Zen My Fitness – Linking Muscle and Mind

Archive for the ‘Fat Loss’ Category

Food should never be boring or don’t get the guilts about having a snack, that is unhealthy not the food.

Raw Avocado-Lime Pie

If you want to try something a little different then try raw food.

You eat raw already by snacking on fruit but that can be extended to raw foods like lasagna and cheesecakes.

Here are some Benefits of a Raw Food Diet ( taken from About.com).

• Increased energy
• Clearer skin
• Weight loss
• Reduced risk of disease

The raw food diet contains fewer trans fats and saturated fat than the typical Western diet.

It is also low in sodium and sugar and high in potassium, magnesium, folate, fiber, vitamin A, and health-promoting antioxidants.

These properties are associated with a reduced risk of diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Read the rest of this entry »

It's not as bad as you think!

Sounds paradoxical eating snacks and still being able to get a defined 6 pack Abs but it’s true.

And I don’t mean as a cheat meal but you can eat these daily!

OK there is a punch line, I need to be doing these few things first to be able to eat like this, the ground rules are:   …. Read more of this article

MMA or Mixed Martial Artists are some of the fittest athletes in the world.

Watchout your head is in the way!

You have to be fit to hold up your hands for 5 rounds with 1 minute rests while someone is trying to punch portholes into you.

If fat-loss is a goal and you are bored of doing endless “TV watching”  treadmills then mix it up and consider doing a good hard MMA workout as an alternative cardio routine for fatloss.

I’ll guarantee it will engage your mind rather than being placed in neutral, your athletic skills increase and you’ll find it more enjoyable and satisfying.

So Why MMA Workouts for Cardio?

  … read more at the musclehacker!

How to get 6 pack abs you probably already know is one of the most searched health topics on the Internet.

Me in Feb 2011

Checking with Google there are 5,600,000 results and this article makes 5,600,001 and when you finished reading this there will be 10 more!

There are plenty of articles that will tell you how to get a 6 pack abs but with this post I’ll simply stick to (1) objective  of real measurements … there are no magical 6 pack promises allowed on this!

If you are like me I hate spending too long at the gym (1 hour max.) so at the end I tend to rush through doing my ab routine so I can get home and do other things.

Rather than do my abs at the gym I want to identify what are the most effective exercises that can be done at home for developing a defined mid section. Read the rest of this entry »

When do we start?

I have published a guest article over on musclehacker.com  about discovering what is the best type of cardio for fat loss!

I provide a definitive answer that will work for you guaranteed.

Maybe you have heard that before but if you haven’t then the answer is (drum roll please) ….  click here  to find out at the musclehacker.com!

I wanted to find the best method to lose weight fast in a week!

How to Lose Weight Fast

Why? Just for the sake of curiosity and see what worked plus we are in Mid Winter and I always tend to put extra weight on over that period.

So I chose 3 methods but there are many more ways to lose fat however these were easy enough for me to do.

The 3 that I decided on for my weight loss experiment were:

1. Intermittent fasting during the day.

2. Eating mainly simple Carbohydrates during the day.

3. Eating mostly Proteins during the day.

But firstly I had decided on some simple rules: Read the rest of this entry »

Cheat meals play an important part of any nutritional diet plan which will greatly help you lose body fat over the long term.

Typical Cheat meal for me No1 for the day

If you want to get or stay lean having a fantastic cheat meal will do a lot of good things to your mind and body.

If you are like me I hate having spent the whole week working hard to lose body fat and then having a cheat meal (see the pics on the right from last Friday morning) like a big cheesy pizza or deep fried fish and chips and a few too many beers but feel terribly guilty later and think  ”Have I wasted that whole week?”

Well I have just done some ‘hard work’ over the last month I have been experimenting with different cheat meals and see how they affected my body weight.

These meals I am about to show you are borderline cheating but also border line healthy!

So the criteria of these meals needed to meet the following so I could recommend them, they are;

Straight After No1 is No2 an almond tart

1. Easy and quick to make in approx. 30 minutes
2. Simple ingredients
3. I could eat as much of it as I liked and it will help me stay trim
4. My body fat level was to remain essentially the same
5. These meals had to be nice enough tasting to be a cheat meal Read the rest of this entry »

At the gym and on the beach where I train regularly I have had a couple of women come up and ask about my fitness routines and workouts.

They’d like some ideas for their own workouts so I start off asking them what are their goals?

The common reply is they want to lose weight, not get bulky or what I interpret is they want a lean and sexy body which essentially means what’s the best way of how to drop a dress size.

Since that’s their goal (different to mine, cause I’d look terrible in a size 0 dress) women do need to follow a different system, unless gaining muscle mass is their objective, NOT!

I found over time that an effective fat loss strategy that works quickly is a system that focuses on a mixture of;

Diet + Cardio + Resistance Training  = Hot Lean Sexy Body

Getting this formula right and I’ve seen people lose weight and fat straight away, better yet for the long term you can continuously maintain a slim looking body. Read the rest of this entry »

You have lost weight but did you know it can be an equally tougher problem to stop regaining the same weight?

I realised this was an issue after recently seeing the “Body For Life” (BFL) participants at my gym.

An older male of 40 years, a young guy about mid 20s and a female in her 30s were all previous winners but they had become overweight, again!

I couldn’t understand it, how after all they went through and knowledge learnt that they were so out of shape.

I don’t know much about BFL but it has helped thousands of people to lose weight so obviously it’s an effective method to drop fat, but what went wrong?

If you Google “Biggest loser where are they now” … Season 1 and 3 winner have also regained their weight!

I had a bit of chat with the BFL’ers (a sensitive issue) and a common theme was “it’s still a struggle to try and not eat so much”.

Is It So Hard To Keep Weight Off Once You’ve Lost It? Read the rest of this entry »

My Liquid Lunch In Singapore

One of the best things that you can do in life is to go on holidays, eat as much as you want and still lose weight.

Really I can’t think of any thing better!

Well I did just that and it’s easy when you apply just some basic principals but you need to know some facts first.

Setting the scene; I organised a 2 week trip for my wife and myself to travel to Shanghai China for the World Expo for the first week and then the second week come back through Singapore for the celebration of festival of lights called Diwali.

Now if you know Asia, it has very cheap food and drink and I knew it was going to be a big enjoyable calorie feast for most of the time.

Pre-Planning is critical for a big night out or when you go on holidays which can mean continued fitness success or food binge disaster.

So I had to plan a few things.      Read the rest of this entry »