- Burn more calories each day than you consume. Common sense, I know. This doesn’t mean starve yourself. In fact, one of the benefits of exercise is being able to eat more food, without gaining fat. Make sure plenty of the calories you eat come from complex carbohydrates and protein so that you do not lose muscle mass, have sustained energy, and avoid blood-sugar spikes. Muscle mass boosts your basal metabolic rate, allowing you to burn more calories at rest. It is possible to gain weight and still lose fat at the same time, but only if you’re adding muscle mass primarily through weight training, and closely monitoring your diet.
- Divide your daily caloric intake into smaller, more frequent meals/snacks, ideally up to 5 meal times per day. By doing this, again, you keep your metabolism a little more elevated all throughout the day. Also, you will be more likely to use those calories for immediate energy and less likely to store them as fat. Each meal should primarily consist of complex carbs, lean protein and some fat. I know all you Atkins-dieters out there are now disagreeing with me, regarding carb consumption, but diets such as Atkins are very extreme and limit your food choices so much so that you may find that your diet is lacking in variety and consequently, nutrition much of the time. Also, it is a medical fact that putting your body in a state of ketosis is unhealthy and hard on your kidneys. All that being said, if you can be described as being obese, ‘insulin-resistant’, or a borderline type II diabetic, (adult-onset), then Atkins is a perfect diet for you to lose fat fast.
