Here in no particular order are 14 tips you can use straight away to help you lose some belly fat. Implement them straight away and you will see results straight away also!
Increase you water intake
Calculate your calories (you might not count calories but your body does)
Get your macro’s right within these calories. You still need energy!
If you don’t know how to do this yourself get help from a good trainer.
Increase your protein intake.
Whatever your strategy stick with it! Assess if its working after 6-12 weeks of consistency.
Eat more broccoli, spinach and greens in general.
Fish and chicken are your friends (if you are Vegetarian have a look here)
If you’re not assessing you’re guessing, take pictures weekly, weigh yourself daily. Be honest with yourself.
Find foods that match your goals that you like and eat them everyday.
Don’t be afraid of fats especially from nuts, avocado and olive oils.
Add a fibre supplement to your diet if you need, I take it at night, you might want to take it in the morning, it doesn’t matter, just take it.
While we are at it, take your damn fish oil too. That stuff should be compulsory for everyone without an allergy.
Sign up to my newsletter so you can stay up to date with everything
You are eating well 80-90% of the time. You are getting all of the nutrients your body needs so that you can train hard, recover and train hard again.
The reward? A fit, strong, lean, sexy body!
But you want to let go. Every corner you turn there is an advertisement for some sort of processed junk food. Every page you turn in the newspaper, catalogue or magazine has a bright colored picture of the latest and greatest snack.
You want it, you’ve earned it and ……….the good news is that you can have it!
But before you have a free for all at the buffet and say ‘but James said it was alright!’ we gotta have some rules!
Call it what you will, a cheat meal (sounds negative), a structured re-feed (sounds too technical, and no fun) but the fact remains that there are some benefits from occasionally straying from the nutritional straight and narrow.
If you are restricting the amount of energy your body gets (ie dieting, calorie restriction, eating well) your body adapts to this decrease in energy by altering the levels of certain hormones resulting in an overall metabolic slowdown.
This would perhaps explain why when you start a ‘diet’ that it works for a week or two and then your progress stops.
The cheat meal or re-feed helps to reset these hormone levels back to their previous state so that your body will continue to burn more fat once you return to your proper eating plan.
What to eat. Well that’s pretty simple. Get the carbs moderate to high and keep your protein levels about the same as normal. You want to keep your fat intake under control here however.
So in real food terms you can have a go at those normally nasty starchy carbs, breads, pasta, rice, juice etc. Low fat pizzas and hamburgers will be alright here as well. Stay away from fried foods as they are going to be too high in carbs and fats together which is what we are trying to avoid.
If you are looking to keep the food choices as healthy as possible you can’t go past a heap of vegetables (grab the potatoes while you can), a heap of fruit and your berries as well.
Now that you know what to eat, you need to know how often. Somewhere between one meal and one day (all your meals for the day) per week will do the trick. You will find that this not only helps you to get that extra bit of fat off the body but will keep you focused in the days leading up to to the ‘cheating’.
I am always looking to find ways to add good fats, fibre and nutrients into my diet and nuts are a great way to do all three.
The thing with nuts though, is that it can be easy to over consume them and bump your daily calories up too high.
Enter almond meal, or any other nut meal really. (The best to work I have found are almonds, cashews, walnuts and hazelnuts)
It is very versatile and can be added to salads, used to make a paste (just add some seasoning and olive oil) for flavouring meat, thicken up your beef chili or even to add to your shakes.
You don’t need much as it works really well with other flavours.
Check out the video for a quick how to in the kitchen.
With Easter on the horizon and the consumption of chocolate sure to increase, I thought it would be a good time to look into the research.
There is a lot of data surrounding the health benefits of chocolate and these are regularly brought up in the defense of eating swags of it.
Chocolate is made from the fruit of the cocoa tree, the cocoa bean. So that makes chocolate a fruit right!! Just like many other plant based products it contains a variety of vitamins and essential minerals. Also, the fats that come from the bean contains fats which, unlike many others, doesn’t increase cholesterol levels.
Sounds pretty good so far. The problem is that most of the positive research is based on dark chocolates with 65% cocoa solids or more. Generally speaking, the darker the chocolate the higher the level of beneficial cocoa solids. They contain less additives such as sugar and other unhealthy vegetable fats which cover the naturally occurring bitter taste of quality dark chocolates.
The higher quality chocolates also have a higher level of antioxidants. The standard measure for antioxidants, the ORAC scale, shows us that dark chocolate has 13,120 ORAC units/100g and milk chocolate has only 6,740 units/100g. The other interesting fact is that it appears the presence of dairy reduces the level of antioxidants absorbed into the bloodstream.
So the news might not have been what you had hoped for. Dark chocolate in moderate amounts (one or two pieces, up to three times per week) is what you should be aiming for to reap the health benefits and not be adding extra inches to your waistline.
There is some good news however. If you are getting the rest of your diet and exercise right 80-90% of the time you can afford to get a bit of the sweet stuff in over the weekend. It is Easter after all.
