If you only have a small amount of time to dedicate to exercise I can tell you that it is possible to lose a considerable amount of fat if you follow the right type of program and nutritional advice.

So we don’t all have hours of time to spend working out in the gym.  In fact most people are so busy they just neglect to even go, thinking that they couldn’t possibly get enough work done in just 30 minutes.

I’m here to tell you that that thought process is flawed.

When you combine the right type of exercise in the right order then it is definitely possible.

Not many people are privy to the knowledge I have gained on how to implement these strategies for fat loss in just 30 minutes, but after successfully taking a group of individuals through the whole process over the month of January (they are just about to enter the second phase of the system)I am now opening it up to everyone.

Please visit my specialist site Fat Burn In 30 for the full scoop.

I’m only taking in 30 new students to this course and it will close again on Sunday evening, so go check it out now **click here**

Tweet This Post

This guest blog post is a transcription between fitness and nutrition authors Jayson Hunter and Jim Labadie. I have their permission to share it with you.

Jim: Okay, I think that’s something very important for people to understand that is when you start, you can see these dramatic results but it’s permanent lifestyle changes which is exactly what the carb rotation diet teaches is that, you can have fast, safe permanent weight loss but its permanent in the sense that you can start by taking off 15 – up to 15lbs in 30 days, but things are going to level off, and you have to make behavioral changes, you have to change your life. There are no quick fixes for anything, right?

Jayson: Exactly, and if you go to the extreme and say, and again we don’t know exactly what diet The Biggest Loser people are on, but a lot of people go on what they call a , a true low carb diet, and a true low carb diet is like, maybe 30 grams of carbs for the entire day. It’s low. It’s essentially nothing. When you go on that type of diet it really wreaks havoc on your metabolism, where the carb rotation diet is tied with the carb rotation because you are preventing that metabolism from slowing down because you aren’t just going to this extreme. You’re cycling. You’re cycling the carb intake which is going to get you that fast weight loss but not sacrifice your metabolism because you want that metabolism to be fast all the time. That’s the number one goal.

Jim: Okay so that’s the key folks. Any body that’s listening, it’s all about your metabolism, you really need to know the science behind it and you really need to come to grips with it. In fact what you can do is you go to TheCarbRotationDiet.com and you can read Jayson’s five absolute truths, every serial diet seeks rapid and permanent weight loss must come to grips with. Now, there are certain things you just have to understand about the way your body works and you know, the high fat diets, the low fat diets, high carb diets, low carb diets, you need to come to grips with certain things about how your body works, and that is the key.
Your body works a certain way and that’s true for all of us, so you need to know the science behind it and while you can lose weight fast, safely and keep that metabolism up, you’re going to need to make those permanent lifestyle changes to keep it off. And that’s the key, that’s what the carb rotation diet teaches. So, Jayson, do you have anything else to add?

Jayson: Other then just don’t get caught up in these changes, you know these extreme changes of “Man how did they lose 30lbs and I can’t lose a pound.” You got to compare apples to apples here and see what positions their in and see what you’ve been in because as you noticed as you watched the second week of the biggest loser, those guys lost 2lbs, 3lbs, someone, like you said, gained a pound and that’s their body going through that transition and almost going into a survival mode. I think you’ll find that as you keep watching the show; their weight will start to be more consistent where they’ll consistently lose 2lbs of fat a week or 3lbs of fat a week.
You won’t see this wild swing of losing 30 lbs then losing 0 lbs even though they worked just as hard and ate just the same, because your body’s going to adjust, and your body – your metabolism will slowly speed back up and you know the goal is to try not to get that metabolism to slow down to being with, try to keep it up at an elevated rate so that it is a consistent, permanent weight loss.

Jim: There you go everybody. So, The Biggest Loser, it’s an inspiring show, it does some very good things and motivates some people, just make sure you understand the science behind why people are on diets and all the things—all the good things that you’re going to do for your body through doing things the right way. And TheCarbRotationDiet.com is the answer to that. So again, go to TheCarbRotationDiet.com, check out Jayson’s five absolute truths that every serial dieter, and you know who you are.
You are the people who, you know – hey everybody’s gone thought it, they’ve tried diet after diet. So, if you’re looking for rapid and permanent weight loss you must come to grips with 5 absolute truths about your body and the way it works and once you understand those, you really understand the changes you need to make and you’ll make them for the rest of your life. So, Jayson, thank you again for filling us in with all this great information.

Jayson: Thank you, I’m glad I could at least help out.

Jim: And stay tuned for more great pod casts everybody. We’ll be back next time.
Click the links here for more quick weight loss tips and healthy weight loss tips.

Tweet This Post

This guest blog post is a transcription between fitness and nutrition authors Jayson Hunter and Jim Labadie. I have their permission to share it with you.
Jim: Hi everybody it’s Jim Labadie the Carb Rotation Diet. We’re here today with the creator of CarbRotationDiet.com, Jayson Hunter. And we are going to be talking a little bit about the confusion there was the other day on the show The Biggest Loser, a lot of people watch that show. In the first week all these people, extremely heavy people lost a ton of weight and then the second week really nobody lost any weight.

In fact, to my knowledge, one person gained one pound. So, we want to explain what the confusion is and what exactly happens when you have that rapid weight loss. So, Jayson, right away let’s just get to the information. This is just going to be a quick pod cast to clear up any confusion people have. Why did people see such amazing results the first week and see none the second week?

Jayson: Well, if we just use this show as an example. They saw so much weight loss in the first week because they obviously tell you that they are on a special type of diet, they don’t really go into the details of what it is, but I can assume that it’s a higher protein, low carb diet. These people are obviously 300/400 lbs because they were eating too much, they were over eating, you know ingesting thousands and thousands of calories. They were not on a healthy weight loss diet before this. So, when they got to The Biggest Loser, of course they restricted those calories and put them on a special type of healthy diet plan.

Glycogen is created from the carbohydrates and starches that you eat. So, for ever gram that you store in your body, you also store 3-4 grams of water. So, if you look at it from the stand point of maybe someone was eating 500 – 700 grams of carbs and they were storing all this glycogen and they cut it to 200 grams of carbs, well you can also cut out about 3-4 grams of water for every one of those carbs you just cut out. And obviously that’s weight on the scale and leads to quick weight loss.

And, when you see that, the metabolism kind of goes into a shock so, you lose all that glycogen and the extra grams of water which is weight in the end, and then not to mention they were exercising like crazy which none of them had really done before, so they’re going to lose water weight anyway from the amount of perspiration and body changes that are taking place and all the stuff that your body has to do to adapt to that exercise now. And your body generally fluctuates about 3-4% on a daily basis anyway.
So, if you look at it from the stand point of some of those men are 300-400 pounds, a 3 %- 4 % change could be, 12 pounds in either direction. And obviously women that are 200 lbs or 250 lbs, you’re looking at maybe 10 lbs in either direction, 8 lbs in either direction, somewhere in there. And women tend to fluctuate even more then men in regards to water weight on a daily basis just because of the hormone levels. When you saw the weight loss they were getting, such as 15 lbs, 18lbs, I think someone lost 29lbs. Most of that is the initial shift because of eating less carbs, eating less calories as well as just general water weight loss because of the increased activity that they were now doing along with their healthy diet plan.

Find out more on carb rotation diet in Part 2
For more info on Carb Rotation Diet program **click here**

Tweet This Post

This guest blog post was written by fitness and nutrition author Craig Ballantyne I have his permission to share it with you.

Here are 3 kick-butt bodyweight exercises you can do anytime, anywhere to burn fat, stay energized, and avoid overeating.

Bodyweight exercises help you burn fat shockingly fast, without any fancy equipment.

1) Any Single-Leg Exercise

The pistol (single-leg squat to the floor) is the most advanced 1-leg exercise. But you can also do assisted single-leg squats with a band, or onto a bench, or even with a Stability Ball between your back and the wall.

If you aren’t ready for single-leg squats, you can use Bulgarian Split Squats, Reverse Lunges, regular split squats, or lying 1 – leg hip bridges if you are a beginner.

2) Decline Push-ups

These are harder than normal pushups, thanks to your elevated feet. And in this position, you can still use a close – grip to fatigue your triceps, a “piked – hip position” to build your shoulders, or even the Spiderman leg motion to work on your abs.

3) Bodyweight Inverted Rows

I choose these over chin-ups and pull-ups because bodyweight rows let your chest rest, while your back is strengthened. It’s the perfect complement to a pushup.

Do 8-12 repetitions per exercise. Don’t rest between exercises. Go through the circuit up to 3 times, resting 1 minute after each circuit.

For a once-per-month challenge, do each exercise to failure in your final round through the circuit.

Get in shape fast with Turbulence Training

Tweet This Post

Well this is one of those really annoying things that I end up explaining a lot to people.

The ‘fat burning zone’, as is labelled on many cardio vascular machines, is supposedly the zone in which you burn more fat.

Strictly speaking the charts are right but they are also so very, very wrong. The fat burning zone on these charts relates to a percentage of maximal heart rate. These heart rate percentages are in turn based upon laboratory measures of the best level of exercise to burn the most amount of fat as a percentage.

Let’s start with the first problem. The % of heart rate that they recommend it based upon a prediction of your max heart rate. For this they use a very simple equation that your max heart rate is 220 minus your age. That would make my max heart rate 184 beats per min, yet just last week I got my heart rate up to 198 beats per minute. I don’t fit that projection. Therefore the prescribed heart rate level for my best fat loss percentage would be wrong.

It’s not just me, back when I was doing my thesis for my undergraduate degree, I studied 10 women in a raft of tests. Most noticeable was the heart rate differences but a prime example was the difference between two women of the same age.

They were both only 19 years old , so had a predicted max of 201, yet when I got them running to complete exhaustion (VO2 max test on treadmill) one peaked at 216 and the other at only 176 (and she puked in the face mask and collection apparatus (nasty clean up job).

So you can see heart rate can be hugely variable.

Secondly and most importantly the fat burning zone is a complete waste of time. I’ll show you why with a little maths…stick with me.

Let’s say you walk on the treadmill for an hour (in your fat burning zone) and you manage to burn 400 calories of which 70% were fat, you would have you burnt 280 calories of fat.

Then imagine you were to run fast (as fast as you could) for an hour on a treadmill and burnt 1200 calories, of which only 30% were made up of fat…you still burnt 360 calories of fat.

That’s 80 calories more fat, plus a whole heap more to boot!

So that’s it really, the fat burning zone is only good when viewed as a percentage not as a total amount of calories.

It’s like the old story about how survey groups used to confuse you with percentages i.e. 80% of users found that they had good results…what they didn’t tell you was that only 5 people were survey!!

We only care about total calories not percentages…the body burns calories not a percentage of those calories!

–This is an excerpt from my Fat Burn In 30 program designed for people who only have 30 minutes a day to exercise and want to lose fat.  The next course will be starting very soon, if you are interested get over to www.FatBurnIn30.com where you can get on the early notification list.

Tweet This Post

This guest blog post was written by fitness and nutrition author Rob Poulos I have his permission to share it with you.

People are confused more than ever about how to burn fat. They are confused about the best way to go about achieving the body they want. They are confused about what works and what doesn’t, and the reasons why. There are countless individuals slaving away in gyms and fitness centers around the country right now.

They are working tirelessly, almost every day, on the treadmill, stair-climber, elliptical, etc. to burn those calories and fat. They also might be lifting weights several times a week for hours at a time to build some strength and muscle. They might even join a few aerobics or spinning classes too.

They are probably also trying one of the latest diet strategies that promises miracle fat burning and weight loss. They could also be spending a lot of money on the latest and greatest dietary supplements that could be that miracle pill that will aid in weight loss. They are also carefully watching the scale as their main judge of fat loss progress.

If it goes up a pound or two, they may behave rashly and maybe even change up their entire workout or diet program! And of course there are others are doing variations on that same theme.

After all, this is the kind of stuff that many of the popular fitness and diet gurus typically recommend to burn fat. But with so many different strategies and plans being pushed as the be all and end all, what happens is we tend to overboard.

And when that happens, we lose sight of what really matters in achieving lifelong fat burning, fitness and health…the principles than many people don’t know about, most people have forgotten, and only a select few put to use to achieve lifelong health and fitness. These are the same principles I used to drop over 40 pounds of unwanted body fat, keep it off, and revitalize my life!

With any exercise or nutrition program, you’ll probably lose some fat initially, but far too often the progress doesn’t continue or doesn’t come as fast as the person would like because they’re using a temporary mindset. They’re only focused on the short term and one specific goal. So they end up switching to something else, and the cycle continues until they’ve become consumed by this cycle of confusion.

I believe that this is one of the biggest, if not the #1 reason for the lack of fat loss and fitness progress that is being experienced by the masses of exercisers and dieters in the world. They are jumping from one fad diet or exercise routine to another, while losing sight of what’s really important, and what really works.

Simply put, they are exercising far too much, not nearly intensely enough, and trying to adhere to unrealistic diet recommendations.

If instead they focused on a long term plan, a lifestyle as it’s often called, and didn’t worry about “losing 10 pounds by summer”, they would find it far easier to do the right things most of the time.

And those right things include brief, progressive, and intense resistance training, eating a diet full of nutrient rich foods, drinking tons of water, and getting plenty of quality sleep and rest. The students of my Fat Burning Furnace method understand this and are reaping the life long health and fitness rewards because of it. Are you?

For more info on Rob’s program **click here**

Tweet This Post

This guest blog post was written by fitness and nutrition author Tom Venuto I have his permission to share it with you.

The way to break the weight loss plateau then is to:
(1) re-stimulate metabolism and re-set fat-burning and starvation hormones, and
(2) re-establish the deficit.
(3) KEEP AFTER IT!

The question was, “How do I do that? More cardio, more weight training, manipulate my diet?”
You could do all of the above. Eating less or exercising more can both increase a deficit. But one thing you might want to do first, is give yourself a little break. Take your calories up to maintenance level, maybe for a week.

The idea there is not to try to accelerate fat loss, because what you’re actually doing is removing your calorie deficit for a short period of time. What you’re trying to do is facilitate the fat loss when you jump back into it.

It gives your body a physiological break from the stress of dieting; it resets some of those starvation hormones and stimulates your metabolism so when you go back to the calorie deficit, your body responds again.

You also get mental break from the diet as well, which makes it easier to stick with the program when you go back to it.
You could also use a calorie cycling approach, to help prevent yourself from hitting another plateau, and we already covered calorie and carb cycling in the last call.

I also recommend, because so many people underestimate how much they eat, don’t take any chances. Count your calories, or at least become really aware of the portion sizes and maybe even consider keeping a journal.

You’ve probably been told many times by a lot of different “experts” that you don’t have to count calories. But when you’re in a plateau, I’d recommend that you stop guessing and really get serious about what you’re taking in.

Then what you need to do is reestablish that calorie deficit using every tool at your disposal.

Use nutrition by pulling back your portion sizes. Or use cardio. And by increased cardio, I mean increasing energy expenditure. You could increase your frequency. You could increase your duration.

But increasing energy expenditure is not necessarily doing longer workouts, just burning more calories. You could also take the same amount of time that you’re spending right now and increase your intensity.

The whole idea is just burn more calories and stimulate metabolism, which gives you your deficit back again or you can pull back your food intake and give yourself a deficit again from the food side.

There’s more than one way to do it and I don’t think that you should lock yourself in. Use all of the variables and remember that there are TWO sides to the energy balance equation, not one.

For more info on Tom’s program **click here**

Tweet This Post

Just found this video and thought I’d share it with you.

Weight Lifting Bloopers

This is a great example of professional weight lifters and amateur weight lifters making mistakes.

Some are quite bad and show the complexities of doing Olympic lifting, whilst others show idiots who really should get some professional fitness training assistance.

Tweet This Post

This guest blog post was written by fitness and nutrition author Tom Venuto I have his permission to share it with you.

Weight loss plateaus can be frustrating, even maddening! It happens especially when you get down to that “last 10 lbs” or when you drop a lot of weight, and you hit the “good” body fat category, but you’re an “overachiever” and you still want to get even leaner… all the way to “ripped”, or at least lean enough to see your abs. It’s a challenge, but there IS something you can do about it. I revealed the answers in a recent teleseminar called the Super Lean seminar, which I recently had transcribed and I’ve posted it below for all my website visitors. Breaking a weight loss plateau is not difficult, it simply requires out of the box thinking. You will find the solution fascinating because part of it is the most counter-intuitive move you can imagine.

QUESTION: Tom, I know you often say that to get to the point where you can see your abs, you need to reach single-digit body fat. But what if I hit a weight loss plateau at about 12% body fat? What do I need to do to break the weight loss plateau and get my fat% down to single digits? Should I do more cardio, more weight-training, or change my diet somehow?”

ANSWER: You could use any of those strategies. You could manipulate your calories, do cardio more often, do more cardio sessions weekly, or increase the cardio intensity. You could also change your weight training. You shouldn’t limit yourself to only one option.

One of the problems I see with quite a few programs is that they’re too dogmatic. If you hit a weight loss plateau, the person with the most flexibility in their approach is the person who’s going to be most likely to get through that plateau.

The first thing though is to understand what a plateau really is. This is important, because if you were losing weight, but now you’re not, there’s only one thing that that could mean; you were in a calorie deficit but you’re no longer in a calorie deficit.

You may be wondering why that happens.

There are four primary reasons you hit a weight loss plateau:

The first reason you hit a weight loss plateau is because your metabolism decreases. While this does not completely stop fat loss, it does slow down fat loss. If you’ve been cutting calories, especially if you cut them severely, your body adapts by decreasing the metabolic rate. That’s sometimes known as the “starvation response” or “Adaptive thermogenesis.”

The second reason you hit a weight loss plateau is that you need fewer calories after you lose weight. Calorie needs are directly tied into your body weight. One problem is that after people lose a lot of weight, they tend to keep eating the same way they were eating when they were heavier.

So they’re feeding a smaller person the way they were when they were a bigger person, but when you’re a smaller person, you don’t need as many calories, even at rest (your basal metabolic rate is lower).

A third reason you hit a weight loss plateau is that when you move that smaller body, you’re not burning as many calories. If you strap on a weighted vest or heavy backpack and go out and hike up a hill, you can tell, obviously, that if you’re lugging around extra weight, you’re burning more calories. So now can you see why, after you lose weight, you burn fewer calories?

The fourth reason you hit a weight loss plateau is that most people either cheat on their diets or they forget to record part of their food intake. This one requires a little bit of honesty with yourself. Even if you don’t do it intentionally and you don’t “cheat” per se, unconsciously, we’re all terrible at estimating how much food we eat.

Some studies have even showed underreporting calorie intake as much as 50%. In other words, you say, “I’m only eating 1,200 calories a day, but I’m stuck at a plateau!” but you’re really eating 1,800 calories a day which doesn’t give you much of a deficit.

All of these reasons for plateaus get amplified in the later stages of a diet, because biologically speaking, your body is doing everything it possibly can to get you to go off your diet and to get weight to stabilize.

After a long period of dieting and after a large weight loss, your body cranks up the appetite, stimulates cravings and tries to trick you into eating more.

The leaner you get, the longer you’ve been dieting and the more aggressively you cut calories, the more your body tends to defend its weight, and hold on to remaining body fat.

So it’s really common to hit that plateau when you’re dieted down and leaner. Usually it’s nowhere near as difficult for the overweight person to start losing weight as it is for the lean person to get even more lean. The last 10 lbs is usually a lot harder than the first 10.

If you think about it, it’s pretty unnatural from a biological perspective to walk around with really low single-digit body fat. It’s not beneficial from a survival-of-the-species point of view to have low body fat. So this metabolic adaptation becomes more pronounced the leaner you get.

you’re also at a higher risk of losing muscle, because extra muscle is not economical when there’s a calorie shortage. Having extra muscle is like having an engine that’s bigger than you need – It’s like a gas guzzler.

The ultimate answer to why you plateau, why that last 10 pounds is so hard to lose and why it’s hard to break into those single digits is that you were in a calorie deficit but for all of the reasons mentioned above, you’re no longer in deficit.

In part two we’ll look at ways to break the weight loss plateau.

For more info on Tom’s program **click here**

Tweet This Post

Interval training has gained in popularity over the last few years, but it is far from a new scientific practice. I actually don’t know who first coined the term ‘interval training’ but it’s been around as long as we’ve been doing exercise (i.e. since ancient Greek/Roman times), but it wasn’t really until the 1970’s that it started to be studied in sports science laboratories.

Interval training has gained in popularity due to a number of great research articles coming out that showed shorter more intense workouts were better at burning fat and delivering fitness capacity gains than one paced cardio sessions.(steady state cardio is the actual term).

It’s because of these studies that a new type of interval training has been popularised.

It’s called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).

HIIT is the type of training that I use with a lot of my clients and in a lot of my programs as it gives great results. However, it does not mean that HIIT is the only type of interval training you can do.

Have you ever heard of Fartlek training?

It’s a Swedish word that means Speed Play.
Unlike HIIT it uses lots of different and varying levels of intensity to deliver results.

So your typical HIIT would look something like this:

Work Hard for 20 secs (resistance training or some form of cardio machine, running outdoors)

Rest 10 secs

Repeat for 4-5 minutes.

Rest 1-2 mins and then do another set of exercises.

A typical Fartlek Program might look a little like this:

5 mins easy jog

5 mins fast pace run

2 mins flat out pace run

100m strides (i.e.over striding type drills or skipping type drills), rest 30 secs x 5-10

5 mins easy jog

10 x Hill sprints with walk back recovery

Etc etc

Until you have completed a workout that lasts 30-50 minutes.

So not all of work would be carried out at a really high intensity.

You can also apply this sort of thing to a cardio workout on a fitness machine. So that you may just have small and less intense changes in the interval ‘paces’. If you are only able to walk for instance then you might do this:

Walk @ 6 km/h up a 7.5 gradient for 5 mins

Walk @ 6.5 km/h up a 5 gradient for 5 mins

Walk @ 5.5 km/h up a 10 gradient for 5 mins

Etc etc

By now you should be getting the idea that if you are not ready to do HIIT then you can still get some of the benefits by working at lower intensities. So there is no excuse to continue with your long, slow, boring, one paced cardio workout anymore.

So what's the myth I hear you say...well the myth is that interval training has to be of the high intensity type. You'll get decent results doing lower intensity intervals (maybe not as good as with HIIT) but then not everyone is at a level where they can do HIIT.

Tweet This Post