First of all, fat loss is more descriptive of what most people really want and need. We’ve all heard the “lose weight” message our whole lives; but when it comes down to it, fat is what we really need to lose and nothing else.

Secondly, when you concentrate on “weight loss” instead of “fat loss” then you tend to do stupid things. There are lots of products, programs, and diets out there that will help you lose weight. Unfortunately, many of them are unhealthy and unsustainable because they cause you to lose weight instead of fat.

What Is Weight Loss?

When you step on the scale, you see one simple number like 125, 163, 205, or 350. Since a bathroom scale is the easiest and most common way of judging your progress toward your health or fitness goals, you see this simple number and all you think about is making it smaller.

However, weight is not a simple number. Rather, it is a complex number determined by several factors like bone density, water retention, muscle mass, fat stores, position on earth, time of day, amount of food and liquid in your stomach, bathroom schedule, etc. If you decrease any of the factors that make up your weight, you will lose weight. This is why I don’t like the term weight loss. It encourages people to mess with some of the weight factors that should not be messed with. Worse than that, it encourages products and programs that mess with weight factors that should not be messed with.

What is Fat Loss?

Fat loss is much easier to define than weight loss. It is nothing more than burning up the excess fat on your body. This excess fat is the part of your total body weight that is responsible for poor health, poor body image, and poor physical fitness. Get rid of your excess body fat and you will be better off on multiple levels.

Do It The Right Way!

So, what is the right way to lose body fat? There are several things that can contribute to an effort to lose excess fat, but it is my experience that the single most effective thing you can do is build muscle. Muscle and fat are like light and darkness. When you turn on the lights in a dark room, the light fills the room and the darkness flees as a natural consequence. The process of building and maintaining muscle is very much like turning on the lights in a dark room. As a natural consequence of building lean muscle mass, excess fat begins to melt away and stay away.

I feel like a broken record for saying this, but the build-muscle-to-burn-fat principle is perfect for the ladies too. Don’t be afraid to build muscle. You’re not going to look like a body builder  just because you start lifting weights. Most men struggle to build large muscles and we have testosterone on our side. A woman’s body isn’t designed to naturally build large muscles, but it is designed to build sexy, feminine musculature that will turn the body in to a fat burning machine.

Whether you’re a man or a woman, you need to learn to love resistance training. If you are new to it, or just getting back into it, your body will need a little time to adjust. However, once you get used to it, there isn’t much better than the feeling that comes after a good workout.

So, forget about the diet pills, colon cleansing, celebrity diets and other nonsense that claims it will help you lose weight. It’s your excess body fat that you want to lose and it’s muscle that will help you do it. My two favorite muscle-building-for-fat-loss programs are No Nonsense Muscle Building by Vince DelMonte and The Truth About Six Pack Abs by Mike Geary. They are both great programs and I whole heartily recommend both of them. Check them out and get started losing fat the right way.

Example 1: Overfeeding

I first heard the term overfeeding in The Truth About Six Pack Abs by Mike Geary. This is the term that he uses to refer to taking one day a week to completely forget about your diet and basically eat whatever you want. Notice that I said basically. You still need to exercise some self control. This isn’t a free pass to go out and eat enough for three people.

Mike uses calories as a guideline. If you want to lose fat, you have to consume less calories than you expend. There is no way around it, that is just the basic science of it.

There is, however, more than one way to look at it. You can compare the calories that you eat to the calories you use on a daily basis, or you can look at your week as  a whole. For example, if you create a consistent caloric deficit six days a week and then splurge a little on the seventh day, you will still have a caloric deficit for the week as a whole. This is all assuming that you don’t go crazy on your overfeeding day.

For a more detailed explanation, check out Mike’s program. It’s got a lot of really great information in it.

Example 2: Treat Meals

I recently wrote a review of Jackie Warner’s book This Is Why You’re Fat. The full title of the book is This Is Why You’re Fat (And How to Get Thin Forever): Eat More, Cheat More, Lose More–and Keep the Weight Off. You can see just from the title that Jackie is a proponent of being a diet cheat.

Jackie’s approach is to allow yourself to have two “treat meals” on the weekend. That’s one treat meal on Saturday and one on Sunday. She gives a couple of guidelines that you should follow. The first one is that you only get to have your treat meals if you stick to your diet during the five preceding days. The second guideline is that you should keep each treat meal under 1,500 calories. Other than that, you can pretty much go nuts for those two meals.

Why You Should Be A Diet Cheat

There are two reasons why you should consider being a diet cheat. The first reason is psychological and the second reason is physiological.

The psychological reason is pretty simple. When you are on a diet (see note below), sometimes it can be difficult to stick with it, especially in the beginning. To make the adjustment easier, it is good to have a light at the end of the tunnel. If you know you have a cheat day coming, it is easier to stick with your diet. If you don’t have something like that built in, it becomes very tempting to just give up and go back to your old ways of eating.

The physiological reason has to do with the way your body reacts to a sustained caloric deficit. As you start consuming fewer calories than your body needs, your body will start drawing on your fat stores in order to sustain itself. Eventually, your body will think that you are starving and will respond by lowering your metabolism and increasing your appetite. This is the worst possible scenario for someone who wants to burn fat. Cheat days, with a higher caloric intake, can trick your body out of thinking that it is starving.

I think both of these points make sense. Physiologically, we are all pretty much made the same so the effects of going into starvation mode apply to us all. Psychologically, however, we are all a little different from each other. You have to evaluate yourself and decide if the psychological effects of having a cheat day will be positive or negative for you. If you are the type of person that will lose all self control if you allow yourself to cheat, then cheat days probably aren’t the way to go.

As always, give it a try and see how it works for you.

Note On Dieting: I do not believe in dieting. I do believe in having a good diet. Hopefully you see the difference. Eating well should be a way of life and not a temporary way to reach a fat loss goal. Eating healthily over time will result in sustained fat loss. That being said, I accept that eating in such a way as to create a daily caloric deficit (if done wisely) can speed up the fat loss process. However, this should only be done over the short term to bring your body into healthy body fat percentages.

For a variety of reasons, you are afraid of fat. You’ve been taught to think and feel this way. You’ve been taught that eating fat will give you high cholesterol and heart disease. You’ve been taught that eating fat will make your body fat.

It’s logical. It makes sense. Why shouldn’t you think this way? If you put fat in your body then you’re going to get fat, right?

The truth is your body actually needs fat. In fact, approximately 20 – 40% of your total caloric intake should come from healthy fats. That’s why it occurs naturally in almost everything we eat.

Healthy Fat? What’s That?

You’ve probably heard different “experts” talking about polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, saturated, and trans fats and which ones to eat and which ones to avoid. Unfortunately, the advice you get varies from one expert to the next and it’s all too much to remember. It makes trying to shop for healthy food extremely difficult and confusing.

Fortunately, you don’t really need to worry about that. The answer to which fats are healthy and which fats are not is really quite simple. It’s actually not even so much a matter of what kinds of fat as it is the history of the fat.

Confused? Let me explain.

Generally speaking, any fat that occurs naturally and is consumed in is original and natural state is a healthy fat. On the other hand, fats that have been through any sort of processing (meaning humans have messed with it) are generally unhealthy.

It’s a pretty clear and simple rule and it makes food selection much simpler. To say it even more simply:

Natural Fat = Good; Processed Fat = Bad

Now that you’ve got the rule down, let’s look at some examples. Everything you eat should come from either a plant or an animal, so we’ll look at examples from those two categories.

Animal Fats – The Good And The Bad

For the most part, if you’re eating something from an animal then it is probably either meat or some form of dairy product, so let’s focus our attention there.

Unless you hunt and fish for all your meat, the meat you consume was raised in one of two ways:

1. Fed by humans with some combination of synthetic and natural food sources
2. In a natural environment on completely natural food sources

Can you guess which one is healthier for you? The correct answer is of course number two.

In many mass production farms that raise animals for consumption, the animals are not fed their natural diet. Instead, they are given antibiotics, hormones, and other things that are intended to make the farms production more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately, these things have a trickle down effect on you.

Your other option is to eat meats that come from animals that were raised in their natural environment and allowed to eat their natural diet. It is more expensive and less efficient to raise animals this way, but the end result is much better for you.

The same thing goes for dairy products, they either come from animals on a natural diet or from animals on a synthetic diet. Again, the natural diet produces the healthiest food for you. On top of that, most dairy products go through a few processes that make them less healthy for you (i.e. pasteurization, homogenization). Milk fat is actually quite good for you if you can find milk that hasn’t been processed.

Plant Fats – The Good And The Bad

Just like animal based food products, you have two options when it comes to plant based food products:

1. Chemically altered and/or heavily processed
2. Naturally occurring with little to no processing

As before, number two is the better choice.

When it comes to plant based foods, most of the fat is in nuts and oils. These fats can actually be quite good for you if they are not heavily processed.

What you want to look for here is the words “organic” or “natural.” For example, when you buy your peanut butter, look for a bottle that says it is organic. You should be able to notice a difference in the ingredients list of the organic peanut butter versus the regular peanut butter.

In fact, the ingredients list can be a good guide for you when selecting plant based foods. If the ingredients list contains things that you don’t immediately recognize as coming from a farm or garden, then it’s probably not the best choice for you.

Some Sources Of Good Fats

Here are a few examples of foods that will give your body the healthy fats it needs:

• Nuts
• Seeds
• Avocados
• Organic Peanut Butter
• Fish

Remember that 20 – 40% of your calories should come from good fats. This list is just an example. There are many other good sources of healthy fat. Just stick to the rule I mentioned above and you should be fine.

For a more in depth explanation of how processing food alters fat and why processed foods are bad for you, check out The Truth About Six Pack Abs. This guide will give you everything you need to get a healthy, lean body and a great set of six pack abs.

The Truth About Six Pack Abs comes in various formats. For a quick explanation of your options, check out my post titled The Truth About Six Pack Abs Package.

Why aren’t you raising your hand? I thought fad diets were so popular because they work so well. Shouldn’t we all be raising our hands right now?

Okay, so you get the point. I’m not a big fan of fad diets. I don’t like them because they don’t work. These diets are surrounded by lots of hype and plenty of testimonials, but the reality is that they don’t produce sustainable and healthy weight loss. More often than not, in the long run a fad diet will leave you the same or worse off than before you started the diet.

So, why don’t these diets work? I’ll give you the long answer in a minute, but Certified Nutrition Specialist Mike Geary summed it up perfectly in his book The Truth About Six Pack Abs. Simply put…

The problem with most fad diets is that they typically limit consumption of a certain macronutrient (protein, carbs, or fat) or food group, and therefore tend to fight against what your body needs to function most efficiently.

So what’s wrong with limiting certain foods in your diet? You’ve been taught that fats and carbs are bad for you. You’ve been taught that they are the secret evil ingredients that make you fat, and if you can just make yourself completely avoid them then your excess fat will magically melt away never to return again.

Well, the truth is quite the opposite. Your body needs fat and your body needs carbohydrates. If you do not get enough of them, certain bodily processes (the ones that naturally fight fat storage and promote fat burning) start to shut down. Since most popular diets focus on limiting or completely avoiding fats and carbs, lets look at some of the negative impacts of reducing fats and carbs in your diet.

Negative Impacts Of Limiting Carbs In Your Diet

• Loss of lean muscle
• A lower Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)
• Reduced muscle glycogen levels
• Less energy
• Muscles start to look flat or deflated
• Reduced ability to recover quickly from workouts

Negative Impacts Of Limiting Fat In Your Diet

• Hormonal imbalances
• Increased hunger and cravings
• Your body craves carbohydrates to compensate for reduction in fat
• Reduced performance of fat burning metabolic processes
• Reduced ability to perform numerous essential bodily processes and functions

Okay, so now you’re confused. On the one hand, you have been told not to eat fats and carbs. On the other hand, I’m telling you that bad things will happen if you don’t eat fats and carbs. So, which is it?

As with many things in life, the answer is moderation. More specifically, moderation and knowledge. You shouldn’t eat too many fats and carbs, and you shouldn’t avoid them completely. On top of that, it is also essential to eat the right kinds of fats and carbs.

Learning how to eat properly can be difficult, but it is an essential part of living a happy and healthy life. If you want to lose your excess body fat the right way and keep it off forever, I suggest learning about and understanding the roles that fats, carbs and the other main components of your diet play in storing or burning body fat.

One of the best guides I have found on eating the right way to burn fat is The Truth About Six Pack Abs. It explains things very well and helped me understand how you can lose weight without avoiding any food groups or classes of macronutrients. Give it a read and you’ll be glad you did.

eDiets is offering a 25% discount right now on their Online Plans and a free week of meals for their Meal Delivery Plans. Their website says that it is a limited time offer, so it could disappear at anytime. You don’t need to enter a coupon code or promo code to get the discounts, you can just go to this page and click on the 25% off discount offer or the free week of meals offer.

I’m usually not a big fan of “diets”, but the eDiets Meal Delivery plan is such an easy way to diet that you almost can’t go wrong. Just make sure you don’t order meal plans for two people and eat them all yourself. Other than that, the eDiets Meal Delivery system is a pretty fool proof way to diet. If you need the extra help in preparing healthy meals, give eDiets a shot. I think you will be pleased.

the force exerted on the mass of a body by a gravitational field

Do you really care about the amount of force exerted on the mass of your body by the earth’s gravitational field? I’m going to guess you don’t. What you are really concerned with is the percentage of your body that is composed of fat verses the percentage of your body that is composed of muscle. Having a body weight goal is okay as long as you pair it with a body fat percentage goal. Without both sides of the goal, you may find that you have successfully arrived at your body weight goal only to find out that you are now simply a smaller version of your old fat self. That’s not what you want. Instead, make sure all your hard work pays off with a new you that looks, feels, and is healthier than when you set your weight loss and six pack abs goals.

I read a perfect example of this in an article in The Wall Street Journal called The Scales Can Lie: Hidden Fat. It is about a Mayo Clinic study which found that many people with a “normal” or “healthy” Body Mass Index (BMI) and weight are suffering from a condition that they termed “normal weight obesity.” This term refers to people who look skinny, and have a BMI and weight that are within normal parameters, but have too much body fat. If you are at a reasonable body weight, but your belly and arms feel squishy when you poke them, you may be one of these people.

So, what should you do about it? As I said earlier, stop worrying about your body weight and start paying attention to your body fat and muscle mass. You need to engage in diet and exercise that will help you build muscle and get rid of your unwanted body fat. If after reading that last sentence your first thoughts were of crash diets and treadmills, I want you to slap yourself. No, harder than that. We have to get those thoughts out of your head to make room for the things that will actually help you. If those methods worked, we wouldn’t have such a huge obesity problem on our hands. You need to start thinking in terms of full-body strength training exercises and well balanced meals consisting mostly of natural unprocessed foods.

Whenever I recommend strength training and building muscle to loss body fat, I feel like I am going to scare off all the women. I find that many women tend to be afraid of building muscle because they think it will make them bulky or it will make them gain weight. Gaining weight is the last thing they want to do so why would they want to build muscle? Well, like I said, weight is a meaningless number by itself. If your body fat percentage is way down and you look great, why should you care what you weigh? We don’t wear our weights on our chests like a scarlet letter. If you look and feel good, nobody is going to know or care how much you weigh.

Let me give you an example from The Wall Street Journal article. They interviewed a 34-year-old woman who weighed 170 pounds at just over 30% body fat when she started dieting and doing some aerobic exercises. She was able to lose 45 pounds which brought her down to a weight of 125 pounds. This is a great improvement, but she was still at 25% body fat. She wanted to look even better, so she added strength training to her routine. Over the next 18 months she gained 20 pounds taking her back to 145 pounds. Oh no! What happened? Strength training made her fatter! No, it made her weigh more. There is a big difference. In gaining that extra 20 pounds, she was able to get her body fat percentage down to 14! Now imagine what you would look like at 14% body fat. As women are recommended to have higher body fat percentages than men, 14% is phenomenal for a woman. Do you think she got upset at gaining 20 pounds when it allowed her to drop 11 percentage points in body fat? Not a chance and neither should you.

I hope you can see the merits of focusing on body fat instead of body weight. It’s time to start educating yourself about how to eat properly and exercise correctly. I recommend two programs that will teach you these principles and will help you meet your body fat goals. They are The Truth About Abs and No-Nonsense 6 Pack. They are both great programs so pick the one that looks the most interesting to you, order it today, and get started cutting down your body fat.

For more information about eating properly to lose fat, I also recommend The Fat Burning Kitchen. To monitor your progress, you should also consider getting a body fat scale.

I’m not really a big fan of obsessing over calories, but when you eat out or at a work place cafeteria on a regular basis, it would be beneficial to you to learn how to count and keep track of your calories. Being conscious of calories allows you to make informed decisions when you are making food choices.

Jillian Michaels is a personal trainer on the NBC show Biggest Loser and she is a proponent of counting calories. Watch the video below from TIME.com for some tips from Jillian on how to choose the healthiest foods when you are eating away from home.

There are a few things that stuck out to me in this video. One of the main things was Jillian’s comments about diet soda. I have heard several nutrition expert recommend avoiding all sodas, including diet, but I have never heard a good explanation about why you should avoid diet sodas. Jillian points out that the artificial sweeteners used in diet sodas trigger the release of a hormone called Neuropeptide Y. Wikipedia has the following to say about Neuropeptide Y (NPY):

The main effect is increased food intake and decreased physical activity. NPY is secreted by the hypothalamus, and in addition to increasing food intake, it increases the proportion of energy stored as fat…

Another thing Jillian Michaels points out is that you need to educate yourself about the amounts of calories in different kinds of foods. As she says, you can buy a calorie counting book or even a calorie counting iPhone App to make it really easy for yourself.

Portion control is another thing that stood out to me. When you know how many calories are in a particular food, you know how much of that food you can eat. If you are really hungry, fill up on lower calorie foods. If you really must have something that is high in calories, only eat a little bit of it.

The video has some great tips in it. Anything you can do to make your meals healthier is a good idea. You should also check out Jillian’s new book, Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body!. For more tips on exercise and healthy eating, visit Jillian’s website.

I found this story very intriguing. The requirement was that all students had to either have a BMI of 30 or below or else they had to take a class on nutrition. If neither option was completed before graduation, the student would not be able to graduate. Apparently, many (or at least the loudest portion) of the students felt that the requirement was “unfair” and “biased.”

I find this sad for a few reasons. The reason that is applicable to this website, and perhaps the most important, is that so many people want to fight against something that was put in place to help them get healthier. You can debate whether or not the policy would have been effective or if it was the best way, but it seems clear to me that the intention was good.

In a society where obesity is quickly getting out of control, perhaps all colleges and universities should be more proactive in teaching their students how to care for their bodies. The role of higher education is to help young people prepare for life and the workplace. Being healthy is very much a part of this. There are disadvantages to being over weight in both life and business. The students can cry about discrimination all they want, but the harsh reality is that they are only hurting themselves by fighting against those who are trying to help them.

Obesity causes, or contributes to, health problems. This can be a problem when finding employment and health insurance. Businesses carry a large portion of the healthcare cost of their employees. Health problems related to obesity can also cause absence from work. There is no reason why these factors should not influence an employer’s hiring decisions. Many businesses already offer incentives to their employees if they will take certain health improvement steps and penalties if they do not. I suspect that this trend will continue and become more prevalent over time. If students are subjected to similar situations in school, it will only help to prepare them for the realities of the work place, and they may even be healthier for it.

Your health is important. If you need to lose weight to improve your health, there is no time like the present to get started. Find a weight loss program that will give you the structure and motivation you need and then get started today.

I recently stumbled across a book that teaches you how to make these incremental diet and lifestyle changes and save money in the process. With times being tight, and the ongoing struggle to lose weight, it seems like the perfect combination of topics. The name of the book is The Tight Arse Diet. This isn’t the type of book that will teach you how to drop 10 pounds in a week. The book is all about taking it slow and losing weight and saving money over time. I know that everyone wants results now now now, but sometimes you just have to take a step back, look at the big picture, and do things the right way. If you want results that will last, it’s a good way to do it. Pick up a copy of the book and see what you think. Even one tip that results in a positive change in your life will be worth the price.

If you’ve read the book, let me know what you thought about it.

I like this study because it shows that just a little bit of improvement in weight loss can make meaningful improvements in the health and function of your heart. It is easy to think that getting in shape is all about being vain and wanting others to think you have a nice body. It is important to remember that there are health benefits as well, and ultimately the health benefits are more important. If you’ve let your health slip over the years, there is no time like the present to decide to make a change. Get on a good exercise program today and your heart will thank you tomorrow.