The science of lean

Healthy Eating and Strength and Fitness Training

christmas at the beach copyFind Your Sweet Spot – but don’t obsess over diet.

Although we might not all want the perfect beach worthy body – most of us want to feel comfortable in our own skin and feel like we look good.  Fat loss remains the highest priority for most people who decide to join a gym or who seek nutritional advice.

Visit any book store or website and on the health and fitness sections remain cramped with book after book on how to get lean and lose body fat.  All talk about various theories as to why we put on fat, why it’s so hard to get rid of and techniques for dropping unwanted fat.

One underlying theme that most of them address but few now talk about, is that energy in and energy out is still a very important part of the fat reduction process.

You can dress it up with intermittent fasting principals, ketogenic states for the body to ‘operate’ under, or high protein performance regimes – but in one way or another these new rules of fat loss still rely heavily on manipulating the energy in and energy out equation.

In this article we want to address the misconception that calories don’t really matter – because we believe they are hugely important.  We also know that there is not one number that works for everyone.

So, contentiously old school that this is, calories in/calories out remains the most important factor in how our bodies lose, maintain, or add body fat and muscle.

Effectively managing the in/out ratio remains the best way to manage body fat and body composition for most people.

To think though, that there is one number to rule them all – and that 2000kcal for a man and 1600 kcal for a woman will guarantee weight loss – or the opposite, that exceeding this number will make you put on fat, is foolish.

If it were that simple we could all eat 1600 Kcal’s per day of Special K and be red-swimsuit clad in a matter of weeks.  If it were that simple, adding 1 extra cafe latte to your intake on a daily basis would have the terrible consequence of making you 5 kg heavier every single year!

We do believe that there is a unique amount of food that will cause a particular person to lose body fat; a range in which each individual can operate without putting on fat; and a level at which an individual will put on excess body fat.

What is also true is that these amounts are completely unique to every person and the amounts are variable according to the food you eat and your current body composition and activity levels!

Initially, we have no way of actually predicting what will happen – all we can do is actually experiment and tweak ‘rules’ to find your own personal sweet spot.

This can take time, patience, and the advice of a good trainer – but is well worth doing because once you know the ranges in which things happen – you can play around at the edges of those ranges to elicit the response that you want!  Knowing those ranges and working with them, makes staying relatively lean, easier than you might think.

And you won’t need speciality diets, regimes, or extremes to get the results you want.  Just consistency and patience.