Hawkes Bay Personal Trainer shares five fat loss secrets

Hawkes Bay Personal Trainer, Paul Miller shares five fat loss secrets you need to know

1. Eat Fat to beat fat.

While too much of the wrong types of fat such as trans-fats found in cookies and crackers are without a doubt bad for your health, a diet rich in good fats can help you with both your health and your waist line. Good fats such as coconut oil, avocados, olive oil, nuts and seeds have been proven to significantly reduce belly fat. As a bonus, fat also makes us feel fuller for longer as it is nutrient dense.

2. Cut with cocoa.

Cocoa contains more antioxidants than most foods. A 2005 study in Japan found mice that ate cocoa lost more fatty tissue than the mice that didn’t. You might be thinking that humans are not the same as mice; you would be correct however our DNA is surprisingly similar. To be precise 97% the same.  If you’re thinking wow this gives me the green light to go and gorge on chocolate then you’re sadly mistaken. There is no question that eating too much chocolate will make you fat. I would recommend eating a couple of squares of chocolate no more than twice a week and make sure the cocoa content is high while the sugar content is low, aiming for chocolate that is at least 80% cocoa.

3. Exercise on its own is not enough to beat the bulge.

I cannot stress this enough; you cannot out train a bad diet. For some reason people believe that if they are exercising they can eat whatever they like. In around 5 minutes it is quite easy to consume over 800 calories if you’re let’s saying eating pizza and washing it down with wine. Now if you were to push yourself with high intensity cardio for 5 minutes you would be lucky to burn 60 calories. We all know that it takes less time to eat than exercise but ask yourself this, were those couple of slices of pizza worth the hour high intensity training you will have to put in, in order to burn it off?

4. Long cardio sessions are not helping you burn the fat.

If you’re a cardio queen and you do the same treadmill work-out again and again then this one is for you. Long cardio session have been shown to raise cortisol, our bodies stress hormone and burn muscle which will ultimately lead to your metabolism down regulating and slowing. Besides, that research shows that long cardio sessions are not nearly as effective as interval training (short bursts of heart racing exercise followed by bouts of recovery). One study by Angelo Tremblay showed that interval training burned 9 times more fat than conventional long cardio training. To experience the incredible benefits of interval training check out how Bootcamp Hawkes Bay can help

5. Sleep to sculpt.

Sleep is one of the most important yet most ignored factors to fat loss. A study at the University of Chicago’s general clinical resources centre showed that dieters who got eight and a half hours sleep nightly lost 56% more body fat than compared to those eating the exact same 1,450 calories per day diet who only got five hours thirty minutes sleep a night. When you don’t get enough hours of sleep your leptin, a hormone that is responsible for making you feel full depletes and ghrelin a hormone that is responsible for your hunger levels increases, so lack of sleep leads to the feeling of both greater hunger and never feeling full, a real bad combination for those trying to lose weight.