Fat loss success- 5 things to maximise your results
In this post, I am going to share top 5 things you must do be successful in your fat loss success planning.
Just like any other area of life, the things that matter in bodybuilding are basic habits which you need to do on a regular basis.
Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets managed”. When it comes to bodybuilding there cant be a bigger truth.
1. Diet log – My Fitness Pal
The first step to building a successful diet is to have a diet plan. Here is a guide where I explain in detail how to build your own diet. If you want me to make your diet plan go here.
The next step is to actually follow the diet plan. How often it happens that we have a plan but we don’t follow it. In my experience, I have seen people track their major meals but they don’t track the snacks, tea-coffee in between. If you calculate the overall calories of all these in-between snacks, sometimes they end up like an entire meal. We need to be careful here.
MyFitnessPal is one such nice tool I recommend. It’s simple to use, it has got a huge community database, you can add your own meals with macros and the best part is it is totally free. They do have a pro version but for the most part, you are never going to need it.
Here is the interface, shows my days meal and overall calories.
2. Workout Log
Many people especially beginners do not realize the importance of tracking their workouts. They feel that all they need to do is to go to the gym, hit as hard as possible, thrash their muscles and go home. Well, this works for some time but this can cause serious injuries in the long run.
Tracking workout helps in determining whether our lifts are improving or not. Sometimes the overall body is growing but specific muscles like arms or calves are not growing, in this case, we need to check the overall volume and frequency for this particular muscle over the week.
Bodyspace is one such application where you can track your workout, you can find a workout plan of popular trainers, it has a strong community base and you can interact with other members as well.
3. Kitchen scale
Having a diet plan and tracking it regularly is a great thing. But how do you know that you are tracking it accurately?
The kitchen scale helps you measure food quantity accurately in terms of gms or ml.
4. Body fat caliper
This is yet another important tool that helps tie in all the pieces of the puzzle. No Body transformation program is successful without it.
Let\’s say you are following a diet accurately, you are tracking your calories, taking workout logs regularly. And then at the end of the week, you see a drop of 2 lbs in weight. Great!!
Did you succeed or did you fail? We don’t know, as of now, this is just a result.
To know whether we succeed or fail we need to know whether this 2 lb is muscle or fat. If you lost 1.5 lbs of Fat and .5 lbs of muscle, good job! But we need to do some work here, losing muscle is not acceptable!
However, if you lose 1.5 lbs of muscle and .5lbs of Fat, there is some serious problem and we need to evaluate our Diet and workout plan.
Body Fat caliper helps us decide that out of 2 lbs we lost, how much of it was muscle and how much of it was fat. Once you have a weekly reading of body fat %, you can then compare on a weekly basis whether you are losing fat or gaining muscle.
5. Monitoring Progress & Taking Action
It boggles my mind when people keep following the same Diet & Workout for months wondering why they are not getting the same result they got during the first few weeks. And when they are not getting any results they\’d hop on to another diet or take supplements and even if that doesn\’t work take Steroids.
There is so much data available at our hands with Diet logs, Workout Logs, Body Fat Readings. If one looks at these pieces of information closely one would clearly understand what all changes he/she needs to do to lose fat or build muscle.