In my experience, most people go on diets thinking that their goal should be less weight – wrong (except if you’re an athlete aiming for certain weight category). Try to compare a pound of meat and a pound of fat, you will get the picture. Muscles are much condensed and much heavier than fat, so you can actually lose less weight and more inches around your waist, keeping your muscles right where they should be – not just so you might look buffed up, but also for the sake of your metabolic rate. Here are a couple of tricks to help you do just that:
Fiber up!
Fibers are good for you on so many levels. Firstly, they will help you keep the hunger strike away without adding extra calories to your diet plan. Fibers act as something of a “cleaning lady“for your stomach and bowels helping you get rid of all that nasty residue in there. They will slow down carb digestion process, lower your insulin levels and keep that fat-burning process going. Brown rice, oatmeal, and high-fiber vegetables are the groceries you should put on your list right away.
Take fat burners during your high-carb days
If you are a bodybuilder and already had some experience with dieting, you will remember those days when working on large muscle groups and you simply ran out of juice. These are the days when you should give yourself just a bit of a carb boost. This is why it would be a smart thing to take some fat burners half an hour before training – not only will they help you process those extra calories from carbs but they will also give you additional energy and stamina and even focus boost if they contain caffeine.
Diet is more important than cardio
As we already mentioned, the more muscles you have the faster your metabolic rate will be. Excessive cardio during diet will not only drain all the energy out of you, but more importantly it will get you into catabolic state – your organism will switch from burning fat to burning muscles. This is why you shouldn’t do more than 45 minutes of cardio three to four times a week.
Do not over-train!
Have you ever heard the expression “less is more”? When it comes to dieting, it’s the other way around – more is less. If you train more than your optimal level, not only will you stop losing fat but you can actually let all that hard work go to waste. When over-trained, our organism starts producing cortisol and that is something you don’t want to happen. Cortisol will lower your testosterone levels, reduce your immunity, and push your organism to use amino acids from your muscles as fuel instead of using fat for those purposes. So if you train more than you should you might actually lose some muscle and gain fat at the same time, and that’s a lose-lose situation if I ever saw one. Keep your training sessions on a moderate level and be sure to include at least one off day in a week. Also, it is highly recommended to take some test booster supplements to reduce the possibility of having low testosterone levels during your diet.
Follow these simple guidelines and combine them with a nice low carb diet and you will get your beach body in no time! And remember, diet is not just a nutrition plan – it’s a state of mind. Your results will stay great just as long as your attitude towards food stays healthy.