Burn...Baby...Burn

Almost every conventional diet program ever conceived has one thing in common: Extremely low calories. Nearly all of these low calorie diets produce weight loss in the beginning. The problem is, none of them work for long – it’s physiologically impossible to lose fat permanently by starving yourself. The human body is simply too “smart” for this to ever work.

When you starve the fat, you also starve the muscle. When you starve the muscle, you lose muscle along with the fat. When you lose muscle, your metabolism slows down and your body enters the “starvation mode.” When your body enters starvation mode, fat loss comes to a screeching halt as your body tries to conserve its energy. When the fat loss stops, you either give up (and gain back the fat you lost), or you grit your teeth and drop your calories (starve yourself) even more. If you drop your calories even more, your metabolism slows down even more. And if your metabolism slows down even more, fat loss comes to a screeching halt again. Eventually, you always end up throwing in the towel because you can’t keep dropping your calories forever. It’s a vicious cycle. You just can’t win the very-low-calorie-diet game.


To lose body fat, you must create a calorie deficit. There is no other way. A calorie deficit means that you burn more calories than you consume every day. There are two ways you can create this calorie deficit: 1) decrease your caloric intake from food, or 2) increase the amount of calories you burn through exercise.

Both methods should be used, but of the two ways, burning the calories is healthier, more efficient and more permanent. That’s where the phrase “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle” comes from: It means, don’t starve the fat with low calorie diets, instead, Burn the Fat with exercise. It also means keep your muscle mass intact at all costs with weight training and sufficient amounts of nutrient dense food. Losing muscle is unacceptable.

The secret to fat loss is to allow yourself to eat more (of the right foods) and use exercise to burn off the fat. Ironically, most people do the opposite: They slash their calories to starvation levels and exercise little or not at all. This slows the metabolism, decreases lean body mass and invokes the body’s starvation response. Exercise allows you to create the calorie deficit and burn fat without slowing down the metabolism.

It's amazing what can happen to your body when you put nutrition, cardio and weight training all together at once.

It’s tempting to believe that all you need to solve your excess body fat problem is a pill or diet shake. The supplement companies certainly want you to believe that. The truth is that exercise and good nutrition from whole foods are all you’ll ever need.