6 Ways To Cut Your Last Few Pounds Of Fat
If you’re struggling to burn those last few pounds of unwanted body fat, take a look at these 6 sure-fire strategies that will get you on the top of your game!
We’ve consulted a large pool of scientific data on the subject and discovered the perfect combination of nutritional and training factors for dramatically dropping your fat percentage and achieving that super lean, dry look you’ve been after. It usually took bodybuilders many years to master the skill of eliminating the most stubborn pockets of fat while maintaining their hard-earned muscle mass.
That’s not really surprising, considering that this is a very delicate balancing act that involves providing your body with enough good quality calories and reducing calorie intake exactly as much as needed to encourage burning of the deepest layers of fat. But thanks to advancements in science as well as the growing availability of the collective experience of bodybuilders all over the world, we now know the recipe for achieving this valuable goal.
So if your efforts have been unsuccessful so far, it just means you didn’t have the right tools. But don’t worry, we got you covered on this one. You too can get impossibly shredded with the help of these 6 diet, training and supplementation tips!
#1. Fiber Up Your Diet
The final phase of any fat loss journey is always the hardest one, meaning that you will need to pay even more attention to the size of every bite you take and become absolutely obsessed with your macros. The first thing to address is your dietary fiber consumption.
As you become leaner, the role of fiber in your diet becomes more important than ever. You need to load your meals with fiber-rich foods such as oats, whole grains and specific vegetables. Of course, we’re talking about low-calorie non-starchy veggies that provide plenty of fiber and help keep you full for longer without increasing your waistline – think broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. At the same time, reduce your intake of high calorie starchy vegetables such as potatoes, corn and peas.
This should help you reach the desired deficit easier because you won’t be starving yourself and end up overeating or ruining your health. Basically, you can consume the same amount of food as you did before, but you’ll take in fewer calories. Isn’t fiber fabulous?
To estimate whether a certain carb-rich food is also a good source of fiber, divide total carbs by dietary fiber. The lower the ratio, the more fiber the food item contains. Aim for a ratio of 6:1 or lower.
Additionally, up your intake of spices such as hot peppers and cayenne pepper, as these foods increase thermogenesis, or the production of heat in the body, thus causing higher energy expenditure. Eating spicy foods will ultimately help you lose weight, as long as your diet is based on lean protein and complex, fibrous carbs. The slimming benefits of hot peppers such as habaneros and cayenne come from an ingredient called capsaicin, which has been repeatedly shown to increase energy expenditure via increased fat burning and significantly dampen appetite.
#2. Cut the Carbs, Increase the Protein
To maintain muscle mass, you need to consume a lot of protein – we’re talking about at least 25 grams of it every 3-4 hours. This will prevent catabolism and stimulate protein synthesis and even help you keep building muscle as you lean out. As usual, the most important times of the day for protein intake are the pre- and post-workout meal. Carbs, on the other hand, are the preferred fuel of your body and you need them for energy production and restoring depleted glycogen reserves in your muscles, but they’re not required for muscle growth by themselves. The most important time to load with carbs is after the workout, when they can be used to reduce muscle breakdown and enhance recovery.
In general, when cutting, you need to be pickier about carbs than usual, while increasing your protein consumption. Protein-rich meals will also keep you fuller for longer, so make sure to include an adequate variety of high quality protein sources in your diet, such as lean meats, fish, eggs, diary and nuts. Finally, protein has a thermic effect upward of five times greater than carbohydrates or dietary fat, which means that the body can burn up to 35% of the calories consumed from a protein-rich meal just to absorb it!
So tame your carbs and love your protein – that’s the big “secret” of effective fat loss.
#3. Do Less Efficient Cardio
Here’s the logic: the more difficult your session is, the more energy you spend trying to accomplish the task, which in turn makes your body burn more fat. But when your cardio sessions feel easy and smooth, that’s a clear sign that your body has adapted to the challenge and can complete the exercise without spending a lot of energy. So the better you are at performing certain cardio workouts, the lesser the fat loss benefits.
That’s why you should focus on doing the exercises you’ve been avoiding until now, not the ones you like and are good at. If you like running, jump rope. If you like biking, do burpees instead. This way you’ll improve your body’s efficiency at burning fat. Another great option for faster fat loss is high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which has been repeatedly shown to burn more body fat than steady-state forms of cardio.
However, it’s not recommended to perform HIIT every day, because that will make it harder for your body to recover properly and you may fall into the trap of slow but constant catabolism. A much better option is to alternate between HIIT workouts that will force your body to burn fat and lower-intensity cardio sessions that will allow for proper recovery. For maximum results, try to get the best from both worlds.
#4. Take a Fat Burner
Want the most bang for your buck? Then you need to up the fat burning potential of your workouts by taking a fat-burning supplement that includes highly effective ingredients such as caffeine, green tea extract, synephrine and capsaicin. That being said, you should be aware that there is no size-fits-all approach when it comes to fat burners – you will have to try a couple of different products before deciding what works best for you. Note that caffeine won’t produce optimal results for people who are regular drinkers of coffee and other caffeinated drinks.
Then, after you find the fat burner that works the best for you, keep in mind that your body’s response to it won’t remain the same forever. In time, the body will most probably adapt to the active ingredient and its once potent effect will slowly fade away. That doesn’t mean that the ingredient isn’t working, it just means that your body is smart and has quickly caught up with the change. All you have to do is stop taking the product for a few days, and then reintroduce it.
If it still doesn’t produce the wanted effects, try something else. Oh, and by the way, there isn’t a fat burner in the world that can compensate for a crappy diet. Taking supplements is just a way to intensify your gains even further, while the foundation has to include proper diet choices and an adequate training program.
#5. Lower Your Room Temperature
New research shows that brown fat offers some unique benefits for the human organism. While white fat ups the risk for heart disease, diabetes and other chronic health problems, brown fat has been found to be actually quite healthful since it helps us burn calories and reduce the amount of white fat in all areas of the body.
As it turns out, exposure to lower temperatures increases brown fat activity – for example, one study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation found that men who sat in a 63-degree Fahrenheit room for two hours a day over the course of six weeks burned up to 289 calories more than those who sat in a room with normal indoor temperature!
More specifically, lower temperatures increase the activity of a gene that converts white fat to brown fat, which contributes to a higher resting metabolic rate and speeds up weight loss. In addition, when you get too cold, rather than turning up the heat – perform a few sets of jump squats or burpees to warm up and stimulate white fat burning even further!
#6. Change Your Weight-Training Strategy
No matter what your current weightlifting strategy is, it’s time to replace it with the opposite method. If you prefer lifting heavy weights for low reps, try reducing the weight and increasing the number of sets and reps; and if you’re used to high training volume in the form of high reps and low weights, switch it up and try working with heavier weights for very low reps. Just like with the cardio sessions, the idea is to make your body work as hard as possible to adapt to the new stimulus.
In other words, your body should be less than optimally efficient at performing the exercises, thus spending more energy to complete the tasks. Without doing this, you can’t expect to keep building muscle nor speed up fat loss!
The hardest things are usually also the simplest, so don’t overcomplicate things anymore – these 6 diet tips are all you’ll ever need to get absolutely ripped.
Sounds impossible? Try following them for six weeks and see what happens. You won’t believe the results.