6) 101 Tips to lose fat and get lean: Educate yourself about nutrition
Ignorance should never be an excuse. The lack of nutritional education in the world never ceases to amaze me, after all we are what we eat. Every morsel of food that passes your lips has an impact not just upon your cosmetic body composition, but also a profound and often long lasting impact upon your health.
There are many fantastic nutrition books out there ranging from the popular and well known "South Beach" diet series through to the always fascinating offerings of men such as Johnny Bowden and Michael Eades. Healthy, nutritious food does not have to be as boring and unpalatable as plain dry chicken breasts and broccoli.
Fat loss programmes can be short, spartan bursts of intense effort, but once you have reached your goals you need to maintain all your hard work and the way to do that is to make it as easy as possible for yourself by knowing how to consistently make nutritious and dare I say delicious food choices.
7) Use spices and avoid sauces
The food that you eat on a fat loss programme doesn't have to be totally plain and bland. Eating the same tasteless food day after day is one of the most common cardinal errors to make when following a diet as at some stage your mind and your taste buds start to rebel, making that all too dangerous blow out an increasingly likely possibility.
Nutritious, healthy meals can be spiced up (literally!) by adding spices ranging from the rather obvious (salt and pepper) to the more personal (chilli, curry, Cajun etc). Be wary of those spices with tonnes of added sugar, but even then the odd bit won't kill you if it is added to overall healthy fare such as organic chicken breasts or lean cuts of steak.
The one thing however that I do want you to avoid is adding sauces to your food. Whereas curry powder sprinkled across your chicken breasts is acceptable, lavishing them with the love of curry sauce is most definitely not! Very rarely does a sauce not contain something creamy or buttery and as such these are definite negatives on the road to fat loss success.
8) Read the labels!
I strongly urge all of those you seeking a slimmer body to quickly develop the habit of properly reading food labels. It never ceases to amaze me that so many dieters are duped into eating some pseudo healthy concoction that is both of zero nutritional value and full of "hidden" sugars and fat. The worst culprit of all are those "fat free" foods that are absolutely laden with the sugars that in this author's humble opinion are far more likely any other macro nutrient to cause the consumer to gain fat.
In your quest for fat loss you should also be aware that claims such as "5% fat" are not necessarily the nutritional bonanzas that they first appear to be. Claims of this nature are almost always based on net weight, not calories. Remember that 1 gram of fat equates to 9 calories, more than twice that of both protein and carbohydrate (that are each 4 calories per gram).
9) Be lavish with coconut oil
Coconut oil / butter isn't just good for moisturising the skin or for adding an exotic flavour to otherwise mundane dishes (cooking your scrambled eggs in coconut butter adds a deliciously different tang by the way). It is choc full of healthy nutrients that make it one of the absolute best choices you can have for using as a butter or a dietary fat.
The one key thing you need to bear in mind with coconut oil is that it contains medium-chain-fatty acids (otherwise knows as MCTs, or medium-chain-triglycerides) that have long been a staple of many an athlete's fat loss diet. The rationale, backed up by research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is that you can't really store MCTs as fat and that instead the body uses them for a rapid energy boost. Almost like a sugar rush without the attendant blood sugar crash and fat gain.
I have never been one to believe that MCTs are the miracle fat loss "secret" that they were once (way back in the early 1990s) heralded as being. But anything that has an abundance of them is certainly healthy and a better alternative than 99.9% of commercially available oils and butters. So why not try coconut oil - the strong chances are that both your taste buds and waistline will approve!
10) Intelligent late night snacking
Any of you who have ever dieted for any length of time will know that as easy as getting through the day can be (if you get your nutrition right), managing an evening without a raid on the fridge or the biscuit cupboard can be the hardest thing.
I myself have always been a "muncher" - so when I am idle and sat in front of the TV or reading a book I just don't feel myself unless I have something to snack on. Unfortunately the obvious snack choices of chocolate and crisps don't really cut it if you are trying to lose fat and get lean. There are two ways to really get a handle on this potential problem:
1 Never have junk food in the house in the first place. Perhaps easier said than done if you don't live by yourself. My solution - put your foot down and educate the guilty party!
2 Prepare healthy and "optimal" later night snacks beforehand. This strategy works well even if you don't have "bad food" in the house (after all, Dominos is just a few clicks of the mouse away for all of us!), but is especially potent if the lure of the cookie filled biscuit barrel is just a few steps away. When dieting I have always found it extremely helpful to keep ziplock bags filled with various sliced raw vegetables (carrots, peppers, celery sticks), and for the protein conscious amongst us beef jerky makes a great chewable snack that is ideal for both fat loss and muscle building.
And as an aside, please don't be overly concerned with eating late at night. So long as your digestion is working properly (GERD sufferers will know what I am referring to - acid reflux exacerbated by laying down) there is absolutely nothing wrong with late night snacking so long as you make the right nutritional choices!
Read the first five diet tips from Nick Mitchell.
