5 Tips for Easier Fat Loss

Do a Google search for "how to lose fat." I dare you.

You will find thousands upon thousands of different sources, with tons of different answers. If you took the time to compare and contrast all of those different answers, you'd find tons of similarities, and tons of differences. The problem is...

Since you have other important things to do, I'd like to make your life a bit easier. Below is a list of 5 things you should be doing to lose fat easier. If you turn these items into habits, the fat will stay off easier, too.

LIFT WEIGHTS

Lifting weights is going to be one of the best things you can do for your health and fitness no matter what your goal is. I don't care if your goal is fat loss, muscle building, or getting out of your car without groaning. You should be lifting weights.

When we introduce something to our body, it sends a signal telling our body to adapt. If you perform endurance running, your body will receive a signal telling it to adapt by improving its energy efficiency (your metabolism will slow down). If you perform mobility and stretching consistently, your body will receive a signal telling it to adapt my improving the muscles' ability to lengthen and create stability in those lengthened positions. The same concept applies for resistance training. When you lift weights, you send a signal to your body telling it to gain strength and build muscle. As a result, you will become stronger, and carry more lean tissue. This is beneficial for fat loss for one major reason. Resistance training promotes a faster metabolism, as well as muscle building. Muscle takes a lot of energy to maintain, so your metabolism will increase as a result of your increased muscle mass as well. In short, you'll build a fast metabolism, and as you know, fat loss is much easier with a faster metabolism.

Before I move on, I want to clarify something. When I say building muscle, I specifically mean adding ANY amount of lean muscle to your body. This applies for women wanting to increase tone and definition, as well as men wanting to get jacked. Any sort of increase in lean tissue (even if it's a small increase) will lead to a faster metabolism. You'll also look great, too. So that's nice.

TRACK YOUR FOOD

Tracking your food intake is something I believe EVERYONE should do. It is the best way you can get an extremely good idea of how food affects your internal health as well as fat loss. Tracking gives you an opportunity to know what and how much you're currently intaking, and also allows you to see what tweaks you need to make in order to lose more fat. We've been trained to mindlessly eat since we were kids. You'll be astonished by what you discover when you finally decide to keep a log of your food.

Here's the thing. Fat loss and finances are similar in many ways. If you want to know how to save money, you're going to want to track your spending and create a budget in order to save more money. Similarly, if you want to lose fat, you're going to want to track your eating and create a "budget" in order to burn more energy than you consume in a day. In both scenarios, playing the guessing game is dangerous and will most likely put you in a bigger hole than you're in now. Take responsibility, get determined, and take note of what you do so you can make accurate and beneficial changes.

BOOST YOUR METABOLISM

I briefly discussed this before, but I'll go over it in more detail.

In the context of modern life, speeding up your metabolism is one of the best things you can do. It will make getting lean and staying lean much easier. Why? For starters, we are more sedentary than ever. In addition, food is more readily available than ever before. Simply put, we are moving less and eating more. So, having a faster metabolism will make it easier for you to burn more calories without sacrificing your lifestyle.

Two things you can do to boost your metabolism include eating more food and performing resistance training. If you do things the right way, you'll see your body's ability to burn through calories increase like crazy. While performing your resistance training program, slowly add volume to your workouts once your body begins to adapt. Increases in volume have been proven to enhance strength and muscle mass, which are going to help your metabolism. You can add volume to your training by adding weight, sets, reps, or a combination of the three. While tracking your nutrition, make sure you're eating enough protein, carbs, and fat for your desired outcome. The goal is to maintain your current weight week after week as you eat more food and add volume to your training.

STAY CONSISTENT

This one is simple. If you're consistent, you'll see positive change. If you're inconsistent, you won't. It is better to be 90% consistent consistently than to be 100% consistent inconsistently. Don't stress too much about the BEST workout ever. Don't stress too much about the BEST nutrition protocol ever. Instead, focus on eating well 80% of the time, and getting all your workouts in. Even if that's too much, find ONE simple change in your training and ONE simple change in your nutrition that you can be consistent with. Once those changes have turned into habits, build from there.

HAVE YOUR EYES SET ON THE LONG TERM

Can you lose 20 pounds in two weeks? Yup. But you don't want to go down that road. Short-term, get fit quick routes will lead you to hole that will take years and years to dig yourself out of. If you want to build a lean body and be able to easily maintain it down the road, have your eyes set on the long term. If you want that kind of change, you need to accept the fact that you are going to make a lifestyle change. Lifestyle changes are no joke, and they take time. Once you have your long term goal and you've accepted the fact that you're making a lifestyle change, break things down a bit. Make daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Also, it may be a good idea to create behavior-based short-term goals for your outcome-based goals. Let's say your outcome-based goal is losing 50 pounds of body fat in a healthy way over the course of the next 2 years. Your behavior-based goals can be things like getting all your workouts in, meeting your macronutrient goals each day, and getting your body composition tested every month. Whatever you choose to do, create some behavior change. Outcome-based goals are achieved far more often when there are detailed behavior-based goals to go along with them.

THE TAKEAWAY

If you want to lose fat and keep it off, make sure you implement these five things into your life.

1. Lift weights

2. Track your food

3. Boost your metabolism

4. Stay consistent

5. Have your eyes set on the long term

If you do these things (even on a small scale) and slowly build, you will see great change in your health and fitness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam is a fitness professional, baseball fan, and cookie fanatic based in Fort Collins, Colorado. After hanging up the cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. As an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, he is constantly moved to help people improve in all walks of life. If you’re interested in hiring Adam as your coach, fill out an application here.

Build Muscle or Burn Fat: Which Should Come First?

Over this past week I have been meeting with potential clients at the coffee shop close to my place. It's a great spot to build relationships and have great conversations. During those conversations, I noticed a lot of questions were shared between the various people I was speaking with. One of the most common questions asked was: "If my goal is to build lean muscle tissue, should I try to build muscle first, or lose body fat first?"

My immediate answer is this: It depends. It depends on what your ideal body is, where you're starting, and whether you're male or female. Having said that, I am going to speak for the male readers out there. Don't worry ladies, all of this applies to you as well, just round up 7-8 percentage points when I'm speaking of body fat percentage. 

Now, I want to take the time to explain how you can figure out what to do first on your fitness journey. 

Starting Points

All of our starting points are different. We have different genetics, different body compositions, and different goals. So in order to properly assess the best initial goal, we need to first figure out where we're at with our body composition. Figuring out what goal to attack first is dependent on the individuals starting body fat percentage. For the sake of the topic, I'd like to use 15% body fat as a good place for middle ground. If I'm looking to gain lean muscle tissue, I must first accept that there will most likely be a little extra fat put on during that phase, although It is possible to burn fat and build muscle at the same time, especially when you are just starting an exercise program for the first time. But for those of us out there who have been training for a while, it is an extremely hard goal unless you are counting each and every calorie, which can be hard with busy schedules, kids, travel, "lack of time", etc. 

Once we have accepted that some fat may be added to the pounds on the scale, we can now properly assess the direction we must take. If we start out at a lower body fat percentage (lower than 15%) I would strongly consider building muscle, since we won't get close to that 20% range which is what we want to avoid. Going off of that, we would aim to burn fat first if our body fat was 15% or higher because 20% body fat is not where we want to be if our goal is to be lean and healthy. 

Ultimately, it comes down to knowing what body fat percentage we currently have. There's a question that still stands, though. Why do we need to avoid 20% body fat? Why can't we just get to 20-25% and work our way down? Let me explain.

TAKE CAUTION

As I stated before, 20% body fat is what we want to avoid because it is easier to let yourself go and not worry about the additional fat gained. It's harder to see that fat gain because there isn't any initial muscle tissue to look at anyway. You could be at 30% body fat before you know it. 

LEAN DOESN'T MEAN SMALL OR SKINNY

When I started leaning out for the first time, I was absolutely terrified. I was at my biggest and strongest at that point. I had nearly 240 pounds on me and I felt great about it. I knew I had a decent amount of body fat at the time, but I wasn't concerned, really. As I got leaner and leaner, people kept saying that I was looking bigger, that my muscles looked fuller, and I was more vascular. People told me stories of others looking bigger as they leaned down and I thought it was complete garbage. How could I possibly look leaner if I was losing weight? Muscles. That's why. I began to see the muscles that I had developed over the years and they looked bigger without all of that fat around them. Now that I'm in a stage of maintenance with plenty of food and a lean composition, people are saying I look bigger and leaner than ever. I'm only 212-215 pounds on a 6'2" frame, which isn't anything jaw-dropping. 

Additionally, it's extremely difficult to gauge what we want to gain because we can't actually see what our lean muscle mass actually looks like under all of that fat. If you have 25% body fat, you may want to gain 10 pounds of lean muscle, but I am willing to bet that if you see yourself at 10-15% body fat, you'll be pretty happy with what you're workin' with. 

To conclude, burning fat first is always a good option, unless you're completely new to working out and your body can handle two things at once, or you body fat is low and you can visually see your lean muscle mass. 

If you have any questions like this, please send me an email at adam@poehlmannfitness.com, or send me a message after you "like", and follow me on the socials!

Thanks for reading!