4 Steps for Burning Fat

By Gary Matthews
eDiets Guest Columnist

Below you will find scientific guidelines for weight loss that have always been around, but are not followed by the majority of weight-loss programs these days.

1. Increasing Your Metabolism

To produce sustained, permanent and long-term weight loss, it's imperative that you boost your metabolism. And the most effective way to raise your metabolism is to have a greater proportion of functional muscle on your body.

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The only way to build this lean muscle is through strength training. There's no other method that works wonders on the metabolism.

By performing strength training, you'll effectively increase the amount of functional lean muscle on your body so that your metabolism will elevate.

After a strength training session your body will undergo a significant increase or spike in metabolism, which will allow you to burn much more fat than you were able to before.

2. It's All About Lean Muscle

The amount of fat the body can burn is directly related to the more lean muscle your body can hold.

If your muscle system can sustain more energy and use this energy significantly when performing strength training, then it will be able to burn off the calories you eat and the excess fat on your body.

In other words, if your muscles become stronger and can hold more energy, then you should be able to release this energy more efficiently to increase your metabolism and to burn off excess calories that you have eaten.

Once we can build more lean muscle our bodies will become more efficient at burning fat.

It's also the amount of lean muscle on your body that makes you look good. Once you burn off the excess fat from your body, the lean muscle underneath your skin will be exposed making you look healthy, energetic and well-toned.

3. Decrease Your Daily Calories

For years we have been told to use low-calorie dieting to rid the excess fat from our bodies. The trouble with this is that the calorie-restricted diet throws the body into starvation mode, with the body holding onto the fat and using precious muscle tissue for energy.

This then lowers the metabolism, causing greater muscle loss. When the diet is broken, the unwanted fat not only returns, but actually increases because of the lowered metabolism.

The way around this is to cut your daily calorie intake by a small amount of calories. This will stop any starvation mechanisms from clicking in.

Decrease daily calorie value by a couple of hundred calories per day and no more. This will generate slow weight loss and the majority will be fat loss only. The daily calories should be consumed during the day with small frequent meals.

4. Fast Walking Burns Fat

All you need to do now is incorporate fast walking into your weight loss program to hasten the burning of excess fat.

Not only is fast walking much easier on the hips, but it also produces a greater percentage of fat loss as opposed to jogging or running.

Here are some of the benefits of fast walking.

• Easy to perform
• Most conventional
• All natural body movement
• Doesn't cause injuries
• Can be done anywhere
• The best minimal effort exercise for fat loss

I can't stress enough how fast walking is necessary in every weight-loss program.

Gary is the author of several ebooks, including Maximum Weight Loss in 10 Weeks -- the complete ebook and time-saving solution for burning away unwanted fat, and Maximum Weight Gain in 10 Weeks" -- easy-to-use and follow techniques that serve as a guide to muscle growth without having to "live in the gym." Visit Gary’s website at www.maximumfitness.com

The fitness pros at eDiets can show you how to combine exercise and nutrition to get the best results. This is what you've been looking for. You will need to make the commitment, but isn’t it time to finally take care of you?