When summer rolls around, every guy with hard six pack abs gets excited for the opportunity to take his top off down the beach and flaunt the body he worked so hard to craft. It’s a great feeling and a great reward for all the effort they put in down the gym.
For those with a portly paunch on the other hand, this can be something of a stressful occasion. You can’t hit the beach in your normal attire but how do you keep that extra fat hidden when you’re going topless?
One solution is this: lose the fat fast. Even if the nights are already getting shorter you can still make a difference to your belly – you just need to diet smart. These three simple tips will help you to do just that…
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
While you might have a deadline to get those abs beach-ready, that doesn’t mean you should rush and cut corners. Losing fat very quickly is not only bad for you (because your weight will be yo-yoing), it also makes you very likely to pile the fat back on shortly after. To get long-lasting results, you need to take a more measured and steady approach.
So how quickly can you actually lose fat? The general recommendation is 1-3 pounds of body fat per week or 1% of your overall weight. So if you’re 100 pounds, you might be able to lose 1 pound per week (not 1% of your body fat percentage). Note though that this is a very arbitrary recommendation – the answer is really going to depend on your current weight, fitness, metabolism and more and you’ll find it becomes harder to shift weight fast as you get slimmer.
Increase Your Protein Intake
This is a very important one for those bodybuilders out there. If you only care about losing weight, then this isn’t as important. If you want to lose weight and keep your muscle, then you need to adjust your macros so that you’re getting more protein to protect and build that tissue.
Even if you only care about losing weight though, protein is filling, important for our health and has a thermogenic effect meaning that it burns calories as you digest it. Overall then, increasing protein is a smart move for anyone.
MED for CV
Remember what we said about slow and steady winning the race? This applies doubly to your CV. Your ‘MED’ is your Minimum Effective Dose and in this case, that’s going to be about one CV session a week.
Why not add more? Because it’s simply too much of a change for your body if you currently aren’t doing any CV at all. Suddenly start running 100 miles a week and you’ll end up burned out by week 2. Likely you’ll get ill, you’ll definitely lose muscle and your body won’t know how to react.
Start out with a decent CV workout once a week and then add more and more as you grow in fitness and confidence.
