THE WORST THINGS TO DO WHILE TRYING TO BURN FAT

1. Heavily restrict your calorie intake.

Sure, it may make logical sense that if you only eat a cup of salad a day, you’ll be losing fat like melting butter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work like that. The truth is, your body hates heavy calorie restriction and crash diets…they almost instantly send your body in to “starvation mode”, decreasing metabolism and causing your body to hold on to your fat stores as a starvation protection mechanism. Moderate, not severe, calorie restriction is the way to go for consistent, week-to-week fat loss…but even that can become problematic. Bringing us to our next worst thing to NEVER do while dieting:

2. Restrict calories for more than one week.

No matter how moderate your calorie restriction, it won’t take the body long to figure out that you’re eating fewer calories than it’s used to getting on a daily basis. The result? Decreased basal metabolic rate, meaning slowed fat loss and the infamous, dreaded fat loss plateau. Not only do fat loss plateaus disencourage a person from attaining their weight loss goals, but they’re incredibly disheartening psychologically and cause many people to give up on diets from the lack of progress. I mean, who wants to sacrifice for no reward? One of the many reasons behind this issues is because when you are continually cutting back calories, your leptin sensitivity drops. Leptin is our satiety hormone, and if that falls, your body thinks we are starving, so it becomes incredibly efficient at holding body fat instead of burning it. Other research has shown that it takes just under a week for important fat burning hormones to drop off due to calorie restriction, so it’s best that calorie restriction be limited to 1 week at a time.

So what do you do to “reset” your metabolism after a week of dieting? Well, that brings us to our next worst thing to NEVER do while dieting:

3. Deprive yourself of your favorite foods.

Do you like ice cream? Yeah, me too. How about pizza? Love it. Shame that these delectable favorites aren’t on the “approved” foods list of very many “diets,” and that brings up several problems:

A) You’re GOING to cheat. Yes, even you with the supersonic willpower you will cheat sooner or later because you are going against your biochemical nature to eat. And when you do, you’re going to overeat and feel guilty and defeated. However, you don’t have to, and you shouldn’t feel that way.

Our best recommendation besides avoiding these mistakes is to follow our intermittent fasting protocol on the days you don’t exercise. New research shows, it’s not so much what you eat but when you eat. If you get all three meals in within an eight-hour window, your body by nature is always going to be on the fat burning side because it takes roughly 12 hours to begin breaking down reserved fatty acids from our system. Besides, intermittent fasting has been proven to keep you feeling and looking young because it causes something called autophagy. To understand precisely what this means and the mechanism behind it, please click here.