People often come to me asking if the current program they are following is good and worth doing. As with almost any type of fitness program, some will help people and some won’t. There’s always a program out there that will work for you; sometimes it’s just a challenge to actually find it.

I know people who have shed a good amount of fat doing the old school body building workouts. I know many people for whom that method just didn’t work. I know people who have lost a lot of weight going on jogs every morning. I also know people who actually gained fat while doing long, slow cardio everyday.

Throughout my days as a trainer and through the trials and tribulations of finding and creating a fat loss system that works for most people, I have come up with five points that you should understand and apply to your fitness program if you want guaranteed fat loss success.

Know the Goal of Fat Loss

The goal of successful fat loss is to get your metabolism as high as possible for as long as possible throughout the day.

The goal is not to burn as many calories as possible during a workout because that can only take you so far. You have to look at the time you aren’t in the gym because surprisingly enough that’s when you’re actually going to be burning all that fat away.

So understand that the goal for a successful fat loss plan is the focus when you create or review your program.

A Nutrition Plan We Can All Use

If you sit back and think about it, this whole nutrition thing really shouldn’t be overly complicated should it? The easy answer would be to simply stop eating processed food and eat more veggies.

The realistic response for most people is, “That ain’t gonna happen.” At least not overnight, anyway. The fact is that some of those diets out there are actually pretty solid. Another fact is those diets cause too much of a dramatic change in people’s lives and they have a hard time sticking with it.

Most people succeed with gradual change, so why not make your nutrition plan a gradual one. The goal of this would be to cut out processed food and increase your vegetable and lean protein intake…just not overnight.

Let’s say you eat out for lunch twice a week and it’s always fast food. Why not cut out one of those fast food meals a week? Plan on buying something healthier or making your own healthy lunch. I remember a trainer telling me once that he had a guy come to him for advice on nutrition. This guy ate two Big Macs at lunch three times a week. The trainer told him to only eat one Big Mac for a few weeks and then they could re-adjust his nutritional plan. The guy came back four weeks later about 30 pounds lighter, just from one change.

Frequency

That’s only the first step regarding nutrition, however. The second step is to figure out how your nutrition plan can follow the goal of successful fat loss. How can you ramp up your metabolism throughout the day when you eat?

Eating smaller meals five to six times a day helps your metabolism stay at high levels during the day, so it makes a lot of sense to do that. If three meals is what you have to do then in between meals, try ‘grazing’ (as my clients say), and eat a handful of nuts or a piece of fruit.

This plan of gradual change and increasing the frequency of meals has proven to be successful with all my clients, and I guarantee it will work for you, as well.

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how’s it looking so far?

If you are consistently struggling with your nutrition, maybe it’s because you try to change too much too soon. Try making gradual changes and see what happens. It’s actually a foolproof plan. If you cut out something that’s not good for you and don’t add anything else, then you literally have to lose weight. People might disagree with this, but in the game of long term successful fat loss, slow and steady wins the race.

Dan Grant

PS - Want to follow my comeback. If so go here: www.dangrantcoaching.com