The Zen Diet Revolution (16 page)

•   A feeling of fat burn – yes, sensitive individuals report they can feel the change as their body starts to burn fat. They can feel the energy flowing into their blood stream.

So there it is: about 20 or 30 minutes into exercise you should feel a second burst of energy. Your breathing rate should increase naturally, and you may even feel a slight change in the way you are breathing. Each and every breath is burning fat as you exercise. Learn to recognize this sense of fat metabolism in exercise as it will also help you recognize it in daily life.

The exercise needs to be ongoing and preferably aerobic. Interestingly, the more intense the exercise, the higher percentage of muscle in your body will burn in desperation to supply energy. Studies have shown that walking is the most efficient form of exercise for burning fat. Many exercises use up more calories, but also burn a lot of muscle (which we want to keep because it keeps up our metabolism). Walking burns more fat per calorie than any other exercise. Unfortunately, you need to do a lot of walking in order to use up the calories required to shift fat. So you are best off finding a slightly more intense form of exercise that you can enjoy doing two or three times a week. However, always remember the Zen Diet principle that an enjoyable method is the best approach. If you enjoy weightlifting or a form of sport that is not aerobic, we suggest that you work towards burning about 300 calories in each of the exercise sessions. The amount of exercise you need to do to achieve this goal varies depending on what you’re doing. Below is a chart that gives you general guidelines on the calorie
expenditure per hour. But please don’t use your activity based on being high calorie-expenditure – it is far more important to choose something you are actually motivated towards and enjoy.

Research shows that fat is burned when you exercise at 70–80 per cent of your maximum heart rate. This can be an extremely hard thing to measure when you’re working out in the gym, so scientists have come up with a simple solution that you can use to make sure you’re exercising at the correct level of intensity to burn fat.

Always exercise so that you could have a conversation with the person you are next to. This is known as the ‘talk test’. If you find you are so out of breath you can’t conduct a reasonable conversation with a person on the treadmill to the left, then you are burning precious muscle instead of body fat.

So that’s the intensity sorted. But how long should you exercise for? As with all things, you should remember
kaizen
in your exercise. Little change! If you are new to exercise, you should start extremely gently. I would suggest that if you have not exercised for a while, then you should only spend five minutes on your first session and work up by one minute each time. Other exercise authorities would find this a rather ludicrous suggestion, but they don’t understand the value of small change. I have personally seen so many people boom and bust with exercise routines by overdoing it and trying to keep up with more experienced individuals.

When you undertake a new exercise routine, your body needs time to adjust. Lots of extremely complex things are happening in your bones, your muscles and in your blood vessels. Your body is learning to produce enzymes that burn fat and growing new blood vessels to distribute energy more efficiently to the areas you’re exercising. In addition, your muscles are becoming better at resisting lactic acid and growing stronger; your bones are gaining increased density and adapting their internal structure to what you are doing. The art of exercise truly is the art of hinting to your body to make this change. Writing as an extremely experienced exercise enthusiast, I can truly state that the biggest form of setback is when your exercise routine injures you! Exercise should never cause any pain or discomfort to your body or your joints; if it does, you need to approach it more gently. Always remember
kaizen
! Make progress slowly.

One of your next changes may be to remove some of the things you’re doing that could be causing you to prevent fat metabolism when exercising. Here are the most common culprits.

Whatever you do, don’t drink sports drinks. A lot of people arrive at the gym and buy sports drinks to keep them
going through their session. The problem is that the standard sports drink contains 395 calories, and so an average person running at 8mph for half an hour will burn only 300 calories. Worse still, because they are continually sipping on the sports drink during their exercise, they never will trigger fat metabolism. Then, after their exercise routine, they probably feel that they can reward themselves with a protein bar or a treat on the way home. The net result is that there is no fat metabolism at all!

When people start a diet, they focus on cutting calories and they switch to a light beer option or start drinking slim-line tonics with spirits. The truth is it’s time to let go of the alcohol completely. It’s not the calories that are the problem: it’s the alcohol itself.

•   The moment you drink some alcohol, you stop the fat-burning process dead. It’s the first fuel of choice for your body, so the moment it hits the bloodstream, your body converts straight over to ‘running’ on the alcohol.

•   Alcohol stimulates the appetite with cravings for unhealthy foods – pizza and kebabs at 3 am … enough said!

•   Alcohol also has some unhelpful effects on the body, the first being to lower your testosterone and raise your cortisol levels. A single night of drinking raises levels of the muscle-wasting hormone cortisol and decreases muscle-boosting testosterone for up to 24 hours!
Testosterone, which has a powerful fat-loss effect, is reduced whenever alcohol is consumed, and when levels are lowered, it may even lead to muscle loss. Muscle, as you will read later, is in fact the slimmer’s best friend!

This one can sneak up on the best of us! When we exercise, we feel we have done something virtuous; we also believe there is some form of negative calorie bank and that we can treat ourselves straight afterwards or in our next few meals. The truth is, it’s very easy to eat far more as a reward than you have burnt through exercising. Fish and chips or a big curry can put on over 1,500 calories – which is the equivalent of six hours’ walking!

Be aware that no matter what form of exercise you start, it is likely that, to begin with, your weight will start to increase. This may seem counterintuitive, but is, in fact, an extremely good sign. Muscle weighs over four times more than fat. As you start to exercise, your body will begin to adapt by increasing the amount of muscle you have and creating new blood vessels to aid in the circulation of nutrients and body.

But why do we want to put on muscle? Well, muscle burns fat constantly. It requires calories to maintain muscle, so it burns out your fat stores every moment of the day;
for this reason, protecting your muscle is an important principle in fat burning.

Studies have shown that the way you eat immediately before and after a workout is important with regards to the kind of results you get from your exercise. Participants who took a protein supplement both before and after exercise were approaching a 90 per cent more efficient fat-burning rate and built far more muscle. Most surprisingly of all, this is a more significant effect than that of the overall nutrition during the day. So make sure you drink a protein-rich drink like a glass of milk before and after your exercise. It may seem strange to eat more calories to burn more calories, but the payoff is significant (almost doubling your results).

It is good to be aware that you don’t stop burning calories as soon as you stop exercising. Your body is revved up and your metabolism is in high gear. Basically, you continue to burn calories up to 20 minutes after each exercise session. Studies show that a small amount of caffeine increases the amount of fat burned in this period, so have a nice cup of tea!

The actual number of calories burned after exercise depends on how high the intensity of the exercise was in the first place. Studies suggest that there is a significant
increase in after-burn when you exercise in intense bursts rather than a session of continual gentle exercise.

Because of the after-burn effect, it is also more efficient to divide your exercise into two rather than one large session: for example, if you normally spend 40 minutes on the treadmill, it may be more efficient to burn fat if you divide your exercise into two 20-minute sessions.

The power of the after-burn effect is highly individual. Some people burn lots of calories after exercise, and some don’t. You will have to experiment to find out how effective this is for you.

All our bodies are different; experiment with different forms of exercise routines to find what works for you. And remember – measure results with a tape measure, not with a set of scales.

Yes, the stories you hear are true! There are forms of supplements you can take which do increase the amount of fat you burn during your exercise. These are extremely powerful because they optimize the fat-burning effects of the exercise you are already doing. These supplements are collectively known as ‘thermogenics’ because they increase
your body temperature and quicken your metabolism which will burn more calories during exercise.

Here are some of the best known thermogenics:

This well-known substance is a useful thermogenic found in tea, coffee, cocoa and the South American plant guarana, and has long been considered an aid for improving physical performance and associated fat burning. Athletes often use caffeine to enhance their endurance powers and race performance, but it is also of benefit during short intense exercise such as weight training.

Due to caffeine’s fat-burning ability, there has been much interest in whether it actually does promote fat loss. Research over the past few decades has shown that consuming caffeine before exercise enhances fat burning during actual exercise by around 30 per cent as well as increasing calories burned after exercise.

Consume 100–300mg of caffeine in the morning and an hour before training.

Currently it is hard to find a fat-burning product that doesn’t include green tea extract because recent research studies have confirmed that green tea in standardized doses
can significantly aid fat loss. Green tea contains catechins, one of which is a substance called EGCC (epigallocatechin gallate), and it is this compound that is responsible for the main fat-loss benefits. EGCG inhibits an enzyme that breaks down norepinephrine – the neurotransmitter that aids in regulating metabolic rate and fat burning.

Drinking green tea is good (as it has other excellent health-boosting properties), but for optimum fat-burning benefits take a supplement three times a day before meals, containing 500–1,000mg of standardized green tea extract. Research has shown that the body absorbs catechins from the standardized extract more efficiently than from the tea.

Forskolin is the active chemical derived from the herb
Coleus forskohlii
(a member of the mint family) and has been clinically proven to enhance fat loss and boost testosterone levels in men.

Supplement with 20–50mg of forskolin two or three times daily before meals.

Carnitine is an amino acid that has been clinically proven to boost fat burning and bolster testosterone. It transports
fat for efficient burning, improves fat loss during exercise and aids muscle growth and recovery.

1–3 grams of carnitine in the form of L-carnitine, acetyl- L-carnitine or L-carnitine L-tartrate with breakfast, pre- and post-workout meals and the evening meal.