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For any person attempting to lose weight, burning fat is the most important thing you can do. If you’re not burning fat all you’ll lose is muscle, and the more muscle you lose the more fat you’ll actually gain. Muscle mass naturally has a higher metabolic rate during your body’s resting state. If your body has a higher fat percentage it will slow your metabolism down.

Don’t neglect your breakfast. As soon as you wake up in the morning, your body has just completed an 8 hour fast. After enduring such a fast without nutrients, your body enters a catabolic (muscle wasting) state and will begin to break down protein. This is an important time to get some much needed food as soon as possible. A healthy breakfast is critical to any successful fat-burning diet.

Eat every few hours. This means that you need to eat 5 to 6 times a day. Not only does this kind of meal plan incite muscle maintenance and fat loss, it is also an essential technique for dominating food cravings. You see, when people skip a meal, or neglect eating for a while, their blood sugar drops too much, and their will power gives in. In other words, people who go a long time without enjoying a meal are much more susceptible to cheating on their diet. Thus, having small meals often and regularly will help remove those cravings that may be the main reason that you have failed all dieting attempts in the past.

Even if you never get the cravings for food caused by missing meals, you must still be careful. If you miss meals on a regular basis, your body will actually activate enzymes that store fat. This will make losing weight much more difficult. So don’t do it! Eat!

You must reduce your carbohydrate intake. Your body’s fuel will be attained from a mixture of carbs, protein and fat. When you reduce your carbohydrate intake, your body’s stores of carbs will diminish quickly. This creates an effect in your body, and it will use a higher amount of free fatty acids (fat) for fuel. Cutting down on your carbs will also cause a hormonal fat-burning effect. When you decrease the amount of carbs that you eat, insulin (a storage hormone) is lowered and glycogen (a fuel mobilizing hormone) is raised. This causes a greater number free fatty acids to be released from fat cells and burned, relying on the fact that you’re working out properly.

Choose compound exercises over isolation exercises. Compound exercises use more than one muscle across several joints, and isolation exercises attempt to train only one muscle at a time. The advantage of using compound exercises is that you will be training the most muscle in a given amount of time.

Generally, the more muscle you stress per exercise, the greater the energy (calorie) demand will be on your body. This obviously burns more calories, which is definitely a good thing, but it also stimulates the body to hold on to its lean muscle during fat burning phases, which aides your body in keeping your resting metabolic rate up. In addition, compound exercises have been shown to stimulate the release of your body’s natural anabolic hormones. This further helps you maintain lean muscle.

Be accountable to someone. If you can’t pay for a trainer full-time, hire one to write your training programs for you and monitor your progress. You might only need to be in contact with them once a month, but having them there will give you someone you are accountable to on a continual basis. This will keep you staying focused.

If you can’t, or don’t want to work with a trainer, attempt to find someone to work out with. This will make you more committed to exactly when and where you will be working out. There will be less missed workouts, and you’ll have more consistency in the gym and your workouts in general. If this is impossible or undesirable to you, attempt to find one good friend who totally backs you, and who doesn’t mind you calling them up every few days and reporting your progress. It may seem like your friend is almost like a sponsor in an AA meeting at times, but in saying this, that’s not such a terrible thing to possess in your life when you’re trying to lose weight. This is even more important when you’re continually in the company of people who don’t care about what they eat.