3 Keys to Getting Lean and Staying Lean

Losing fat in general isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Eat less, move more.

Doesn’t sound too bad, right?

Wrong.

Telling people to eat less and move more is the exact reason so many Americans yo-yo year after year. They starve themselves, run until they pass out, and lose all their weight. Then, 6 months later, they’ve gained more body fat back than they had in the first place.

This has GOT to stop.

To make it stop, we need to approach fat loss differently. We need to not only make a plan to lose fat, but make a plan to keep it off as well.

The key to keeping the fat off is losing the fat in the most sustainable way possible. Let me give you an oversimplification for example. Let’s say Linda want’s to lose 50 pounds. She walks 30 minutes per day and loses the 50 pounds. That is VERY sustainable. After she has lost the weight, she will likely continue walking for 30 minutes per day. If Linda lost the weight eating 500 calories per day, and running for two hours per day, the chances she maintains that after she loses the weight are extremely low. I have a better chance of developing the worlds greatest calves.

It ain’t happening.

Linda needs to lose this weight as sustainably and realistically as possible, and so do you. Here are three keys to getting lean and staying lean.

#1: EAT ENOUGH PROTEIN

Too many people seem to think that higher protein intake is just for meatheads and bodybuilders. Nope. It’s for the rest of us, too. Protein serves so many different functions, but let’s talk about why increasing your protein intake can help you get lean and stay lean.

The major reason protein is important along your journey is because it helps preserve and build lean muscle tissue. Muscle tissue is expensive to maintain. This means that your body will burn lots of calories working to preserve that lean muscle.

More muscle (even a tiny bit more muscle) means more calories burned at rest. The more calories you burn at rest, the easier fat loss is.

This is exactly what I help my clients do. Before most of them work with me, they can’t figure out why they won’t lose fat. Well, the reason they won’t lose fat is because their metabolism is slow. They’re eating 1200 calories per day and are still not losing weight. If that’s not a red flag signaling a slow metabolism, then I don’t know what is.

To improve their metabolism, I have them eat plenty of protein to preserve and build lean muscle.

And as an added bonus, they end up getting that tight and defined look they’ve always wanted.

Unless you’re highly overweight or obese, I recommend getting anywhere from .6-1g of protein per pound of bodyweight. There is individual variance, but I have found that sticking around .8g of protein per pound of body weight works real well for my clients.

#2: LIFT WEIGHTS

Another part of speeding up my clients’ metabolisms is weight lifting. I have preached this 1,000 times over and I will continue to do so. Because it WORKS.

When we lift weights, we send a signal to our body to become stronger and increase lean muscle tissue. This also means that your body will burn more calories throughout the day.

Lifting weights will speed up your metabolism.

The actual muscle tissue that we add to our body doesn’t equate to massive amounts of additional calories burned at rest, but something else is going on when we lift weights.

We don’t quite know what it is yet, but we know that it works.

Take Joy for example. She was a client of mine years back. When she first started working with me, she was lifting but not optimally for the results she wanted. She was maintaining her weight at about 1600 calories. Which isn’t bad, but it didn’t leave her much room to reduce calories if she wanted to get leaner and stay leaner.

So, over the course of 6 months or so, we tweaked her lifting and introduced more protein into her diet. By the end of our time together, she was maintaining her weight at 2800 calories.

What did we tweak with her lifting? Well, we shifted her focus. And this is what I recommend a large majority of you do.

You see, simply lifting weights isn’t going to cut it. I can go to the gym, grab some five-pound dumbbells, and go through the motions, but just because I’m lifting weights doesn’t mean my arms are going to get any bigger.

If I want my arms to change, if I want my body to change, I need to demand it to change based on the exercise I am giving it when I am in the gym.

You need to lift with a different intent. You need to be purposeful. Think about going to the grocery store. If you just need to go to the grocery store, you drive there. You’ve done it hundreds of times. You take the same route and it is almost automatic. You get in your car and next thing you know, you’re there. But what if you want to get to the grocery store in ten minutes, in the middle of rush hour, with road construction? You’re going to be driving with intent, taking backroads, timing lights, etc. Same goes for lifting. You need to use the weights and how you’re lifting them to tell your body to change.

For most people, simply shifting your focus to strength and getting stronger, rather than sweating and getting your heart rate up, will do wonders. Sweating and getting your heart rate up doesn’t really help with getting lean and staying lean sustainably. Would you rather maintain your results lifting three days per week, or running seven days per week?

#3: REDUCE PROCESSED FOOD INTAKE

Hear me out.

Processed food in and of itself doesn’t make you fat. Take a look at the Twinkie professor from Kansas State. The dude ate nothing but a Twinkie every three hours and lost a butt ton of weight. Sure, he lost muscle and he probably didn’t feel well, but the point is that no one food inherently makes you fat.

However, processed foods will make your getting lean and staying lean journey a b*tch. They are engineered to hijack your taste buds and neurological pathways to make you want more and eat more.

You know how it’s really hard to eat a potato chip and not eat another. Almost impossible! Yeah, that isn’t an accident. They intended it to be that way.

Here’s a fun fact for you. There are about 4-5 potatoes in a bag of Lays chips. I don’t know about you, but I could easily down a bag of Lays potato chips. No problem. But eating 4-5 baked potatoes? Forget about it. That ain’t happening.

The point is, whole natural foods help you regulate your hunger and satiety levels. They don’t trick you into wanting more when you don’t need more. They nourish your body and keep you fuller for longer.

Highly processed foods do not. They cause you to crave more and eat more. And to make it worse, they are very calorie dense and lack in quality nutrients.

Does this mean you need to avoid highly processed foods at all costs? Absolutely not. For goodness’ sake, live a little. Eat a cookie.

But, the more processed food you eat, the harder getting lean and staying lean will become.

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.

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7 Ways to Curb Sugar Cravings

It’s late, you’ve had a stressful day.

After you’ve had your dinner, you plop on the couch. Thirty minutes in and you’re thinking about ice cream. This seems to happen every night at the same time. It doesn’t cease.

You wait it out for a couple minutes. The craving just won’t go away so you head to the freezer and pop the lid off on that pint of ice cream.

After grabbing the spoon, you sit back on the couch and take a bite, then another, and another. By the time the 25-minute episode is over, you’ve somehow blown through the whole entire pint.

Your craving got the best of you, and this isn’t the first time it’s happened.

You immediately feel a flood of guilt and shame rise over you and think, “gosh, I need to stop giving into these cravings. But, I just can’t seem to get rid of them.”

Here’s the thing, cravings can be beat, and you can beat yours.

There are seven ways I help my clients curb their cravings, and I hope they help you curb yours, too.

1. Give In, But Don’t Binge

This tip may surprise you.

Sugar cravings themselves aren’t horrible. They’re normal, and it’s ok to give in a bit.

Pay attention. It’s okay to give in, but just a bit.

When it’s not ok is when you let your craving turn into a 1,100 calorie binge through a pint of ice cream. It’s the binging that will keep you from progressing, not so much the craving.

When you get a craving, it’s ok to give in.

Have something around that you can use to healthily give into the craving. They key is having just enough and no more. It’s necessary that you don’t have an unlimited access of crap at home, because once you give in it’s easier to convince yourself that you need more.

When you only have a little bit, it feels like more of a treat that you can truly enjoy. You savor it, because it’s all you’ve got.

Make it hard to go further than a craving. Get rid of all the crap in your house. When you don’t have crap in the house, you’re more likely to choose something healthy to curb your craving. When you don’t have crap in the house, you’re less likely to go off the deep end. Make it harder to satisfy that craving. If you crave and you want to satisfy that craving, you should have to get in your car and drive to get what you want. Make it so you have to go to the gas station and grab one pack of Reese’s. Don’t have a value pack of Reese’s from Costco just sitting in the house.

Have whole food options available to give into as well, like fruit. Have apples, berries, grapes, whatever you like around the house. If you use whole foods like fruit to curb the craving, odds are you may start craving the healthier options over time.

2. Track Your Patterns

Sugar cravings usually come at similar times of the day. This can be due to emotional stress, lack of sleep, or simple boredom.

It’s important to know when the sugar cravings usually come, so you can both have a plan of attack, as well as figure out what the root source of those cravings are.

Grab a journal and track your thoughts and cravings for a couple of weeks. Note what you were doing at the time of the craving. Write down what you’re thinking, what you were doing before that moment, how stressed you are, how your day had been going, etc.

Take note of your environment, surroundings, emotional state, and more so you can create a plan of action for the future as well as address the source of the issue.

For example, if you usually crave sugar on Monday mornings at 10am, it would be good to know that it’s likely because of the stress that comes from your 8am meetings as well as your lack of sleep on Sunday nights.

3. Ditch the Artificial Sweeteners

Sure, artificial sweeteners don’t have any calories, which is why they get all of their praise, but there is much more to nutrition than what our food does to our physical body. It’s just as important to note what our food does to our brain.

When we consume artificial sweeteners, we are likely to crave more sweet things. In addition, we are less likely to feel any resistance to giving into the craving, since the diet Coke “didn’t have any calories anyway.” If you didn’t have that diet Coke in the first place, you may have been less likely to want sugar later on.

4. Reduce Overall Sugar Intake

If you’ve never tracked your food, I highly recommend it. It will give you a bird’s eye view of everything that is going on with your nutrition.

Most people eat too much sugar, but don’t know it because they haven’t every tracked what they put in their mouth.

When we eat too much sugar, we tend to want more, and that’s when the cravings kick in. Our body seems to get to a place where it just wants more of what we’re giving it.

By reducing your sugar intake slowly over time, you may reduce your body’s tendency to want more sugar. This is also a good opportunity to allow your body to want more of the good stuff. Rather than focusing more on eating less and less sugar, focus on eating more and more greens. The more veggies your body gets, the higher the likelihood your body will crave those foods.

5. Get Better Sleep, and Get More of It

When we don’t get enough sleep, our hormone function gets jacked up, which may lead to increased cravings. It’s extremely important to get plenty of high quality sleep for many reasons, curbing cravings being one of them.

Improving your sleep happens by taking time to improve your nightly routine. A couple of hours before bed, turn the lights off in the house and use salt lamps or whatever else you’d like. Avoid electronics as the blue light they emit can decrease melatonin production. You need that melatonin for quality sleep. If you have a show you enjoy and want to watch TV, at least combat the light by wearing blue light blocking glasses.

Your room should be a sleep sanctuary. Black it out, make it cool. We tend to get better sleep in a cool and dark environment. Make sure your body understands it’s time for bed.

The more your body thinks it’s daytime (lights, blue light from phone or tv, warm room), the lower your odds are of getting a good night’s rest.

6. Find Healthy Ways to Manage Your Stress

Stress will wreck you, and will increase your cravings.

Many people choose to handle their stress by mindlessly scrolling on social media, or plopping on the couch for three hours of TV in order to easily escape the world around them. This will help you forget about your stress, but it won’t get rid of it.

Plus, if you’re bored on the couch with built up stress inside you, what do you think you’re gonna do?

Find healthy ways to get rid of your stress. Get together with a friend and talk. Do some yoga, lift, exercise, or go on a walk. Allow your body to get rid of the stress you’re carrying rather than covering it up with a digital bandaid.

Learning healthy ways to deal with stress will help curb those cravings, and may actually reduce them overall especially if you begin to exercise on a regular basis.

7. Eat More Whole Foods and Less Processed Foods

This is the best tip I can give.

Highly processed, hyper palatable foods are designed to hijack our brain and taste buds. It’s no coincidence that we can’t just seem to have one potato chip.

When your diet consists of more highly processed foods, you may be likely to have far more sugar cravings.

Add more whole food into your diet. Whole food is what your body knows. I tell my clients that at least 80% of their diet needs to have had a face, or come from straight from the earth. There should be a minimal amount of change between the food’s initial state and your grocery cart.

Not only is a diet rich in whole foods important, but a diet rich in protein and healthy fats is crucial. Carbs are important, too, but they’re easy to come by. Healthy carbs can help reduce insulin spikes which may lead to less cravings. For example, oats will likely cause less of a spike than gummy bears. When we have hard spikes, we tend to have hard crashes, which can lead to cravings.

Protein and healthy fats can really help with this. Most people underconsume protein, one of the most important nutrients in the world. We need protein to thrive, and it’s important you get a lot of it. It is the most satiating food, so it will help us feel fuller for longer.

Healthy fats take a longer time to digest, and may help keep us from having drastic spikes and crashes in blood sugar. Those healthy fats are also important for proper hormone function, and hormones play a big role in cravings.

Eat less highly processed foods, and more whole foods, with an emphasis on protein and fats, as carbs are naturally easy to come by.

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.

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The Best Nutrition and Training Protocol for Modern Life

Life is different nowadays.

Food is abundant. We can eat whatever we want, whenever we want. Do you feel like eating a whole tray of Oreos? Just take a short drive to the grocery store and bam, they’re yours. Want to get a burger with extra fries, maybe a milkshake, too? Pick from any of 2-5 locations within a 10 minute radius and go nuts. We have easy access to food, and even easier access to highly processed, hyper palatable foods.

Our days are sedentary. We simply don’t have to do as much physical work to get things done and earn a living. We have offices and computers where we can collaborate and create from one place. We have social media, skype, and phones that allow us to communicate with others at the touch of a finger. Life is just easier and lazier than it used to be.

Having easy access to highly processed foods paired up with a sedentary life is a recipe for disaster.

But it seems that life isn’t going to go in the opposite direction, so what are we to do about it?

HOW TO COMBAT MODERN LIFE

Modern life isn’t a bad thing. This is one of, if not, the best time to be alive. Although this is quite a time to be alive, it’s quite a time to be unhealthy and overweight, too. No matter what we do, we have things fighting against our ability to lose weight, keep it off, and maintain a high quality of life. We need to combat those tings, and the way we do it is through nutrition and exercise.

RESISTANCE TRAINING: THE KEY TO A FASTER METABOLISM

The human metabolism is one of the most complex things we have ever tried to understand. What we do know is that our bodies burn calories based on a few different factors.

It takes energy (calories) to digest the foods that we eat.

It takes energy (calories) to live, breathe, and perform involuntary functions that keep us alive.

It takes energy (calories) to move.

Moving is one of the best ways we can burn calories. But if you recall, movement isn’t really happening. Our lives are calling us to be more and more sedentary.

What do we do about it?

Move more and more, right?

Well, yes, and no. Creating more movement in your life is a great first step to fat loss and better health, however we can only add so much movement before we hit a wall. We can only do so many hours on the treadmill per week. We can only walk so many steps in the day. It’s not realistic for us to get to a point where we are on our feet 24/7, and exercising most hours out of the day. We have other things to do, and honestly, no one wants to be exercising for most of the hours in their day. I am in love with fitness, but the sound of living in the gym 7 days per week makes me want to die inside.

We need to do something different.

Calories are burned one of two ways. Automatically, or manually. Automatic calorie burn occurs when we just live our daily lives. Calories are burned from our existence. Manual calorie burn occurs when we create opportunity for additional calorie expenditure. Calories are burned when we exercise, do chores, walk, etc.

We can only do so much manual calorie burn, so we need to find a way to increase automatic calorie burn.

This is where resistance training comes in. Resistance training is the key to increasing your metabolism so more calories can be burned through your existence. After all, we can only do so much manual calorie burn. So why not make fat loss easier by increasing the amount of calories you burn automatically?

People interpret resistance training differently, so I need to be clear on what I’m talking about. When I talk about resistance training, I’m speaking of weight lifting and strength training. This means going to the gym with the goal and intent to get stronger by using heavier weight and usually fewer reps than you’re used to.

No, this does not mean you are adding more weight to your exercises and still performing circuits. No, this does not mean you’re doing 30 squats with five pounds more than you’re used to.

In short, here are good general rules of thumb for resistance training with the intent to speed up your metabolism:

• Follow a traditional weight lifting workout with assigned sets, reps, and rest periods

• Rest periods should be 90 seconds to 2 minutes in between sets

• Sets can range anywhere from 3-6

• 2-8 reps generally bring about the most strength increases.

The above guidelines are general recommendations. Your body will change the most after you introduce whatever it is NOT used to. For example, if you are used to training with 15-20 reps with 30 seconds in between sets, you will likely see improvement when changing to 8-10 reps with 60 seconds in between sets.

The main takeaway here is that you likely need to lift heavier, and rest a bit longer than what you’re used to.

Now, what does "heavy” mean? Lifting heavy means you are using a weight that gets you 1-2 reps short of failure once you reach your assigned rep target. Let’s break that down.

If you have to get 6 reps, you want to be using a weight that allows you to reach 6 reps, knowing you could only do one or two more reps if you had a gun to your head.

Most people don’t fully understand what their body is capable of, because they’ve never tried. Next time you’re in the gym, do your 6 reps. Then do another, then another, then another. Odds are, you’re stronger than you think, and your mindset has been limiting you. Test your strength and push your comfort zones if you want to see change.

There are a few signs that your new resistance training protocol is helping your metabolism. If you are getting progressively stronger, even if its a 5 pound difference on your lifts, you are headed in the right direction. If your appetite is increasing, you are headed in the right direction. If you are gaining lean muscle, you are headed in the right direction. Nine times out of ten, resistance training can increase the amount of calories you burn in the day, making fat loss easier and easier.

More to come on how you can assess your progress.

NUTRITION: HOW TO AID YOUR TRAINING FOR A FASTER METABOLISM

Unfortunately, you can’t just lift weights and see results. Well, you can, but the results won’t be most optimal.

In order to maximize your results and really get your metabolism cranking, you need to use the food you put in your body to enhance the effects of your resistance training program.

If you recall, we can burn calories by digesting and breaking down the food we eat. And good news, there are foods that burn more calories through digestion than others.

Protein makes the body burn the most amount of calories through digestion. Increasing your protein intake is key for building muscle (which will increase your metabolism) and increasing the amount of calories we burn through digestion.

To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time someone was eating enough protein before they came to me for coaching. Protein is one of most underconsumed nutrients. We need to eat more of it, and you need to eat more of it, especially if you want to change your body and health.

It’s recommended you eat .6-1g of protein per pound of body weight. If you are overweight or obese, you should be lower than that. I have found for most of my clients that aren’t overweight or obese, .8g of protein per pound of body weight is the average sweet spot. However, as with other things, there is individual variance. Play around with it and see what your body responds best to.

Aside from the extra calorie burn through digestion, protein is going to be one of the main contributors to building lean muscle tissue that increases your metabolism.

Protein is a must.

Not only do you need protein for a better metabolism and a healthier body, you need to use fats, carbs and additional calories to aid your weight training.

Healthy fats are a must for proper hormone function, and carbs are extremely helpful with performance and recovery.

Other than getting proper nutrients in, it’s likely important to slowly increase the amount of food you’re eating over time.

This is what we talk about in detail in the Eat More, Get Leaner Ebook.

The metabolism can’t increase if food is being restricted. There must be a slight introduction of additional calories week over week.

When I’m helping my clients work on building their metabolisms, we slowly introduce 50-150 calories per week as they begin to get stronger and stronger in the gym. Note: we only do this if they are undereating. There are a lot of factors that play into this, but if you’ve been decreasing your food intake over time, increasing your activity, and you haven’t seen results in some time, odds are you need to increase your intake.

You should have your protein set, and you can add additional healthy fats and carbs into your 50-150 new calories each week.

HOW TO ASSESS PROGRESS

There are many ways you can track your progress throughout this process. I have found one of the best ways is through body composition tests and weekly average weights.

Using the scale isn’t enough because there are many factors that come to play. Sodium, water, and even stress can skew your weight.

Body composition tests will tell you how much lean muscle you have, and how much body fat you have.

I recommend taking one of these every two weeks at the most. Every month works will in my opinion.

As you increase your weights in the gym and very slowly increase your food intake, your goal should be to keep your average weight the same, decrease your body fat, and increase your muscle.

Let’s talk average weights. As I mentioned, taking a weight each morning and using the average to determine progress will help zero out all of the random fluctuations that come with body weight like water, salt, time of the month, stress, and more.

Take your weight first thing in the morning after using the restroom and before eating and drinking. On Sunday, average out your weigh-ins and record that as that week’s weight. As you increase your weight and very slowly increase your food, the goal should be to keep that average weight the same, or +/- two to three pounds. If this happens, it could be a sign that you’re doing exactly what you need to which is increasing muscle and decreasing body fat, thus increasing metabolism. Getting the body composition tests done every so often will help verify if this is really what is happening.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Lift weights with the intent to increase your strength each week. Push your limits

• Your program may include 2-8 reps, 90 seconds to 2 minutes of rest, and 3-6 sets

• Slowly increase your food intake week over week, given your average weight is staying the same. 50-150 calories will suffice.

• Eat .6-1g of protein per pound of body weight. If you’re overweight or obese, you can go a little lower than that.

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.

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Download any of our ebooks or guides for FREE in the “free” tab at the top of the page.