If losing body fat is your main aim, what you do in the kitchen is as important to your chances of success as what you do in the gym. The good news is that eating for fat loss isn’t complicated, as long as you are disciplined and stick to a number of key rules. Each meal plan has been built around these considerations, so following them exactly will result in reduced body fat and increased muscle mass. Here are the seven fundamental rules behind the plans.
GREEN IS GOOD
Vegetables should be the foundation of your diet and every time you sit down to eat half your plate should be covered in a variety of veg, which contains crucial fibre and lots of other healthy elements. Vegetables do contain carbs, but far less than bread, pasta or potatoes – you’d have to eat half a kilo of asparagus to get the same amount of carbs as in a single wholemeal pitta bread.
FOCUS ON PROTEIN
Protein is one of the most important components of this nutrition plan. When you eat a high-protein diet, you’re generally less hungry, so you eat less and lose weight as a result. It’s difficult to eat too much protein but not to get too little, so stick to the serving suggestions in the plans.
DON’T FEAR FAT
Fat does not make you fat. In fact, you need to consume good-quality fats if you want to burn body fat because this macronutrient has a role in energy expenditure, vitamin storage and making the hormone testosterone, which also increases muscle mass. There’s no need to avoid the fats in red meat, avocado and nuts, but you shouldn’t eat hydrogenated and trans fats – those found in cakes, biscuits and other processed foods – because these will derail your fat-loss mission. Plus they’re really bad for you.
START THE DAY SMART
Think of breakfast like any other meal: you need a blend of protein, fats and veg. It may seem strange to eat steak and broccoli first thing, but such a breakfast will start the supply of quality nutrients to your muscles and get your metabolism firing to burn body fat.
CALORIES DON’T COUNT
Still locked into the oldschool ‘calories in, calories out’ rule for fat loss? Here’s a quick question: which will make you fatter, 2,000 calories from ice cream or 2,000 calories from chicken and veg? Be honest – you know the answer to this already. The intake of the correct macronutrients is ultimately more significant than mere calorie counting. That said, you can’t just scoff thousands of calories’ worth of healthy food – 5,000 calories from steak is still a lot of calories. The aim is to hit the correct macronutrient numbers to build muscle and burn fat without eating any extra unnecessary calories. So stick to the portion sizes in the meal plans.
FREE RANGE IS KEY
Free range animals have a more varied diet and obtain a lot more exercise, which allows the development of more muscle, which in turn means they contain more zinc, vitamins B, A and K, amino acids, iron, selenium, phosphorus and zinc. Farmraised salmon have also been found to contain up to eight times the level of carcinogens as the wild sort, thanks to cramped conditions and poorquality feed, while grass-fed beef tends to have much more conjugated linoleic acid and omega 3s than the kind fed on grain and beef tallow. In fact, free range meat and fish is so nutritionally dissimilar to cage-reared that it’s basically different food.
EAT REAL FOOD
Aim to eat only food that grows out of the ground or that once had a face. Alternatively, think like a hunter-gatherer. Ask yourself if a given food would have existed 5,000 years ago. If not, you probably shouldn’t eat it. Avoid things containing preservatives that you can’t spell or ingredients you wouldn’t keep in the kitchen. And eat things that will rot eventually, so that you know they’re fresh.
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