another good article link on this issue: The World Is Fat-Barry Popkin-Professor of Global Nutrition at the University of North Carolina
This article below is for people trying to get more lean…this may not apply to elite athletes. I don’t agree with 100% of this article…but still a some good tips.
by Bill Phillips
1. Do aerobics in the morning
The temptation to eat muffins and drink coffee may be overwhelming (just as looking in the mirror, rubbing your belly, and grunting might be), but doing some form of aerobic exercise for just 20 minutes, first thing in the morning, is more effective in burning fat than a full hour of aerobic exercise performed later in the day after you’ve eaten a few meals. You see, after an overnight fast, blood sugar levels are low, as are carbohydrate reserves. Exercising before you eat causes the body to dip right into stored fat to come up with the energy required to make it through whatever rude awakening you’ve subjected it to.
2. Don’t starve yourself
Reducing your calorie intake to an amount less than eight times your body weight may cause your metabolism to institute severe energy saving measures that will make you dim-witted and grumpy, as well as reduce the rate your body burns calories. It may also cause a reduction in lean body mass or muscle.
(Yikes!) For some reason, during severe calorie restriction, excess muscle is regarded as expendable, and fat reserves are not.
3. Eat six times a day
This is a tip I’ve given dozens of time over the years, but for some reason, it’s one people overlook. By feeding your body frequently throughout the day, you can avoid hunger cramps and maintain stable energy levels and a healthy metabolism. It’s also a great way to provide your body with the nutrients it needs to recover from weight training excise and squelch cravings, especially those uncontrollable to urges to binge during the evening. One of the ways to make it a lot easier to consume six meals a day is to consume three regular, whole-food meals, each consisting of a portion of protein and carbohydrates, and consume meal-replacement drinks for the other three meals.
4. Work out consistently
Everyone knows exercise burns up calories while you’re doing it, but University of Missouri researchers say your metabolism is revved up for as long as nine hours after a workout. Their test subjects burned 600 calories in 1 hour during intense workouts, but they also burned 120 more calories during the next 9 hours than they would have normally had they not exercised.
5. Eat protein and carbs each meal
For example, a healthy breakfast might include six egg whites and a small bowl of oatmeal with skim milk. Lunch and dinner might consist of a serving of chicken or fish and a small baked potato or brown rice. By combining protein and carbohydrates in each meal, you’ll maintain more stable energy levels and provide your body with a constant supply of amino acids and glucose, which help support muscle tissue.
6. Count “portions,” not calories
There aren’t many people who can keep track of their calorie intake for an extended period of time. As an alternative, I recommend counting “portions.” A portion of food is roughly equal to the size of your clenched fist or the palm of your hand. Each portion of protein or carbohydrates typically contains between 100 and 150 calories. For example, one chicken breast is approximately one portion of protein, and one medium-sized bake potato is approximately portion of carbohydrates.
7. Prepare meals ahead of time
Most of us are too busy to prepare healthy, low-fat foods every day: that’s the secret to the success of fast-food restaurants. One possible solution would be to prepare some low-fat meals on Sunday night or whenever you have some extra time and then freeze them.
8. Keep the alcohol to a minimum
For some reason, people tend to regard anything liquid, transparent, and non-sweet as non-caloric. Everyone knows that’s not necessarily true, yet habitual beer and wine drinkers are often reluctant to give up the beverage of their choice while dieting. Not long ago, a patient who was enrolled in a doctor-supervised weight-reduction plan came to us after her diet had failed. We interviewed her briefly and found that, in addition to the food prescribed by the weight-loss plan, she would drink an entire bottle of wine each night! A bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer can add anywhere from 625 to 1,100 calories to your diet. In addition, a gram of alcohol has about seven calories…..nearly as much as a gram of fat, but both are metabolized and stored by the body very easily.
9. Snack frequently but wisely
It’s been shown that spreading your calorie intake throughout the day by eating more often increases your metabolism. Obviously, the choice of food ingested during these frequent feedings is also important, e.g.,… a slice of skinless turkey breast instead of an entire ham hock or air-popped popcorn instead of a snickers bar. Eating a high proportion of refined or simple carbohydrates provides the body with energy a little too quickly. Since simple carbohydrates are used more easily than complex carbohydrates, a lot of excess energy is provided to the body in a relatively short time. If the energy is in excess of what the body needs at that particular time, the excess is quickly stored, most likely in the form of fat.
10. Build more muscle
If you’re a regular reader of this magazine, then odds are you’re also interested in building muscle. Luckily for you, muscle has a twofold cosmetic function. It not only helps you look leaner and stronger but also makes your body more metabolically active. Muscle burns calories just sitting there counting its change. It makes sense, though. Fat is metabolically inert. It’s simply stored, like a bowling ball in a closet. It isn’t useful until it’s needed. Muscle, on the other hand, is constantly demanding, “feed me, feed me,” a la the blood-drinking plant in the Little Shop of Horrors. The more muscle you have, the more calories you need just to maintain your present weight.
11. Watch the fat content
Most of you have heard a gram of fat contains roughly nine calories while a gram of carbohydrates or protein contains just four. For years, dietitians and scientists alike assumed one calorie was pretty much like another, and if you ate too many of them, they’d all end up being stored as fat. It turns out that’s not necessarily true…it seems the body can convert dietary fat calories into body fat more easily than it can convert carbohydrate calories or protein calories into body fat. Studies at the University of Massachusetts Medical School point to the following: If you eat 100 calories of carbohydrate, it takes the body about 23 calories just to process it. The energy “cost” to digest protein is even higher. However, if you eat 100 calories of fat, it takes the body just 3 calories to process it and deposit it, most likely on your hips, rear, or waist. So by switching to protein instead of fat, you’re not only saving yourself from eating extra calories, you’re also ingesting food that’s more difficult for the body to store as fat.
12. Be wary of ground turkey meat.
Turkey is highly nutritious, but when you buy if from the butcher, make sure you’re getting ground turkey breast, not skin or dark meat. Ground turkey breast is about 98% fat free to 99% fat free, while skin or dark meat turkey may only be about 80% fat free, in which case it would equate to a carton of Haagen-Dazs with wings.
13. Keep your protein intake high
One way to help prevent muscle loss while dieting is to keep your intake of protein relatively high…at least a gram of protein per pound of body weight a day. For example, if you weigh 170 lbs, try to eat at least 170 grams of protein a day.
14. Not all vegetables are low fat
It’s hard to believe it by looking at an ear of corn, but most of the fats in processed foods come from the vegetables. Still, it takes about a bushel of corn or most other vegetables to make a bottle of vegetable oil, but the fat content of certain vegetables (or fruits, depending on what botanical school of thought you’re from) like avocados and olives is enormous. An average avocado derives about 86% of its calories from fat, while the number for olives is even higher at about 95%.
15. Don’t eat nuts as a snack
Sure they’re natural, and sure they contain a lot of protein, but they’re extremely high in fat. Consider that many nuts derive up to 97% of their calories from fat. The only exception to this high-fat rule is chestnuts, which derive only 8% of their calories from fat. You’re probably thinking to yourself, “what about those articles in the newspapers that said eating walnuts could reduce your cholesterol rate?” Well, the test was financed by the walnut industry, and in a nutshell, the study involved two groups of men, one control group and one of which substituted walnuts for fatty foods like meat and butter. Since the walnuts contain less saturated fat than the beef and butter and have no cholesterol, the cholesterol levels of the walnut eaters dropped. Using this same type of logic, they could have made a case to support eating bacon or eggs to reduce cholesterol levels…sure it does…when it replaces eating sticks of butter.
16. Cholesterol is not fat
Cholesterol has nothing to do with the fat content of a food. Cholesterol is chemically a steroid (not the anabolic type, of course), and it’s produced by the liver. Only animal products contain it. Consequently, a food item can have no cholesterol yet be high in fat. Conversely, something can be high in cholesterol yet low in fat, such as shrimp. Despite the difference in fat and cholesterol, a diet high in fat, particularly saturated fat, can indeed raise cholesterol levels.
17. Don’t eat with fat friends
On the surface, this may seem a little flippant, but the point of this tip is not to avoid fat friends; just don’t fall prey to the same eating habits that may have had something to do with making them fat in the first place. If you eat with people with poor eating habits, don’t use their dietary shortcomings to justify slipping into similar eating habits, even if it’s only during one meal. For instance, if everyone’s eating cheesecake, don’t let them pressure you into being one of the crowd because sooner or later, you really will be one of the crowd….the fat crowd, that is.
18. Frozen yogurt is not so great
First of all, not all frozen yogurt is low fat. Some varieties average about eight grams of fat per cup. Secondly, there’s hardly any way of telling what the fat content is of the local neighborhood yogurt stand’s frozen offerings. If you’re absolutely sure of the fat content, and it’s one gram of fat or less per serving, go ahead and have it as an occasional treat.
19. De-fat your cheese
A recent survey indicated that the most difficult food to cut back on while dieting was cheese. Understandably so. If you’re preparing a dish that requires it, try de-fatting your cheese….zap an ounce of full-fat cheddar in the microwave on the high setting for two minutes, and much of the fat will liquefy and form a pool on top of the cheese. You can then pour it off, and this method will reduce the amount of fat by about four grams. This method works best with cheddar or mozzarella.
20. Get creative in the kitchen
Try using calorie-cutting mixes when you make a snack or pour yourself a glass of something to drink. Consider cutting your orange juice with an equal part of carbonated water or seltzer. If you just have to have peanut butter (even though each two-tablespoon serving of peanut butter has more than one tablespoon of grease), then mix it with a mashed banana. All out of nonfat mayonnaise? Cut down the fat content of regular mayo by mixing in some mustard.
21. Watch out for salad dressing
Two tablespoons of regular salad dressing, about the amount contained in a ladleful at a restaurant, contain about 200 calories. To put that in perspective, hot fudge has fewer calories and a lot less fat. If light dressing isn’t available and you just can’t do without it, ask for the dressing on the side and use it sparingly, an alternative might be to mix it half with vinegar or lemon juice.
22. Deep-six the potato chips
Eating 8 oz of conventional potato chips is like adding 12 Tbsps of vegetable oil and a teaspoon of salt to an 8-oz potato. However, consider this: you would have to eat 2 quarts of plain unbuttered popcorn to get the calories in 1 oz of chips (about 15 chips). By substituting, you save ten grams of fat. Of course, if you need your chips, try the Baked Lay’s Potato Chips that can be found at better grocery stores everywhere.
23. Cut back on carbs at night
It’s a scientific fact that your body cannot burn fat when your insulin levels are elevated. It’s also a fact that carbs cause insulin levels to go up. So, it’s especially important to limit your carb intake of foods like bread, pasta, candy, juices, crackers, and bagels in the evening after, say 6:00 p.m. Carbs consumed in the evening are more likely to be converted to body fat and/or reduce the amount of fat your body may burn during your sleep.
24. “Pig out” once a week
No one can eat “perfectly” all the time without going crazy! If you’re craving something like apple pie, French fries, pizza, or candy, hold off that craving until your “free day.” One day a week, forget calorie counting, portion control, etc., and eat whatever you’d like. By giving yourself this option, you can maintain the discipline you need to be successful the other six days of the week.
25. Don’t eat carbs before exercise
If you supply the body with carbohydrates to use as fuel when exercising, it will prevent fat burning and preserve body fat stores. A recent study confirmed that if you keep taking in carbs, your body will burn carbs. Cut back on the carbs, and your body will burn fat more readily and quickly.
26. Fail fast and change direction
If what you’re doing now isn’t working, make a change! Don’t believe that if what you have been doing isn’t working, it will all of a sudden start working for no apparent reason. If you want different results, you have to take a different approach.
27. Don’t just ready these tips!
If you want to build a leaner, healthier physique, you have to apply these fat-fighting tips. As they say, “Knowing what to do and doing what you know are two entirely different things!”
