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!
Allan is the owner and editor of “Mind of Allan” where he writes about explorations in lifestyle development covering wide topics such as personal development, travel, health and dating. He seeks to help other develop the lifestyle that they want and stop settling for mediocrity.
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