FAT LOSS BY CHRIS ACETO Straight answers to frequently asked questions on losing bodyfat with several tips on how to make it work for you Q: When starting a diet, how much should I cut my calories? A: Reducing calories too fast or by too many may work for a couple of weeks, but the body will soon adapt to the drastic change by slowing its metabolism to conserve energy. The result is that very little fat is lost. Worse, low-calorie diets tend to tap muscle mass as a fuel source along with bodyfat. A 10% to 15% calorie cut should coax the body into giving up fat as fuel without tapping muscle mass. A small reduction should also ensure that you have enough energy to train hard to maintain and build muscle mass. This will maintain your metabolic rate, making permanent fat loss easier. Q: Can eating late in the evening make me fat? A: Only if those calories are excess ones — which would more likely be the case for someone with a slow metabolism. Typical advice would be to avoid late-night eating and modify your carbohydrate intake later in the day. However, recent research would indicate that when you eat won’t change how much fat you put on. It’s like this: your body needs a certain amount of calories per day to be able to grow in response to your training. You feed your body that amount, irrespective of the time of day, and you’ll do fine. You feed your body less and you’ll get smaller, more and you’ll get bigger, and if you overdo it you could get fat. Now, if you work out in the early afternoon and eat a good meal to replenish the nutrients lost in training, I think it would be ill-advised to eat another meal a few hours before you go to bed, particularly if you have already fed your body the required amount of calories for growth. Q: How much fat should I consume? A: As you know, dietary fat tends to be stored as fat more so than carbohydrate or protein. But don’t be an extremist and go overboard. A low-fat diet, not a fat-free diet, is the goal. My personal experience is that those individuals who eat an incredibly low-fat diet have difficulty maintaining a high level of training intensity in the gym. Therefore, their workouts suffer and it becomes difficult to hold onto muscle mass while trying to lose fat. Besides, fat does have extremely important roles in the body, which include hormone production, strengthening of cell membranes, nerve impulse transmission, organ protection, etc. So don’t place fat in the ‘evil’ category as many bodybuilders do. For most people trying to drop bodyfat, eating 10 to 20% of their calories from fat seems to work well. To make it even simpler, I usually tell people to consume approximately 25 to 30 grams of fat per day (preferably from vegetable as opposed to animal sources). Q: Should I trade in my junk food and fizzy drinks for low-fat snacks and fruit juice? A: Fat-free baked goods are frequently loaded with sugar, so be sure to check the labels when buying prepared snacks. Sugar is the chief nutrient that causes an overproduction of insulin, the body’s main fat-storing hormone. Just because something says fat-free on the package doesn’t make it a good food for getting lean. Fruit juices are also bad choices for dieters. Because juices are calorifically dense and easy for the body to absorb, they can break down extremely fast and rush into the bloodstream, causing an overproduction of insulin. This in turn can cause those sugars to be stored as fat and inhibits existing fat from being broken down to be used as fuel. As these high insulin levels clear most of the sugar from the bloodstream, an additional pitfall is the resulting low blood- sugar level that can signal the brain to crave more sugar to bring blood-sugar levels back up to normal. This spiral effect can cause the dieter to overeat carbohydrate foods to stabilise continually erratic blood-sugar levels. A lot of talk about insulin, I know, but when you’ve reached a point where your cells are basically saturated with nutrients, eating more — particularly in the form of simple sugar — would of course ask your pancreas to excrete insulin to transport the nutrients to the cells. But if the muscle cells and liver glycogen are full, the insulin will simply take the sugars somewhere to be converted and stored as fat. Q: Is it really important to eat breakfast every day? A: Yes. Calories eaten earlier in the day have less of a tendency to be stored as bodyfat because you’ll end up burning a lot of those calories through your daily activities. Look at it this way: if you eat 300 calories of carbohydrates at 7.00a.m., less of that amount has the potential to be stored as fat than if you consumed 300 calories of carbohydrates at 7.00p.m. Getting your fill in the morning may ward off hunger pangs typically felt in the afternoon and evening. Consuming sufficient calories in the morning could be a way to accelerate your metabolic rate somewhat. A faster and more efficient metabolism is a key factor in building and holding muscle mass. Those individuals with a slower metabolic rate tend to store fat and have difficulty building muscle. Q: Should I avoid eating carbohydrates if I want to get lean? A: No. In fact, I suggest eating plenty of fibre (technically a carbohydrate) and complex carbs. Since fibre is a non digestible food substance found in fruit and vegetables, some of the calories found in high-fibre foods aren’t absorbed. Fibre is beneficial to dieters because it slows the entry of food from the gut into the blood, which moderates the release of insulin and favours glycogen formation (higher insulin levels favour fat deposition). Higher glycogen levels are associated with better recovery from training, so eating plenty of fibre can help the dieter hold on to muscle. Complex carbohydrates don’t create the same type of rapid insulin release as simple carbs, otherwise known as sugars. Since carbohydrates are the body’s (and therefore the muscles’) primary fuel source, you’ll want to consume an ample supply. Good sources of complex carbs include oatmeal, yams, legumes, brown rice and many dark breads. As far as how much carbohydrate to consume, don’t worry too much about ratios. A better way to go is to eat about 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, approximately 20 to 30 grams of fat a day and the balance of your calories from complex carbs. Q: Should I cut back on the number of meals I eat each day? A: Not if you’re eating the ‘traditional’ three meals a day. In fact, the smart way to go about it is to divide your total number of calories per day or the total amount of food you’re currently eating into smaller, more frequent meals, say 4 to 5 a day. This adjustment alone — without even cutting calories — can often lead to fat loss without a loss in muscle. Eating smaller meals more often forces you to eat fewer calories at each sitting, which essentially results in more complete nutrient absorption and less storage of excess nutrients as fat. Keep track of what you eat at each meal so you can see if you’re creating healthy eating habits. Q: Is water consumption really that important for dropping bodyfat? A: Absolutely. Every chemical reaction in the body, including the breakdown of bodyfat into glycerol and free fatty acids, requires water. The dieter who wants to effectively break down bodyfat should be fully hydrated by drinking at least 8 to 10 250 ml glasses of water daily. Thirst isn’t an accurate indicator of hydration levels, so it’s important to get into the habit of drinking enough water every day. In addition, maintaining muscle mass while dieting requires sufficient levels of glycogen stored in muscle. Carbohydrates require water to form muscle glycogen, so an underhydrated dieter will find it more difficult to form glycogen than the dieter who drinks his or her fill of water each day. Q: Will eating a lot of protein make me fat? A: By itself, no. A big mistake many dieters make is to skimp on protein foods in an attempt to reduce fat in their diets. Sure, most tissue proteins like chicken, turkey, fish and red meat have some amount of fat, but protein is absolutely essential to maintaining a lean, hard body. When calories are reduced, the body tends to use more glutamine, alanine and branched-chain amino acids found naturally in most protein foods. If you don’t eat enough protein, your body will get these important amino acids from muscle tissue by breaking down muscle cells to scavenge the amino acids they contain to be used as fuel. This can obviously lead to a loss of muscle, which might even slow the metabolic rate and make burning fat harder. As a rough rule of thumb, eat about 1 gram of protein for each pound of bodyweight every day. This will ensure that you have enough protein to build or maintain muscle. Remember that eating meat is okay, just be careful to eat lean selections and prepare them without heavy sauces and butter. Grill or bake rather than fry or sauté. M&F