low body fat diet

Many fitness specialists believe that body fat percentage is a far more important health factor than your weight. it certainly affects the way you look. the one thing body fat percentage affects more than anything is how your stomach looks. to put it simply, if you don’t sufficiently reduce your body fat percentage, you will never have the kind of abs most people desire. another thing you need to know is that it’s possible for almost everyone to get to that low level of body fat percentage.

how can you lower your body fat percentage?

in order to lower your body fat percentage, you need to create a calorie deficit. this means that you need to burn more calories than you take in. to do this in the most efficient yet easier way is to combine the right kind of exercise with the right diet to burn off maximum fat in as little time as possible.

exercise

as far as exercise goes, you need to get your entire body into shape. to do so, you need to do cardiovascular routines 3 times a week. when you do cardio, make sure not to waste your time on low intensity activities like running at the same pace for 30-40 minutes. even though you’ll burn a lot of calories, your body soon becomes accustomed to that monotonous pace. a better thing to do would be to engage in interval training in which you change the intensity level of your cardio every few minutes. for example, you start by 5 minutes power walking, then change to 2 minutes of sprinting at a difficult pace, than go to light running, sprinting again, power walking and so on. when you do that, you work your body along a wide range of intensity levels. this develops your heart and metabolism much better than monotonous cardio (which is also boring and time consuming) and helps you to reduce your body fat percentage much faster.

another thing you need to do to reduce your body fat percentage is to do weight trainings for every part of your body. some people try to target certain areas of their bodies which they find more fatty than others. this can have some results in terms of muscle development, but little to do with your overall body fat. to better reduce your body fat percentage, work every muscle group in your body 2-3 times a week (it’s alright to do cardio and strength on the same session).

diet

the second thing you need to do in order to lower your body fat percentage is to go on a regular and effective diet. this doesn’t mean starving yourself. actually, starving yourself can seriously undermine your efforts to lower body fat. a good diet is one which is made up of a great deal of vegetables, fresh fruit, lean protein like eggs, turkey, and chicken breasts, and complex carbohydrates like whole wheat bread, brown rice, whole flour pasta, yams, and potatoes. this is a diet in which you eat 4-6 small meals each day instead of 3 large ones and also drink a large amount of water each day.

the secret to getting super lean – i’m talking about being ripped, not just “average body fat” – is all about mastering the art of “peaking.” most people do not have a clue about what it takes to reach the type of low body fat levels that reveal to see ripped six-pack abs, muscle striations, vascularity and extreme muscular definition, so they go about it completely the wrong way.

here’s a case in point: one of my newsletter subscribers recently sent me this question:

“tom, on your burn the fat website, you wrote:

‘who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? no athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. the transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind! only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up all their muscle. some of them are nothing but skin and bone.’

“tom, there seems to be a contradiction unless i’m missing something. why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week ‘transformation’ prior to every event instead of staying ‘lean and mean’ all the time? if they practice the secrets exposed in your book, they should be staying in shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event, correct??”

there is a logical explanation for why bodybuilders and other physique athletes (fitness and figure competitors), don’t remain completely ripped all year round, and it’s the very reason they are able to get so ripped on the day of a contest…

you can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a “peak”, right? what is the definition of a peak? it’s a high point surrounded by two lower points isn’t it?

therefore, any shape you can stay in all year round is not your “peak” condition.

the intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors use), is to train and diet in a seasonal or cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off to a maintenance or growth phase.