3 Great Reasons Why Intermittent Fasting Is A Good Idea!

You may not have heard of intermittent fasting, and so you may not know why it can and should be a part of your workout and fat loss plan. Intermittent fasting is the practice of abstaining from all but water for a period of usually 24 hours to help with the goals associated with fat loss and weight loss in general. The way in which it helps in this arena is by cutting out a full days caloric intake, while still being able to maintain a full workout schedule. Let's look at three main reasons I believe that intermittent fasting is a good idea for anyone serious about fat loss and muscle building!

The primary reason I'm fond of a workout plan that involves intermittent fasting is that it promotes maximum fat loss. Most people employ these types of fasts two days a week while working out, and this means they are effectively cutting out a full two days caloric intake from their weekly consumption. This combined with your workout can and does have a dramatic effect on the pace at which you lose excess fat. By working out while doing these fasts, you are attacking your goals with a two-edged sword, slashing it from both ends of the spectrum.

The second reason would be that this type of fasting allows you to maintain a moderate to intense workout load while still maintaining your energy and metabolism. Many people think that fasting drains both of these aspects, and while that is true for other, particularly longer fasts, for intermittent fasting the opposite has proven to be the case. You often have more energy and a higher metabolism while engaged in this type of fasting, making it the best of both worlds. Many other fasts are so debilitating that you are left at the end of the day so drained you are unable to do anything. Intermittent fasting is not like that at all.

The third reason why I believe intermittent fasting is a good practice to include in your workout plan is that it has beneficial aspects to it that are a little less easy to see, but of great benefit all the same. There is a cleansing of your system that takes place with any fast, as your body adjusts to less content being put into it. There are also undeniable psychological benefits, such as a very affirming sense of accomplishment that can help you in many areas of your life. Knowing that you are not a slave to food is a major part of that.

I'm a firm advocate of intermittent fasting as a way of enhancing your fat loss and workout routines. There is in my mind no faster way of getting maximum fat loss while still being able to handle a full workout load. Investigate it today. I think you might be surprised at the results you'll come up with!

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Brad Pilon is a nutrition professional with over eight years experience working in the nutritional supplement industry specializing in clinical research management and new product development. Brad has completed graduate studies in nutritional sciences specializing in the use of short term fasting for weight loss.

His trademarked book Eat Stop Eat has been featured on national television and helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat without sacrificing the foods they love. For more information on Eat Stop Eat, visit www.eatstopeat.com

Find Out If Protein Guilt Is Sabotaging your Weight Loss

Carbohydrates and Fats have both taken their turn as the evil food that you should never eat, but protein is always the golden child that can do no wrong.

Or can it?

I think protein has been put so high on a pedestal for both weight loss and muscle gaining that you can begin to suffer from something I like to call “protein guilt”.

So what is protein guilt? Well I’ll tell you.

If you eat any food and especially EXTRA food simply because you think you need it for protein, then you have protein guilt.

I realized I had protein guilt a few years ago when I used to analyze every meal I ate for the protein content. If the meal I was eating didn’t have at least 30 grams of protein I went out of my way to eat something else to make sure I got my 30 grams.

This is a perfect example of protein guilt – I felt guilty if I didn’t eat a precise amount of protein at every meal. I couldn’t just enjoy food anymore, I could only think about the protein content because I believed protein was so important for burning fat and gaining muscle.

Now I realize that I was actually OVEREATING because I felt the need to get more protein into my body. I would drink an extra glass of milk or make sure I ordered double chicken breast when I ate salads, anything to make sure I was eating MORE protein. I was denying the fact that I was overeating just to get more protein.

And it showed around my waistline.

This is how protein guilt can sabotage your weight loss efforts, namely justifying overeating just to get more protein in your diet.

To this day I still struggle with protein guilt (I use it to justify my chocolate milk cravings) but now at least I can eat an apple without forcing myself to have some milk or chicken to bring up the protein content of that meal. Doesn’t this sound crazy?

I’m getting better for sure, but I still feel twinges of protein guilt almost every time I eat. If you’re anything like me you know exactly what I am talking about.

If you live in any modern industrialized society you most likely already eat enough protein without even thinking about it. Even though I now know better, this protein guilt still bothered me enough that I researched and wrote an entire book about protein just to ease my mind about how much protein I really needed to build muscle while losing body fat.

I know this sounds a bit extreme but this was the only way for me to get over my protein guilt. Fortunately for you I’m done writing the book and you can get the final answer about protein without having to do all the research and write your own book.

So if you want to find out how much protein you really need to build and maintain lean muscle and your fat burning metabolism, and if you want to know the TRUTH about protein supplements, post workout protein, and protein guilt, then you need to check out my new book “HOW MUCH PROTEIN”

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Brad Pilon is a nutrition professional with over eight years experience working in the nutritional supplement industry specializing in clinical research management and new product development. Brad has completed graduate studies in nutritional sciences specializing in the use of short term fasting for weight loss.

His trademarked book Eat Stop Eat has been featured on national television and helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat without sacrificing the foods they love. For more information on Eat Stop Eat, visit www.eatstopeat.com

Top 10 Diet Rule Experiment: How To Tell If a Diet Will Work For You

If you and I went to the local magazine stand and scanned the covers of the fitness magazines we would find dozens of ‘weight loss’ rules.

In fact we could spend the rest of the week reading magazines about the latest greatest weight loss tricks many of which may actually work for someone. But realistically there’s just no way you could actually follow ALL of them. So how do you know which ones are right for you?

The easy answer is you have to decide which rules fit best for YOUR life and then try to stick to just one or two that will make the most sense for you and have the most benefit.

This may be the first time in your life you become a scientist, and your experiment is you. Here’s what you do…

Browse any of the popular magazines, blogs, websites or anywhere you like to get fitness information. Read up on the diet and weight loss tips and tricks, these could be simple changes like not drinking calories, or a bigger philosophy like limiting the amount of carbs that you eat.

Make a top 10 list of diet strategies you’d like to try, and that sound doable to you. At this point add one new diet strategy to your life for two weeks. Record your bodyweight at the beginning of the two weeks and again at the end. If you haven’t lost any weight this strategy doesn’t work (for you). Discard it and move on to the next one.

This is the simplest way to tell if something will work for YOU. If the strategy you picked sounds like a good idea but seems too difficult for you to manage then it’s simply not a good fit for you in this stage of your life. If it worked for your friend but not for you that’s ok, there will be one that works just for you, this is why you make a top 10 list and try each of them, one at a time.

Let’s suppose you find one that works over a two week period and you don’t want to stop. That’s fine, just add the next one in the list, if you can handle more than one strategy at once more power to you and you’ll probably lose fat even faster. My guess is that sticking to more than one or two rules will be almost impossible, so it will be pretty easy to tell which strategy is really working.

For me the simpler the diet is the better, (which is the main premise behind Eat Stop Eat).

Even when you are following the Eat Stop Eat lifestyle you can still use the top 10-diet rule as a way to guide how you eat on your ‘eat days’.

The top 10 diet rule experiment is the fastest way to find dietary habits that work for you - after all you’ll never know until you try.

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Brad Pilon is a nutrition professional with over eight years experience working in the nutritional supplement industry specializing in clinical research management and new product development. Brad has completed graduate studies in nutritional sciences specializing in the use of short term fasting for weight loss.

His trademarked book Eat Stop Eat has been featured on national television and helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat without sacrificing the foods they love. For more information on Eat Stop Eat, visit www.eatstopeat.com

10 Signs that your Diet Promotes Obsessive Compulsive Eating

In this ground breaking study, 311 overweight women were recruited to follow one of the following popular diet programs: The Atkins Diet, The Zone Diet, the LEARN diet or the Ornish Diet.

To start the study, each woman was given a copy of the popular diet book that she was randomly assigned to follow.

Then, to make sure she was an “expert” on her program before she started dieting, each woman attended a series of 8 classes (each lasting an hour) explaining exactly how to follow her assigned diet.

(Side note- This just shows how OCE these diets are considering that it takes EIGHT classes for these women to know how to properly follow each diet!)

After the courses were completed the women then set off to follow their assigned diet plan for a total of 1 year.

The results were pretty much exactly what I expected – everybody lost a lot of weight in the first two months, after that the diets tended to even out and by the end of the trial the weight loss was far from impressive – none of the groups averaged more than 10 pounds of weight loss after an entire year of dieting.

And while many people used this study to ‘prove’ that diets simply didn’t work, or that the body somehow adapted to dieting, my take was much simpler – Firstly, this trial is in agreement with most research that shows it is very hard to accurately measure how many calories a person eats in a day, and secondly I thought that these results showed that the number one reason diets fail is compliance.

In other words, the more complicated and the more rigid the diet is (or the more OCE it is), the more likely it is going to fail in the long term. – People just can’t stick to these types of diets for long periods of time.

Apparently I wasn’t alone with my analysis.

In a study published in the International Journal of Obesity titled “Dietary adherence and weight loss success among overweight women: results from the A to Z weight loss study” researchers re-examined the A to Z weight loss trial to see if there was an association between the level of compliance and the amount of weight that was lost.

Guess what they found?

Astonishingly only ONE subject in the ENTIRE study followed the diet as directed for the whole 12 months. This means that every other subject was not following her assigned diet properly at some point during the research trial!

The researchers also found that adherence was significantly correlated with 12-month weight change for all three-diet groups. So the better a woman was at following her diet, the more weight she lost.

The fact that adherence was so low is very interesting considering that these women spent eight class sessions reviewing their assigned diets with a registered dietitian before they even started the diet…you can imagine what adherence must be like for someone who simply bought one of those books, read it cover to cover and then gave it a try!

The findings from this follow-up analysis also suggest that the difference in dietary macronutrients had only negligible effects on the participants weight loss success.

The bottom line is that you can generally figure out how successful a diet will be by looking at how complicated it is.

More rules = more complicated = low chance of success

Less rules = less complicated = high chance of success

In my opinion weight loss can be incredibly simple if you let it.

Find the easiest, most comfortable way to reduce the total amount of calories that you eat. The less intrusive a diet is on your lifestyle the greater chance you have of sticking to it long term.

For me, this is flexible intermittent fasting. After all if you can fast for 24 hours once, you know you will always be able to do it. Some fasts maybe harder or easier than others, but you know you can do it!

Obsessive Compulsive Eating habits that make diets complicated and difficult spell doom for long term weight loss.

10 Signs a diet suffers from OCE:

1. It contains a list of foods you can and cannot eat

2. It lists specific times of every day that you are allowed or not allowed to eat

3. It contains specific diet plans that do not take into consideration your own personal food preferences

4. It lacks flexibility

5. It focuses on macronutrients and micronutrients excessively

6. If fails to point out the importance of long term compliance

7. It requires you to pre-pack and carry certain foods with you while you travel

8. It promotes certain foods because they PROMOTE weight loss

9. Over reliance of food Journal

10. Metabolic Typing

Brad Pilon is a nutrition professional with over eight years experience working in the nutritional supplement industry specializing in clinical research management and new product development. Brad has completed graduate studies in nutritional sciences specializing in the use of short term fasting for weight loss.

His trademarked book Eat Stop Eat has been featured on national television and helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat without sacrificing the foods they love. For more information on Eat Stop Eat, visit www.eatstopeat.com