devan