I’ve been on a bit of a diet craze the last 4 months. To be honest.
Dieting is lame! I don’t care who you are and where you’re from. You
can’t honestly tell me that dieting is the best thing ever. We diet not
because we wholeheartedly want to. It’s because we either want something
or it’s a necessity.
The perfect scenario would be if it was possible to lose weight and
be healthy while eating loads of junk food. Wouldn’t that be sweet.
Sadly that is just not the reality we live in. So we diet our way to a leaner body and work our asses off in the gym.
Well that’s what I do… sort of.
It’s been working though. I feel great and I can see signs of a
six-pack forming on my abdomen area, so what I’m doing must be working.
You must be thinking “He must be following a strict diet and spending tons of time on the treadmill” that can’t be further from the truth.
I don’t count calories. I don’t follow a strict and boring diet plan. I don’t even do cardio.
I’m lazy at heart. So I’ve always been following the principle of “Do the least amount of work required to get the intended results”.
Let me share you some of my simple yet effective principles.
Cut the carbs
One of the biggest culprit on why you never seem to lose much weight
is because you eat too much carbohydrates. Trust me, when I started to
actually count calories and figure out how much of what was in 100g of
rice or even two slices of toast bread; I was astonished. It’s not that
carbs are bad, but excessive amount of it and depending on the source
of carbs you get, can be detrimental to how you’ll progress on your
diet. The general rule is you want to avoid white carbs such as bread,
rice, soft drinks, sugar and fruits. To make it even simpler. Which is
what I’m doing. Cut all carbs.
You heard me. Cut it all out.
Quite controversial if you’re a certified nutritionist. You might
even deem it as extreme. But to get extreme results. Extreme measures
must be taken.
However I do not recommend you doing this long-term. I’m dieting from
a short term framework where I try and achieve my results the quickest
way possible; then applying a more long-term approach afterwards.
If you want a more long-term oriented process and you don’t feel that
a six.pack is on your need-to-do-list. Then in terms of carbs you can
just eat vegetables. Eat all the vegetables you want and the occasional
1-2 pieces of fruit. Nothing more. The reason being vegetables have a
low count of carbohydrates per 100g.
In 100g of red peppers you’ll only find 5 grams of carbohydrates compared to 30 grams in 100g of bread.
So you”ll most likely feel full after eating 200g of vegetables and
you’ve eaten less than 70% of carbs that you usually would get from
eating rice or bread. With those numbers backing youup , you are sure to
lose weight.
The reason you only eat 1-2 pieces of fruits is because fruits have
high carb count(fructose). But they contain so many vitamins and
nutrients that it’s worth eating 1 or 2. Just don’t over do it.
Drink loads of water
When you feel hungry; most of the time it isn’t because you need food. You’re actually just thirsty.
The plus side is there’s zero carbs in water. You also need to keep
your body well hydrated if you want to help your body burn fat and
supply your body with the needed nutrients and vitamins.
It’s recommended that you drink at least 5-8 tall glass of water every day.
So next time before you make a snack. Try drinking a tall glass of water.
Hit the weights
This would probably be good news for the guys. But you don’t need to
do cardio if you have a solid diet. So you can just focus on lifting
weights. However realize you won’t be growing much when you’re trying to
lose weight. But it’s still necessary that you keep working out hard to
keep those hard earned muscles. You want to hit the gym at least 3
times a week either doing a full-body workout or a 3-day split. It
doesn’t really matter if you do high reps or low. Just stick with one
thing.
But the majority of your exercises should be compound exercises since
they hit more muscles and trigger a longer fat burning duration. You
want to have 4-6 exercises in each workout, lasting no longer than 45-60
minutes.
Protein and fat
Since you won’t be getting a lot of carbs you want to stock up on
protein and good fat. The conventional idea is that fat is bad – that
isn’t the case. As always excessive amounts of anything is bad. But fats
are actually crucial to your bod’s well being. So what you want to do
is eat healthy fat; the monounsaturated kind.
As one of my friends told me “To burn fat, you need to eat fat”. So don’t feat fat. Embrace it. The good ones at least.
You want to eat at least 1 gram protein, per body weight. So that means if you weight 200 pounds. You need to eat 200g protein.
If you weigh yourself in kilograms then it’s 2g of protein per body
weight. Meaning if you weigh 80kg. You need to eat 160g protein.
Simple isn’t it?
But wait. How do you know how much protein you’re eating if you don’t
count it and do research. Didn’t you say you don’t count calories?
Well I lied. I do count or did.
What you only need to do is to find out the nutritional values in the
food you eat the most. For example one of my main stable foods are 500g
of minced meat. I know that I get around 90g of protein from that. So I
just visit my grocery store and buy a 500g minced beef meat. Go home
and fix a nice little dish up with some red peppers, onion and garlic.
Add a little spice to it and voila! Dinner is served.
Then if I’m missing a bit of protein later that day. I take the easy
route and just grab a protein shake. Where 1 scoop is usual around 22g
of protein.
So I recommend that you find out the nutritional values of the food
you eat the most. Make a mental note or write it down to help you
remember it so you know how much of what you need to eat. Make some
stable dishes that you can eat and buy some protein powder. After a
while you have an idea of how much you need to eat to fulfill your
protein requirements. No need to count every single meal when you
already know what’s in it.
Have a binge day
After all your hard work you can reward yourself with one binge day per week.
A binge day is one day where you can eat whatever you want. I usually
do these on a Friday or a Saturday where I fill myself up with ice
cream, pizzas and KFC. Yummy!
Once Sunday rolls in it’s back on the diet. Or should I say the 5
principles. Because really this isn’t a diet. Just 5 principles that if
you follow you would undoubtedly lose weight.
I tried this on my mom and my sister. The both lost 10-12 pounds in a
month and that’s with no gym time and just following the principles I
gave them. They were amazed!
I called it a food revolution at my place!
So if you want to lose some weight quickly. Cut the carbs. Drink more
water. Hit the gym. Eat protein and fat. Reward yourself with one binge
day per week.
Enjoy!
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