Difficulties You’ll Face While Dieting and How to Deal with Them
If you’re been following me for a while now, you’ve probably know that to lose weight, you will need to be in a caloric deficit. That is, to expend more calories than you are consuming. This is usually done by tracking your calories and macronutrients, and then ensuring you’re consuming the right amount of calories such that your weight drops. Simple as it sounds, doesn’t it? However, like any other journey, roadblocks are unavoidable and difficulties are sure to come.
These difficulties can highly derail your success. You definitely wouldn’t want that, would you? But if you are able to foresee these difficulties, you’ll be able to deal with them more effectively. Even better, if you can deal with them ahead of time, you will be able to avoid these difficulties altogether. Fortunately, in this article, I will be going through 3 difficulties that is very likely to happen to you during a fat loss diet and how to deal with them.
4 Must-Dos to Ensure Optimal Muscle Growth
Everyone wants to build muscle as fast as possible. In fact, one of the top reasons why people come to me for Personal Training is to build muscle. However, the truth is that muscle-building is a long, slow and often frustrating process. As a result, it may be hard to tell if you’re actually effectively building muscle or not. And the added fact that progress will slow down as you gain more experience, is not helping.
But roughly how fast can you realistically build muscle? A study at McMaster University found that the average male beginner training 4 times a week can gain about 3kg of muscle in 10-12 weeks. That means about 1kg of muscle per month while training in optimal conditions. In this other study, it was found that with good nutrition and consistent training, 0.9kg of muscle growth per month is possible for beginners. While it may seem little, over time, the results can be significant. With 12 months of consistent training, you’ll be able to gain up to 10kg of muscle mass! But as you progress, the rate of muscle gain will slow down. At the intermediate stage, researcher Alan Aragon estimate the rate of muscle growth for a 70kg male is about 0.4-0.8kg per month. And for advanced individuals, about 0.2-0.4kg of muscle growth per month.
And these numbers are assuming that your training and nutrition are optimal, but since this does not happen for most people, muscle-building can actually be even slower than previously outlined. So the important question is - What should you do to build muscle as fast as possible? In this article, check out the 4 Must-Dos to ensure optimal muscle growth.
Practical Tips on how to use Intermittent Fasting for Fat Loss (Many Studies included!)
I’m sure you’ve heard of Intermittent Fasting (IF) before. It is basically specifying when you should eat instead of what you should eat. Many claim that IF can not only help with fat loss, it can improve cardiovascular health, decrease cancer risk and even increase lifespan! But it seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? After all, IF is skipping meals for hours or even days, and then feasting within a designated time frame, which seems to be going against the norm.
But fasting isn’t a new concept by any means. Our ancestors have actually been doing it during our hunter-gatherer days, where they have to fast for days if they are unable to find food. IF is just a rebranding of this. Furthermore, we are actually already fasting when we are asleep. And some of us are already doing IF but may not even know it! Most commonly known as skipping breakfast.
So what is the truth? Can IF magically help with fat loss and other benefits? And if so, how exactly should you do IF to see the best results? Here I’ll be covering the types of IF, benefits and shortcomings of IF, how long to fast for, and how much to eat. Let’s dive in.
Progress Over Perfection: The Correct Mindset for Sustainable Fitness
Ever missed a planned workout and feel like a failure after? Or ate a unplanned ‘cheat meal’ only to feel utterly guilty for the rest of the day? Maybe even looked at instagram models and compare yourself with them, believing that you’re not doing enough?
Well, you’re not alone. In fact, many people view training and nutrition in this manner. They think that everything has to be perfect in order to be successful in losing weight or gaining muscle. But the truth is quite the opposite. Expecting things to go flawless can actually get in the way of accomplishing your goals. It can take the joy away from working out. It can make dieting so painful. It can make the whole fitness journey extremely stressful. More importantly, it can make you feel guilty when you’ve actually done absolutely nothing wrong.
Fortunately, there is a much better way to think of fitness. That is choosing progress over perfection. Instead of leaving you guilt-ridden, progress can inspire, excite, and sustain the way you eat and train. You’ll feel happier because there is more to celebrate and enjoy. And in this article, we will look at some ways to focus on progress instead of perfection.
How to Pack on Mass Fast for Skinny Guys (or Hard Gainers)
You’ve been training for some time, eating all the ‘bodybuilding food’, and on paper, it seems like you’re doing everything right. But you just can’t seem to put on any size despite all the hard work, and get frustrated. You look at yourself in the mirror daily and feel like you’re just destined to be skinny forever, or in other words, a hard gainer.
I’ve come across many people who once thought they were hard gainers. No matter how much they ate or trained, they just can’t seem to put on any weight onto their skinny frame. Although there are studies that show that body types are not pseudoscience, it is still definitely possible for hard gainers to put on significant muscle mass as long as they are eating and training right. And after these hard gainers realized their mistakes and optimized their training and nutrition, they started to add pounds of muscle to their frame after consistency and patience.
I am pretty sure most of you hard gainers can do the same too. And in this article, I’ll be going through the things skinny guys should be doing to put on muscle mass in the most efficient way possible. Let’s dive in.
5 Science-Based Diet Tips to Lose Weight without Feeling Hungry
If you’re aiming to lose weight, it is no doubt that having the right nutrition strategy is the most important factor. Many think that it is simply eating less, since we know that in order to lose weight, you should be eating less calories than you burn. However, the problem with this simplistic model is that it fails to account for how the different types of food that you eat can affect both the amount of calories in and the amount of calories out.
If you feel like you are eating so little that you’re constantly hungry, your nutrition strategy might just be the wrong one. In fact, studies have shown that the biggest reason why people fail their diet is because of high hunger levels.
What you should do instead is to focus on the types of food you’re eating and how you’re eating them, which can make a huge difference to your hunger levels. And in this article, we will use a science-based approach to look at some ways you should be eating to lose weight without feeling hungry. Let’s dive in.
5 Ways to Make Weight Loss Less Stressful
Losing weight , like any other goal that you choose to work towards, can be stressful. On the surface, weight loss can be as simple as “Calories in, Calories out” and “Exercise more, Eat less”. But because of stress, it can be much more complicated than that.
A little stress can be good - it motivates you, pushes you, and keeps you on your toes. But if you are too stressed out, you lose your healthy habits, you sleep less, you skip workouts, and you eat highly palatable food for comfort. Your energy gets depleted which could have been used for self-control. Hormones are also induced which tells your body to store body fat. This creates a downward spiral that makes weight loss harder than it already is. In fact, stress has shown to have strong links with obesity.
If you’re experiencing the above symptoms due to stress, you should know that weight loss isn't meant to be like that. Here are some ways you can make weight loss less stressful and more manageable.
Best Science-Based Workout Split to Maximize Muscle Gains
One of the biggest decisions you have to make when you start hitting the gym is choosing which workout split to do. Or to put it simply, what exercises to do on different workout days of the week. For example, when I first started to gym, I used what was very popular in fitness magazines, and what my friends recommend - the “Bro Split”, meaning to do each muscle group once a week (Monday is International Chest Day!). I definitely build a significant amount of muscle over years of training, but the more important question is whether I would have progressed faster if I had used a better workout split.
After years of lifting and research, I would say that there’s a high chance that using a different workout split would have accelerated my muscle growth. Finding a workout split is also a useful way to formulate a training plan and stick to it - an essential step to optimizing results. You wouldn’t want to walk into a gym finding the first empty machine and start pumping out reps would you?
In this article, we will take a look at the different options and which one is best suited for you. Let’s dive in.
Step-by-Step Tips on how to Break a Weight Loss Plateau
When you first start your weight loss journey, everything is smooth-sailing. You see your scale weight dropping consistently for days as you start exercising and going on a diet. You’re happy that everything is working, and look forward to achieving your dream body soon.
But one fateful morning, as you step on the scale, you realize that your weight isn’t falling like it used to. You get stressed up, but brush it off as a one-time event. However, the following morning, the same thing happens - same weight, or worse, heavier than the previous morning! The weight that was previously falling off consistently seems to be sticking onto you for its dear life now. This continues for a week and you get demoralized and feel like you’re just not meant to be lean. You then search the internet for answers, and get things like “carb cycling”, “intermittent fasting” or “starvation mode”, but get even more confused.
This is something you’ve probably experienced before. And if you have not, you can actually count on this to happen sometime.
Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re actually not in a weight loss plateau. But if you’re really in one, breaking it is actually much simpler than you think. And in this article, we will check out what weight loss plateau really is, and what you can do about it.
6 Small Lifestyle Habits to Lose Weight without Trying too Hard
Many times, losing weight can feel daunting. It seems like making huge changes in your life like meal prepping and spending hours in the gym is the only way to achieve your goals. Fortunately, that is not how sustainable weight loss works. Making such a drastic change can help you lose weight fast, but it will not be lasting. What we should aim to achieve here is to lose weight and keep it off.
And how do we achieve that? Through making small changes to your existing lifestyle! As you incorporate minor adjustments day by day, you’ll soon begin to see how they can add up to something very significant. The more these adjustments are repeated, the stronger and more automatic the habit will be, and you’ll be more likely to stick to them.
We have seen how powerful a habit can be in my previous article. Now we will specifically look at small habits we can make to achieve sustainable weight loss. Let’s dive right in.