K1 Strength & Fitness

It's All About the Food

Time and time again I have to remind myself of this simple, yet frustrating fact. "It's all about the food."Even though I'm a certified personal trainer, I am still a human being that loves to eat, and when I say eat, I mean burgers, fries and sweets, whatever, I get cravings too. So when I notice a little extra weight here or there, and I start thinking back on what I've been doing differently for the last few weeks, it's never a question of working out, it always ends up with how I've been eating... Most woman think that if they just do enough cardio and watch those numbers of calories go up on the treadmill screen, the math will work. Burning300 calories, when your eating 2000...Just not an effective plan at all. If your looking to drop fat, you must have a calorie deficit of energy in vs. energy out.

What does that mean? Let's look at food as energy in and exercise as energy out. If you don't have a significant deficit of energy in, you can treadmill all day long and probably never create that deficit of energy out. Why? because one, your probably eating to much crap, and two, you've probably adapted to your treadmill routine and your not burning as many calories as you were when you first started. To make matters worse, you've just wasted time and energy that could be put to better use doing interval training. Your time is precious isn't it and you do want to lose fat don't you?

So, what do you do? Your create a calorie deficit by having a nutritional strategy in place that you comply with 90% of the time, leaving 10% for an occasional cheat meal here and there. (creating 1st deficit here)
Next, you learn to strength train with a higher intensity to create a metabolic disturbance that fires up that metabolism and burns even more calories. (more deficit)
And third, you'll add in interval training from now on, to cut your cardio time in half or even less, to burn even more calories throughout the next 24 hours. (more calorie deficit)
The take home message here is to stop thinking which exercises will work, how many days should I train, should I kickbox, do pilates or hire a trainer....none will have a great effect when your goal is fat loss, if YOU don't address the food. It's all about the food.

Dedicated to J.M. ;)