Nick Mitchell's Ultimate Performance » Obesity

101 Fat Loss Tips (16)- Take Photos

Nick — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:50:25 +0000

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean: Take photos

They say that the camera never lies. Let me tell you that it is about the only truly reliable medium by which to be 100% certain of your real fat loss progress.

The mirror plays tricks on you – every mirror ever owned by a woman adds 20lbs and every mirror ever owned by a man suddenly turns him into Conan!

The weighing scale is no friend either. If you are lucky enough to have a great personal trainer (cough, cough!) then you may not actually lose all that much body weight despite losing a heck of a lot of body fat. On our 6 week rapid fat loss programmes many of our male clients lose only about 5-10 lbs of overall body weight despite losing 20lbs plus of fat! This is because their body composition has made a paradigm shift towards holding muscle at the expense of fat. They may weigh almost the same but they definitely look and feel a whole lot better!

He did this is in 6 weeks! What can you do?

The other solid option for measuring fat loss progress is if you work with an experienced personal trainer who really knows how to use a pair of calipers. Charles Poliquin says that it takes about 3,000 measurements to become proficient with calipers so do make sure that if you use them you are working with a competent practitioner. Moreover, if your coach gets out a pair of cheap plastic Accumeasure type calipers tell him / her not to waste your time. To ensure proper accuracy they need to be using medical grade calipers of the type put out by Harpenden. In fact the absolute best person to gauge your body fat losses would be a good BioSignature Modulation expert. We will delve into the magic of BioSignature in a later Fat Loss Tip.

So when it comes down to it, the simplest and best method for assessing your continued fat loss progress is to take regular photos. As I said earlier the (un-photo shopped)camera never lies, and you would be astounded by how small improvements creep up on you unseen and accumulate into remarkable body transformations!

Who can fail to be motivated by visible fat loss like this!

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean: Be accountable for your fat loss

Nick — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:34:34 +0000

Be accountable for your fat loss

Fat loss can be a lonely business. Achieving your peak physical condition doesn’t exactly widen your opportunities to socialise, and temptations are around every corner (or in every biscuit barrel and sweet tin). We all have ongoing internal dialogues and sometimes the good voice is strong, and sometimes it is weak and willing to succumb to whatever vice lies in our path and throw the fat loss out of the window. If you are anything like me you will be a master of self justification. How many times have I heard my personal training clients and / or myself utter such self defeating phrases as:

“Just one won’t hurt”

“I am low on carbs, I need the energy”

One for the bodybuilders – “I feel flat, I need to get some glycogen in my system”

Would you shy from your fat loss regime if you were accountable to this man?!

Pfah! Having a cheat / reefed meal is not necessarily the end of the fat loss world, but having an unplanned one almost always leads to a real and significant falling of the dieting wagon. One way to avoid this very common pitfall is to make yourself accountable to someone. This is one of the ways that a good personal trainer can earn their fees. My trainers always stay on top of all our personal training clients, and those clients in turn can expect to receive encouragement and praise if they have stuck to their fat loss plans, and something of a telling off if they let things slip too much. Those of you who know me will appreciate that “something of a telling off” only tends to happen once, after that most of my clients realise that we both have a lot invested in their success and that accountability to me to follow through on our work helps us achieve some often spectacular results!

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean(12): Take responsibility

Nick — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:41:21 +0000

Tips to lose fat and get lean: Take Responsibility

Excuses, excuses, excuses. These are the real culprits of 99.9% of all failed fat loss programmes. Getting big and muscular is very often a complicated process requiring a tonne of forethought and planning. Getting super lean is nowhere near as intellectually challenging, but boy does it require discipline and perseverance.

Take responsibility for your own fat loss and maybe you can look this good!

Only those who have the maturity and desire to take full responsibility for their exercise and nutritional choices have what it takes to achieve the ultimate ripped look. Long term fat loss, and superlative condition do not come easy – ask our personal training clients who bust their spleens week in week out in the gym in order to look as good as they do. Take a hard look at yourself, do you have the responsibility to act out your desires and reach your best ever condition?

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean(11): Your mouth is not a vacuum!

Nick — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:39:20 +0000

Tips to lose fat and get lean: Your mouth is not a vacuum!

Charles Poliquin has often lectured that no one ever ate anything by accident. His hard line, zero tolerance policy on excuse making isn’t necessarily the correct approach for everybody’s fat loss strategies but it sure gets the message across. The blunt fact is that your mouth is not a vacuum and you are 100% responsible for everything that you eat.

Charles Poliquin, a man who knows a thing or two about fat loss!

You don’t need to, and should refrain from, hoovering your food as if it will disappear if you don’t shovel it down quickly enough. It’s not going anywhere and maybe if you take your time you will allow your stomach to feel full and you won’t end up eating too much!

Tips to lose fat and get lean(10): Educate yourself about nutrition

Nick — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:20:37 +0000

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 fat loss and your cosmetic body composition, but also a profound and often long lasting impact upon your health. I make nutrition and supplementation a vital part of all our personal training advice and it has stood me in great stead when it comes to getting real world results.

There are many fantastic nutrition books out there ranging from the popular and well know “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.

Fit & Ripped at Forty – The Men’s Health Transformation

Nick — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:37:51 +0000

Many of you will have read the cover article in last month’s Men’s Health magazine detailing my work with Fitness Editor Wesley Doyle where I helped him drop from 20% to 10% body fat and achieve the very best shape of his life at 40 years of age.

You can read more about this dual feat of fat loss and muscle building at our main London personal training site, with the main articles being found in our fat loss training articles section.

Not in bad shape really...

In fantastic shape (and with a slightly better haircut too..)

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean (5): never skip a meal

Nick — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:28:32 +0000

Tips to lose fat and get lean: never skip a meal

Resist the temptation to accelerate your fat loss program by skipping meals. It doesn’t work and in the long run it is highly counterproductive.

The best way to lose fat and get as lean as possible is to plan ahead, prepare your meals and know what you are going to eat ahead of time. Yes this is “inconvenient”, and many of our personal training clients initially complain but once their fat loss results start to come through they soon realise that meal preparation is key to successful body composition improvements.

Those who skip meals tend to suffer for a number of reasons:

1) Skipping meals means you are far more likely to experience low blood sugar symptoms and the inevitable carbohydrate cravings that go with it. This makes a blowout binge eating session all the more likely. Trust me in this, we have all been there and it sure isn’t pretty!

2) Your body requires the right nutrients at the right time. Even if you are not at all concerned with building muscle, protein should be of primary importance and I have found that eating some protein (the amount is hugely dependent upon your activity levels, specific goals, and current muscle mass) every 2-3 hours makes an enormous difference to losing body FAT as opposed to just bodyweight. The distinction between losing fat and weight is a very significant one as losing the latter almost always involves losing muscle. This is a terrible thing to do if you want your actual fat loss to be permanent as muscle is the most metabolically efficient cellular substance in the body and the more we have the faster our metabolisms are. Our muscles need regular supplies of protein to maintain themselves, especially when we are in a hypocalorific state (as when we “diet” to lose weight / fat), so regular protein feedings are essential to your long term fat loss success.

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean (4): be consistent!

Nick — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:11:35 +0000

Tips to lose fat and get lean: be consistent!

Rome wasn’t built in a day and no one ever dropped a lot of body fat (and kept it off!) without patience, perseverance and consistency.

The most successful fat loss programmes are those that you can live with and integrate into your daily life. With 70% of our fat loss focused personal training clients I tend to advise lower carbohydrate diets for instance, but never (unless in the most unusual and short term of cases) something as unmanageable as the crazy zero carbohydrate Atkins diet. It’s a symptom of our modern world that we want instant gratification for our efforts but the human body can’t and won’t change overnight. A measly 1lb of fat loss every week may not seem like much after 4 weeks (4lbs), but what about after 6 months?! 26lbs of fat loss is a great achievement, and even more so when you have done it properly and at a pace that doesn’t shock your body into down regulating important hormones such as thyroid and leptin that are vital for a healthy metabolism.

Yes, we can and often do have clients drop significantly more body fat than 1lb a week, but that is when they are surrounded by the support network that we provide giving them all the tools, both mental and physical, to skyrocket their fat loss to amazing proportions. Just look at our personal training client, Wesley Doyle – the fitness editor at Men’s Health, in the Jan/Feb 2009 Men’s Health magazine if you want proof!

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean (2): Drink Diet Coke / Pepsi to kill appetite

Nick — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:49:24 +0000

101 Tips to lose fat and get lean: Drink Diet Coke / Pepsi to kill appetite

Not exactly the healthiest fat loss “trick” in my arsenal, but if you are living a clean and guilt free lifestyle the occasional diet coke isn’t going to do you any harm.

When dieting for bodybuilding competitions I used to find that I could control my hunger pangs and cravings by drinking a cold can of diet coke. The combination of the caffeine and bubbles (filling up my stomach) would really curb my appetite and stop me from munching until the time came when I was allowed to eat another meal.

I do recommend this dieting strategy to my personal training clients who embark upon our wildly successful Meltdown / Fat Loss Program – 6 weeks and an average body fat loss of 16lbs are results that speak for themselves!

Lose Belly Fat and Live Longer!

Nick — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:08:02 +0000

Belly Fat Doubles Death Risk

A interesting piece on the importance of losing belly fat by the always insightful Jonny Bowden. Take a note on the importance of modulating insulin for both cosmetic fat loss and overall health and longevity.

From Jonny Bowden on the risks of belly fat:

Belly fat is in the news again, big time.

First some background: A ton of stuff has been written about the difference between “apples” and “pears”, apples being folks who store their fat around the middle and “pears” being those who store it on the hips butt and thighs. Fact is, all fat is not created equal. The fat stored around the butt hips and thighs- also known as subcutaneous fat since it’s right below the skin- might drive you crazy and make it hard to put on your jeans, but it’s not nearly as dangerous as the other kind. The fat stored around the middle- also called VAT or visceral abdominal fat- is a metabolic nightmare. Stored deep inside the abdominal walls, it is metabolically active fat that directly increases the risk for all sorts of health problems from metabolic syndrome to diabetes.

OK, now on to the study.

Researchers looked at data from almost 360,000 Europeans who had been enrolled in a larger study called the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. They followed these folks for ten years, during which 14,723 of the participants died. What they found was that men and women with the largest waists had virtually twice the risk for premature death as those with the smallest ones.

According to Tobias Pischon, MD, MPH, the lead author of the study, the single most important finding in their study was that it the distribution of body fat affected the risk of premature death. Where you store your fat is even more important than what you weigh. And this was true even when weight is normal. “There aren’t many simple individual characteristics that can increase a person’s risk of premature death to this extent, independent of smoking and drinking” said Pischon.

For years we nutritionists have been using a “low-tech” shorthand for insulin resistance: a 40 inch (or greater) waist for men, a 35 inch (or greater) waist for women. Interestingly, that was exactly the number that correlated with a doubled risk for death when compared with smaller waists (less than 34 inches for men, less than 28 inches for women). Each 2 inch increase in waist circumference added about 17% increased risk for mortality in men and about 13% increased mortality in women.

Earlier this year I reported research showing that these numbers (40 inch waist for men, 35 for women) also indicated an increased risk for stroke.

Bottom line: reduce your belly fat. If you’re an apple, chances are you’re also insulin resistant, and would benefit from a diet low in carbohydrates. In my opinion, that’s the absolute best “nutritional intervention” to reduce the most dangerous kind of fat on the body (as well as the plain old garden variety “unsightly” kind).

Just remember that low-carb doesn’t mean unlimited calories. The absolute best way to go is lower calorie combined with controlled carb eating. For a good calorie goal take your target weight and multiply by 10. That’s a great starting point.

And remember also that you’ll not only be reducing your belly fat- you’ll also be reducing the risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, some cancers and… oh yes, just plain dying.

Seems to me those are pretty good reasons to start eating differently!