It’s easy enough to lose a few pounds for a short period of time, only to gain it back. It’s much harder to achieve long-term fat loss. This begs the question: how can you lose the fat for good?
The answer to this quandary is actually kind of simple: Don’t do things to lose weight that slow down your metabolism.
The Old Way
The old way of doing things is to do a ton of cardio and to follow a starvation diet. Go to the gym and treadmill / stair climber / elliptical / stationary bike yourself to death like a little hamster on a wheel. Do all this and starve yourself and you’ll lose weight…for a little bit maybe.
Here is the problem
When you are only doing cardio machines or running, you will get more efficient at those things. “Efficient?” isn’t that good? Being a more efficient runner is great if you are running a competitive race. It’s bad if you are trying to change your body. When your body becomes efficient at something it doesn’t get any stimulus to change. So over time your elliptical machine becomes less and less effective, which means you need to stay on it longer and longer if you want any results you might be seeing to continue.
That inherent efficiency also means that you aren’t stimulating muscle growth. You are likely even losing muscle along with the fat. When you lose muscle, your metabolism slows down.
Now you need to eat less food (which also slows your metabolism) to maintain a caloric deficit, and exercise more to keep losing weight. It’s a self defeating cycle. The more you succeed, the slower your metabolism, the longer you need to workout and the less you need to eat.
Any rational human can only do this for so long so eventually you stop and go back to the things that made you gain weight in the first place EXCEPT now your metabolism is even slower! This means you are now likely to gain back all the weight you lost AND some more on top of it. STOP THE MADNESS!
The New Way
At On Target Fitness you are participating in a system of exercise, nutrition, and accountability.
Our exercise programming is comprehensively designed by our coaches to train you to build muscle, burn fat, and move well.
You do inefficient exercises (think kettlebell swings) that can challenge your cardiovascular system, depending on the rep and time scheme, but more importantly stimulate muscle growth. Your body burns calories for hours after the workout, known as after burn. This is a benefit that cardio mills just can’t do. They don’t challenge your muscles, therefore your body doesn’t burn calories recovering and building muscles.
In a nutshell our nutritional recommendations revolve around proper serving size, eating frequency, macronutrient breakdown, and good sources of micronutrients. We focus more on those things than overall calories although calories and serving sizes are obviously part of the equation.
As you burn fat and build muscle your metabolism INCREASES. This means that unlike the old ways, if you are 6 weeks in and you’ve put on a couple pounds of muscle and dropped a few pounds of fat, success will now be a little easier over time, not harder. This is how we have long term success stories even from people that initially joined on short term 6 week programs. We do things even in our short term programs that will benefit you long term. So you’ll lose fat (not just weight) and you will keep it off!