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In the last article I covered A Women’s Workout Guide to Looking Like A Goddess. This was a workout routine geared around developing a fit and attractive body. Think, slim, toned legs and arms with a fantastic butt and nicely defined abs.
Now achieving this type of body requires more than an intelligent workout routine. It also requires proper nutrition to support a low body fat, which is what we will be talking about here.
Until you dial your nutrition in, you will spin your wheels, tirelessly and endlessly trying to strip off the last bit of fat. You see, as I discussed in the last article, exercise tends to make women hungrier, and thus eat more.
Well because fat loss is the result of taking in less calories than you burn, if exercising more gets you to eat more, then very little fat loss will ensue.
Make no mistake, exercise is an important part of the equation, but it must be in combination with great nutrition.
So there’s really only one option, and that’s to master this whole eating thing to support a slim body.
What it actually takes to drop body fat
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The goal of a diet is to achieve a calorie deficit so you take in less calories than you’re burning. This will ensure that you start to tap into body fat stores as fuel so you burn off all that unwanted fat.
The secondary goal of a diet should be to make the diet as enjoyable as possible. If a diet is satisfying and rewarding, then there’s a much higher probability that you will stick with it.
Thus, allowing you to drop to your goal weight and maintain it. Well in this post, you’ll see how most mainstream nutrition advice comes into direct conflict with either one, or both of these points.
But all you have to remember here is that a diet needs to get you to eat less calories than you burn, and it needs to be enjoyable enough so that you can stick to it in the long term.
If it takes a ton of discipline, will power and planning, preparation and time to follow, then you will burn out, sooner or later.
After-all, we’re only human ;)
Without futher ado, let’s look at the most common myths that make fat loss harder than it needs to be.
Myth #1 – Breakfast is the most important meal of the day
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Breakfast foods taste so much better when you eat them for dinner
One of the most simple and effective strategies to effortlessly drop fat is to actually skip breakfast. The idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day is flat out wrong.
In actuality, skipping breakfast is one of the best strategies you can employ for you health and to make losing fat effortless!
By skipping breakfast (aka short term fasting) – growth hormone levels sky rocket, this helps ramp up fat burning, while preserving your lean body mass.
Interestingly enough, when your body is burning body fat for energy, you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. This keeps you alert, focused and energetic, and it has a hunger blunting effect.
So much for a crashing metabolism and energy levels by forgoing a morning meal!
The benefits don’t end there! Intermittent fasting has been shown to have neuroprotective properties, improve brain health and may possibly have life extension benefits.
And from my personal experience and that of several others, it seems to work wonders for improving skin clarity and clearing up acne.
Your Body is Primed to Skip Breakfast
All-together, your body is essentially primed to skip breakfast and feast at night. So by skipping breakfast, you cut out plenty of calories first thing in the morning that your body doesn’t need, and you create more room to eat food later on, when you really want to eat.
Furthermore, skipping breakfast saves lot’s of time and preparation. You can just wake up and go on with your day. This takes the hard work and stress out of sticking to a new diet plan.
Fasting will also get you in touch with your bodies real food requirements, not the false hunger that your mind creates.
This has massive benefits for helping you to sustainably drop fat, since you can develop the ability to differentiate between real hunger and false hunger.
In other words, you break down the psychological attachment to eating and you’ll begin to naturally crave the foods your body really wants – lean proteins, veggies, fruits…
Still Skeptical?
I know, I know, we’ve been told hundreds of times that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Thankfully, studies have been emerging showing the benefits of fasting and eating most of your calories at night!
In fact, in a study on obese women, weight loss was shown to be greater with large morning meals but the extra weight loss was from lean body mass, aka muscle. Overall, the group that ate a big dinner maintained more muscle and had a bigger drop in body fat percentage. Take a look for yourself – Large evening meals are associated with a greater retention of lean body mass.
In a more recent study involving a six month trial, participants who consumed more calories with dinner lost more fat, noticed less hunger throughout the diet and saw superior hormonal changes than the group that ate more calories earlier in the day. Greater weight loss and hormonal changes in the late night eating group.
The main key to remember is that if skipping breakfast helps you better control your calorie intake and stay satisfied on a diet, then it is a valuable tool to staying lean! If you struggle to skip breakfast, your best bet is to go with a light breakfast, while still having a good amount of room to eat a big dinner.
In that case, I’d recommend a piece of fruit and some protein – greek yogurt, a quest bar or an egg white scramble with 1-2 whole eggs are all great options!
In my up coming course, The Goddess Toning Program, I provide women the flexibility to skip breakfast completely, or eat a light breakfast!
All the while still allowing them the freedom to eat plenty of food for dinner. Being able to enjoy a delicious and satisfying dinner each night takes the grind out of dieting.
Breakfast Skipping Tips
Make sure to drink plenty of water in the morning and a cup or two of black coffee works wonders at diminishing appetite and boosting energy. There’s no need to fast excessively. Simply, push your first meal until about lunch time or 4-6 hours after rising.
Make sure that your first meal is healthy and satisfying. There’s no need to skimp on food after a productive fast.
Myth #2 – Eat small meals every few hours
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Dig in Ladies
One of my favorite myths to beat to death is the whole idea that you have to eat every few hours to keep your metabolism running on ‘high gear’. It’s actually one of the stupidest myths in existence. It’s based on the concept of the Thermogenic Effect of Food.
Meaning, when we eat food, it takes a little bit of energy to process and digest that meal. So many people’s logical conclusion is to eat more often to maximize the thermogenic effect of food. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a lick of a difference how often you eat.
It’s about total food volume. So if you eat 1600 calories across two meals or six meals, you’ll still burn the same amount of calories digesting. The difference being, if you eat 6 meals, you’re looking at roughly 250-275 calories per meal, that’s hardly a meal for a kid, let a lone an adult.
Eat Big Meals & Drop Fat
In the two meal example, you can eat two 800 calories awesome meals! Or if you prefer three meals, you can keep your first two meals around 400 calories and have a big ass dinner of 800 calories.
To put it into context, in the 2 or 3 meal example, you could go to chipotle and get a burrito bowl with rice, beans, fajita veggies, salsa, double meat and plenty of cheese for 800 calories. All that while dropping fat and looking fabulous, not bad.
In the six meal example, you could eat a few slices of chicken and a few spoon full’s of rice and that’s your meal! No wonder people think getting an amazing body is torture. They’re teasing themselves with small bites of food every few hours because they think they have to.
Funny enough, I’ve actually met and even dated a few models in my time. And most of them either skipped breakfast or ate a very small breakfast, a medium sized lunch and a big dinner! Hell it’s the only way to make dieting sustainable year round!
We want to have that big meal we can look forward to each day. That truly fulfils and satisfies us! Otherwise, it’s all sacrifice and no reward!
Myth #3 – Categorizing Food into Good Foods Bad Foods
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While I’m all for basing your diet off healthy, natural foods, there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy treats in a little moderation. In fact, the mainstream obsession with labelling specific foods as good and specific foods as bad is making it harder and harder to drop fat.
Why could this be? Well because in the context of fat loss – there’s no such thing as good foods and bad foods. As long as you are eating the proper amount of calories, you will lose weight.
Funny enough, people with the good food bad food mentality actually tend to eat more calories. This is because when they feel a food is ‘good for them’ they feel like they can eat as much of it as they want.
Even though they may be eating lots of ‘healthy foods’ it’s still easy to overeat calories. This is especially true for women, who burn less calories than men, because, on average, they are smaller. The other issue is that when you deprive yourself of eating the foods that you want, you will eventually give in.
And when you give in, you will feel inherently guilty. This feeling of guilt flooding through your body will make you feel horrible. How do we deal with feeling horrible? We eat more. But we don’t just eat more, we rationalize it.
We tell ourselves, well I already blew my diet, so I may as well just keep eating. Or we tell ourselves, tomorrow or Monday I will start again, but only this time I’ll be way more strict!
The Solution to Good Foods Bad Foods
Forget about good food and bad foods. Find out how many calories you can eat each day and focus on hitting that number, not exactly, just ballpark it. Most of your food intake should be composed of healthy, delicious and filling foods like lean meats, fruits, veggies, coconut oil for cooking, and tubers (potatoes and sweet potatoes).
That said, if you love specific foods, well eat them. Just make sure not to go over your calories. If you’re eating 2-3 meals per day, chances are you’ll have the wiggle room to enjoy your favorite treats in moderation.
Now be conscious of the amount of calories that you’re taking in from desserts and treats. Sometimes, it’s simply not worth the caloric load to eat certain desserts or treats on a consistent basis. For this reason you may gravitate to different desserts and treats than you’re accustomed to.
My favorite treat is frozen yogurt icecream with a handful of chocolate chips! I always let the icecream melt so it turns into a creamy soft serve style icecream. The frozen yogurt icecream has about half the calories of traditional icecream. This means I can enjoy a solid serving without going over my calories.
When you’re eating delicious desserts every night and dropping fat, well hey, life is pretty awesome!
One More Word on Good Foods Bad Foods
Often times, foods that make ‘fat loss’ very difficult are labelled as good foods. And foods that actually are very filling are labelled as bad foods. For example, nuts are often labelled as very healthy. But they are more calorie dense than chocolate.
If all you really want is a couple pieces of chocolate, but instead you snack on nuts, a healthy alternative, you will unquestionably eat a lot more nuts without feeling truly satisfied. Moreover, often times brown rice is labelled as a ‘good food’. Yet potatoes are not!
Interestingly enough, potatoes are one of the most filling foods in existence, and rice (brown or otherwise), doesn’t even come close to the filling effects of potatoes.
As you start to focus on eating to support a low body fat, you begin to uncover which foods make eating less calories most enjoyable! Often times, certain ‘healthy foods’ don’t make the cut, and certain ‘junk foods’ do! Not a bad thing if you ask me :).
As long as you’re eating predominately healthy, natural foods and avoiding chemical filled, trans fat latent junk, then you’re fine.
There’s no need to stress that having a little sugar at night is going to wreak havoc on your body, it’s not! It’s a matter of context. And if you’re eating less than you burn, there’s very little likelihood that you’re overdoing it.
Myth #4 – Cut out carbs or fats
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Ah yes, there isn’t just good foods bad foods, there’s the tendency for an entire macronutrient, namely carbs or fats, to be demonized! In the 80’s it was all about eating low fat, the common consensus was that fat made you fat.
Then in the 90’s and 2000’s +, the low carb era hit! People believed if they kept carbs very low, they would be burning fat all the time. But the fact of that matter is that people have successfully lost weight eating low carbs and they’ve successfully lost weight eating low fat.
The common denominator is eating less calories than your body burns! If cutting out carbs or fats get you to eat less, well that’s going to result in some weight loss.
When you understand that neither carbs, nor fats are inherently evil, well you can enjoy them both, in moderation, while dropping fat and looking great.
What does this mean? You can actually enjoy food for once. Since all the best foods and meals include plenty of carbs and fats!
Stop Excluding Fats & Carbs
And Mary mother of Jesus is this better or what? You can eat meals compromised of delicious meat and baked potato wedges.
You can enjoy icecream, pizza, hamburgers, french fries, on occasion… All of which have both fat and carbs. And yes, you can eat these foods and drop fat, if you work them into your calorie intake for the day.
Finally, because you’re not restricting fats or carbs, you’ll likely feel way better! Fats are vital to a women’s hormonal production, going low in fat can wreak havoc on your body.
Going low in carbs will reduce the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, making you less happy, relaxed and making sleep more difficult.
As you can see, low fat or low carb diets are both very problematic, in their own right! I suggest eating a balanced intake of food, and eating just 2-3 times per day!
It takes some getting used to, eating just 2-3 times per day, but when you master it, you will be able to drop fat eating delicious foods and staying completely satisfied.
Myth #5 – Don’t eat meat
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Some men and women turn to a vegetarian diet, because they believe that meat is bad for them and will make them gain weight. This is crazy talk! The reality is that meat is incredibly high in protein and vitamins and minerals.
Protein is the most filling macronutrient. Meaning, if you eat 200 calories from protein, you will be far more full than if you were to eat 200 calories from carbs or fats.
So when women decide to cut out meat, invariably, their protein intake goes down, and it becomes more and more difficult to stay full without overeating calories.
After all, have you ever heard of someone overeating on chicken breast? Hell you could even make delicious chicken tenders fried in coconut oil, but you’d still find yourself becoming full quite quickly!
Meat Keeps You Lean
The same phenomenon doesn’t hold true with many other foods! If you’re starving and turn to a bag of nuts, you could likely devour an entire bag of 500-600 calories before feeling moderately satisfied.
500-600 calories of nuts isn’t even that much! Look at those small packages of nuts, the bestowed healthy option, at a convenient store and you’ll see what I mean.
Or maybe you make moves to pasta, good luck! Cereals, pasta and rice are insanely high in calories! Next time, just weigh the amount of cereal/rice/pasta you’re using, and you will be quickly depressed at how many ‘serving sizes’ are in your meal!
A modest portion of pasta, cereal or rice is in the ballpark of 600 calories! And you’ll eat that and be hungry again in a couple hours.
So if your goal is to slim down and maintain a lean body effortlessly, you should be eating a good amount of meat! It will supply you with plenty of protein to help maintain muscle, so you drop fat not muscle, and it will keep you quite full on a diet.
Don’t be scared of meat ladies! Just go with lean or very lean forms of meat like chicken breast, turkey, flank steak, sirloin beef, tilapia, salmon, pork tenderloin…. All of which, have a lot more protein than fat. This will ensure that you fill up on lower calories.
Concluding Thoughts
As you can see, most of the nutrition advice projected onto women, have made it increasingly more difficult to eat at a calorie deficit and enjoy it. This has resulted in women struggling to lose weight while trying to stick to a ton of crazy, nonsensical rules.
Force feeding morning breakfasts, trying to eat every 3 hours, sticking to tiny meals, trying to only eat clean foods, cutting out carbs or fats or meat…. This is just some of the most prevalent myths, there’s hundreds more where that came from!
But thankfully, there’s only one question to be conscious of. How do I make eating less calories (so you lose weight) as enjoyable as possible? Does eating 6 tiny meals make dieting easy and enjoyable and is it something you can stick with for life?
If you put through every piece of diet advice through that filter, you will cut straight through the bullshit and determine if something is good advice or bad advice!
Goddess Toning Program
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I am pleased to announce that the Goddess Toning Program will be released in the next day or two! This is probably the most effective and enjoyable program for women who want to slim down and develop a great looking body.
You’ll learn how much you can enjoy food while looking slimmer each and every week! You’ll also learn how to stay motivated throughout the entire journey, develop true self acceptance so the fitness journey isn’t just a means to an end, but an amazing adventure each and every step of the way.
And you’ll learn the best workouts to develop a great looking body with slim legs, nicely defined abs, a toned upperbody and an amazing butt! To make sure you don’t miss the release sign up for the details at Goddess Toning Program.
In this episode, I sit down with Lyle Mcdonald, hands down one of the smartest authorities on fitness and nutrition that the world has ever scene. Lyle is notorious for his uncanny ability to make even the most complicated concepts become simply understood and internalized, by anyone.
