Are you on a quest to burn fat and build muscle? If so, these are some tips and techniques you can use to further that goal. Use them where applicable, combined with a good general understanding about diet and exercise.
Make sure your diet is right: It’s important that your diet be balanced and yet low calorie. This is well known but sometimes becomes misunderstood based on a lack of nutritional knowledge. Starving yourself is not a good idea and there are very good reasons for this, discussed a little more below. Make sure your diet includes fruits and vegetables protein, and even fats in moderation.
Eat a balanced diet. Reducing calories doesn’t mean that you starve yourself or live on only salad and Perrier water. Both for health reasons and even to effectively build muscle while you burn fat you need to eat items from the four food groups: protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water. It’s not a question of what to exclude certain food types from your diet, but to eat healthier sources of it and in amounts suited to your calorie expenditure.
Keep carbohydrate and fat intake proportional – in fact somewhat less than – physical energy demands. Anything that is over your caloric energy expenditure is going to get stored as fats. A calorie is nothing more than the energy a food substance releases when metabolizes. Fats and carbohydrates are the main fuels the body uses (both are changed to sugars when burned, and changed to fats when stored) and so if you are intaking more than you’re burning it will be stored as surplus for future use.
Favor protein over saturated fats, and complex carbs over simple ones. Most American diets already have enough or too much protein, so getting enough is not a big problem, but they are also high in fat. Vegetarian protein sources like beans, nuts, and brown rice, can be good substitutes. You can reduce your meat intake and up these other protein sources with good results. Complex carbohydrates are found in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and are generally better than simple carbohydrates. Simple carbs are nothing more than the basic sugars: sucrose, fructose and lactose. Complex carbs are also sugars but they are molecularly more complex and generally found in more vitamin rich foods. The latter are considered higher in nutritive value than simple sugars (though a certain amount of these are useful for immediate energy consumption) and better for overall system performance.
Eat plenty of fiber (roughage). Leafy green vegetables, grains, and fruits all have material called fiber that helps complete digestion and elimination of cholesterols. Saturated and other fats are converted by the liver into cholesterol and getting rid of it helps the liver function more effectively and has a number of other health and fitness benefits. Often complex carbohydrates double as fiber sources so you can take are of two things at once by eating these foods. Drink a lot of water. Yes, you’ve heard it before and it’s true. The body is largely composed of water and needs it in adequate quantity to run smoothly. It is the prime factor in all kinds of metabolic functions, transmission of nutrients, and waste disposal. Eight cups per day is recommended.
There are a few “metabolic tricks” that you can try. One obvious one is just to eat smaller portions. This obviously helps reduce fat and sugar intake, and since chances are you’re getting plenty of protein anyway, you’ll be doing yourself a favor. Another trick, often contrary to popular belief, is to eat more frequently, for instance every three hours. This speeds up metabolism, and as long as you’re eating the right things in reasonable portions, this can help weight loss. You can also avoid eating any closer to bed time than two hours. When you sleep your metabolism becomes much slower and so rather than burning fat your body stores it.
Do primarily intense muscular exercise. This “tip” needs a few paragraphs to really elucidate. Combing it with the nutritional wisdom above is what really gets the burn fat – build muscle process going.
In general what you want to do is place a fairly intense demand on your muscles. This tells your body to burn whatever fats are available to meet the energy demand, and builds the muscles so it’s stronger for future use. Many people consider long aerobic workouts such as jogging to be the main fat burners, but in fact it’s coming to light that this may not be the case. These activities are low intensity and long duration, meaning that they are basically muscular exercises that don’t place as high a demand on your body as they could to metabolize its fat stores. They also take longer and so are not really very efficient.
The usual long jog works out the leg and back muscles, and increases circulation and oxygenation, but a slow weight lift taking much less time and done at intense intervals will place greater muscular demand and thus burn more fat.
Proteins are like the raw construction materials of the body. Fats and sugars are the raw fuels. They are like the gas and electricity for the various machines used in a contraction project, while protein is the lumber concrete, steel, and so on. Just as a construction crew wouldn’t waste fuel they could use in the future to get more building done, your body doesn’t willingly waste its fat and carb fuels but rather stores them. However it’s when a project is underway – muscle building – that most of it gets used Thus you want to get some construction projects underway that will both build a stronger structure and use up all that excess fuel called fat.
This is why reducing fat at the same time as intense muscular activity is such a good combination. And in the fitness industry exercise workouts are beginning to reflect this, emphasizing things like interval training, lifting, body weight exercises, slow burn techniques and so on more and more. This is in contrast to the workouts of the pat which tended to emphasize long cardio-vascular type workouts as the fat burners.
Use common sense in your quest to burn fat and build muscle and try to grasp the basic principles rather than get lost in complicated formulas. Use more specific tips and tricks where applicable, but basically get that muscle construction project going, get healthy raw materials to make a strong structure, and get that fat burning to fuel it.
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