VIS IONPERSONAL TRAIN ING

The 7 Reasons Men Fail to Lose Body Fat

Hi this is Andrew Pascoe from Vision Personal Training, specialist in time efficient fat loss for time challenged business men. I am here with you today to reveal 7 common reasons men fail to lose body fat. By avoiding the following 7 big mistakes men make when it comes to shedding body fat, you will reach your fat loss goals quicker and easier.

#1 FAD DIETS

Fad diets are the number 1 reason men fail to lose body fat. New predictions show that 41% of men in the UK aged 20 to 65 will be obese by 2020 and a further 40% will be overweight, this means 8 in 10 men will be overweight or obese in less than 10 years time. These statistics are shocking but they make it is easy to understand why so many men are choosing diets as a solution. 1 in 5 men are on a diet at any given time. Unfortunately these diets are not the solution to attaining the leaner, harder bodies they desire.

Time and time again guys fall for the hype and marketing which the diet industry presents. Just think how many thousands of diet plans have been created over the years…surely if any of these diets REALLY worked there would be no need to create hundreds of new ones every single year?! The fact is the diet industry is worth over a billion £ per year – its big business and one which is relying on men, maybe like you, to fall for their fat loss claims.

Did you know 96% of people of who lose weight regain it? By men like you regaining weight and spending their hard earned cash on the next so called miracle diet - the industry thrives. If you are looking for long term fat loss, if you want to wear your smaller suit at work and feel confident taking your shirt off on the beach for the rest of your life and not just the next 6-8 weeks do not diet! Long term diets don’t work - they make you fatter! Let me tell you how… Every diet does the same thing – it reduces your calorie intake in some way, shape or form. So when a guy begins a diet he starts consuming fewer calories, this is fine because to burn body fat you must consume fewer calories than you expend – this is known as the law of thermodynamics. After 1 week on a diet most men will check their weight on the scales to find– as hoped, it’s gone down, great! In week 2 and 3 guys often start to notice that their shirts are feeling looser. Fast forward 4 weeks into many diet plans and many men have lost 1 stone or more in weight and dropped 1-2 suits sizes – wow, this sounds like good news. And it would be if the story ended here, the trouble is it doesn’t end here, there is a major problem on its way. What always happens next is this…

Men come off their diet. Why? Because they have to, it’s impossible to stick to such a restrictive calorie intake long term. Even with all

the will power in the world there is no way a man can continue to eat like a bird for the rest of his life. All fad diets are non sustainable, they simply are not built for long term success and as soon as you come off such a diet you will regain all the weight which was previously lost plus extra! Why do men gain extra weight? Why do male dieters end up heavier and more portly than ever before when returning to their pre diet eating habits? Well, when dieting a significant amount of the weight a man loses comes from lean muscle tissue – you will never just lose body fat when on a diet.

This becomes the issue as any time a man loses lean muscle tissue not only will he look and feel softer – he also receives a reduction in his metabolic rate, meaning he now expends fewer calories every day. A slower metabolism means going back to old eating habits is bound to cause additional weight gain. This is the problem with diets, being non sustainable - men will always return to their old eating habits and when they do they will always end up fatter because of it. A vicious circle is often created here - feeling like a failure and unhappy with a physique which is softer and heavier than ever before many men begin a brand new diet plan in an additional attempt to shift the fat! Now the merry go round of fat loss begins – this is known as yo yo dieting – it’s a wonderful way to get fatter!Your solution to getting the fat you want off your body and becoming leaner and harder is not in any short term diet plan. It’s in an researched, real world way of eating which you can stick to for the rest of your life. Do you know how to eat in this way? Despite modern day life being vastly different to how it was thousands of years ago, the human genotype is 99.9% the same as it was 40,000 years ago – when we were still surviving as hunter gatherers. Consuming the same foods as we ate 2.5 million years ago right up to the advent of agriculture which was only 10,000 – creates rapid, natural weight loss, soaring energy levels and great health. I can introduce you to this eating system known as the Paleolithic or cave man diet!

#2 Bouncing Blood Sugar Levels

Most men focus their efforts on reducing the number of calories they eat when attempting to lose body fat. They are correct to do this as a calorie excess is the primary cause of fat gain. A simple reason why 1 in 4 men in the UK are overweight is we eat too much. Creat-ing what is known as a negative calorie balance (in other words consuming fewer calories than you expend) is a foundational fat loss principle. But this is only part of the fat loss puzzle when it comes to food. Do you know it’s not just the total number of calories consumed that matters? Controlling the type of calories being eaten is just as important. A calorie is not just a calorie. Eating 1000 calories of carbohydrates

is totally different to eating 1000 calories of protein; each creates a cascade of opposing hormonal responses once eaten. These hormonal responses, you really should be aware of as it is your hormones which ultimately dictate whether you lose fat or get fat. You can either take control of your hormones or they take control your waistline! Sadly too many people eat the foods which create a hormonal response conducive to gaining body fat; the hormone being stimulated is called Insulin.

Insulin is a storage hormone which is secreted from your pancreas gland. Insulin is released in response to eating certain carbohydrates – here’s what happens: Any time you eat a carbohydrate your body breaks it down into glucose (glucose is simply sugar in the blood stream by the way). Understand that your body can only handle a very small amount of sugar in its blood stream at any moment in time, in fact 5 tea spoons is the maximum amount of sugar it can handle – exceeding this amount causes Insulin to be released to take all the excess blood sugar out of the blood stream and driven into the liver, muscles and all the rest being stored as body fat! The take home message here is: Eating the wrong type and amount of carbohydrates cause a hormonal response that causes weight gain.

But the problem doesn’t end here!Once your body has released insulin to do its job of reducing your blood sugar levels – it creates a different problem which sets your body up for a repeat cycle of fat gain! Insulin can cause low blood sugar levels which are a recipe for fat gain. When ever your blood sugar levels drop down to low levels you feel ravenously hungry, irritable and develop a strong craving for sugary foods – do you ever have an energy slump combined with sugar cravings mid morning or mid afternoon? Well that’s because you ate the wrong carbohydrates at breakfast and/or lunch! The knock on effect of eating the wrong kind of carbohydrates is an irresistible craving for

Insuline Released

Low Sugar Levels

5 teaspoons

3 teaspoons

more of them. Certain carbohydrates are perfect for spiking your blood sugar levels back up! This now becomes a viscous circle which is amazingly effective at getting you to gain body fat. By eating the wrong carbohydrate foods (which are often the ones labeled as “low fat” by the way) guys are successfully programming their bodies to become incredible fat storing machines!

A key to you successfully shedding body fat is not in your will power to eat less, it’s in your knowledge and ability to select the right foods which create a hormonal response to prevent the excess calories from being consumed in the first place! Eating the right foods will balance your blood sugar levels, keep your energy levels high and best of all strip away your body fat.

By guiding you to eat certain foods you will stimulate the release of an incredible fat burning hormone called Glucagon. Glucagon is the hormone twin of insulin and is your ally in your fat burning mission but you need to know what you must eat to release him! This is where I can help you.

#3 TRYING TO OUT-TRAIN A POOR DIET

Attempting to exercise away an entire days worth of poor food choices is a really big mistake men make when trying to shed their body fat. It happens time and time again, unwittingly or knowingly - guys feel that exercising for 3 hours per week permits them to eat whatever they want during the other 165. Unfortunately they are wrong! It just doesn’t work like this, it’s shockingly easy to completely negate an entire weeks worth of exercise in just 1 meal or night out! I did an experiment to confirm this point. My experiment involved me running as hard and as fast as I could on a treadmill for 5 minutes - my aim being to burn as many calories as I could. I then compared the number of calories I burnt to number I could consume within 5 minutes of eating at a regular speed. Here are the results:

• 5 minutes of running as fast as I could maintain on the treadmill (17.5kph/10.9 mph) allowed be to burn 105 calories• In 5 minutes I ate one 200g Boots Shaper Roast Chicken & Bacon sandwich (295 calories), a 50g bag of Walkers Steak Max crisps (263 calories) and a 330ml can of regular coke (142 calories). Meaning I consumed a total of 700 calories.• That’s a measly 105 burnt and a whopping 700 consumed in the same space of time!

If I can comfortably consume around 7 times more calories than I can burn in the same time frame, I clearly cannot eat what ever I like and

105

700

exercise away the calorie excess. Now, please bear in mind that I can run much faster than the average guy in the gym – so the chances are you would burn significantly less on the treadmill in the same time frame! I’m not saying this to impress you; I am saying this to impress upon you the importance of eating right. The conclusion is simple: You just cant out train a sloppy diet. Unless you are prepared to spend your entire day running on the treadmill you will not be able to exercise away your poor food choices. It’s too easy to consume a 700/800 or 1000 calories in a single and its too long, too hard and too unrealistic attempting to exercise them off. My weight loss creed is “train hard, eat Smart and you will look and feel great”. If you are really going to lose your body fat you must combine exercises that produce maximal calorie expenditure with a smart, sustainable eating plan that controls calorie intake and hormonal responses. Exactly what I guide my fat loss clients to do and it helps create great results. #4 THE FAT BURNING ZONE

When it comes to exercising for fat loss nothing sounds better than a work out in the magical “fat burning zone”. The implication is that you will burn more body fat when using this method of training over others. The reality is very different! It doesn’t – it is actually a very ineffective and inefficient method of burning body fat which will rob you of your results. Men are crazy to choose this ineffective and inefficient method to burn body fat, the trouble is they don’t know any better and unwittingly believe it is the best option!

So what is the “Fat Burning Zone”?

The fat burning zone is a specific workout intensity which is said to use the highest amount of fat as fuel whilst exercising. You will find the fat burning zone proudly printed on the displays of almost every cardio machine you can find sitting in the gym. No wonder so many male exercisers are incorrectly working out for fat loss - even the equipment manufacturers are falling for this long standing fat burning myth!

Following the most effective exercise protocols for fat loss is a must these days, life is just too hectic and it a challenge for most of us to simply make the time to workout, the last thing needed is to waste what precious time we do make following incorrect advice. Explaining the faults of the fat burning zone is going to help you to avoid this mistake. Typically the fat burning zone is thought of as the time when your body is mainly using fat as fuel. It dictates that when you exercise at low exercise intensities, like jogging for example, you will use a high percentage of

calories from fat to fuel the exercise. Conversely the fat burning zone also states that by working out at much higher exercise intensities, like fast running for example, you use a far lower percentage of fat for energy. This is undeniably correct - you do in fact use a higher percentage of body fat for energy during lower exercise intensities. This means exercise intensity and percentage of fat burning have an inverse relationship – the lighter you train the higher the percentage of fat you burn and vice a versa.

But listen to how the fat burning zone breaks down when it comes to real world fat loss results:

Body fat reduction can only take place when there are more calories being burned than consumed; this is known as the law of thermodynamics. The fat burning zone is based solely on the percentage of calories being burnt from fat not the total number being burnt. At complete rest 100% of the calories you burn come from body fat – so why not be in a state of complete rest all day to lose fat and get slim? Because it doesn’t work like that! Resting all day just won’t shift enough calories to create a negative calorie balance and cause a change in body fat…training in the fat burning zone has the exact same issue – it simply doesn’t burn enough calories – regardless of where they come from!

There is another major floor in the fat burning zone which I like to refer to as after burn. You know that exercise burns calories, but do you know that once you have stopped exercising you continue to burn calories after your training session? Well you do – but only with the right exercise intensity and selection. When you exercise at the boring, low intensities of the so called fat burning zone your calorie burning screeches to a halt the second you stop exercising, there is no after burn of calories. On the other hand when you exercise at a much higher intensity, like the intensities my clients experience during their interval training programs, you will continue to burn calories for up to 8 hours after your workout. Allow me to put that into perspec-tive for you – if tomorrow you workout at 12pm using my interval training protocol - you will continue to burn calories faster than normal until 8pm that evening – effectively you are doing an 8 hour workout! This is fantastic for fat loss! Research studies have com-pared the effects of training in the fat burning VS interval training on fat loss – the results are staggering: Interval training burns up to 9x more body fat in less than half the time! Do you want more fat loss in less time too? If so I strongly suggest you begin a sound interval training program.

#5 LACK OF WEIGHT LIFTING

Another huge mistake I see many men make when it comes to

exercising for fat loss is only performing cardiovascular exercises like running, cycling or exercise classes. Whilst cardiovascular exercise certainly has its place in creating fat loss – it is not as effective as resistance training. Resistance training (in other words lifting your body weight or free weights) is the number 1 choice of exercise when it comes to shedding body fat. Some men avoid resistance training because of the limiting beliefs they hold, they believe it is only for the body builders and meat heads out there. It really isn’t. Resistance training is a phenomenal exercise for losing body fat. Here’s why:

There are 2 vital reasons you should lift weights if you really want to shed your body fat, both reasons relate directly to your metabolism.

1. 65-75% of your total daily calorie expenditure comes directly from your metabolic rate (think of this as the speed at which your body burns calories at rest). The higher your metabolic rate the more calories you burn - every day. It is your ability to burn calories that dictates the amount of body fat you can lose.

One of the biggest factors affecting the speed of your metabolism is your lean body mass – in other words your muscle. Muscle burns up calories just existing on your body, therefore the more muscle you have = the more calories you burn even at rest! Research shows that 1 pound of muscle burns 50 calories every single day. When you gain just 6 pounds of new muscle you will burn an extra 300 calories every single day, that’s more than a mars bar a day burnt off! Will adding 6 pounds of muscle to your body make you look all bulky like a body builder? No! 1 pound of muscle is only the size of a large strawberry but 1 pound of body fat is the same size as a block of butter. The goal of my fat loss programs is to get the fat off your body and get you looking lean and hard - I won’t train you to look bulky and muscle bound – unless you want that of course. My system prioritizes fat loss but relies on building muscle - your friend in the fat burning game.

2. The second vital reason resistance training is so effective at helping you shed unsightly body fat is because of its afterburning effects. Remember I told you that when you do low intensity cardio exercises you stop burning calories the second your exercise session is over? Do you also remember how interval training keeps you burning calories for up to 8 hours after your exercise sessions ends? Well now I’m going to reveal to you one of my best insider tips for fat loss, listen to this. When you do resistance training (using the correct exercises and intensities) you will continue to burn calories for 24-72 hours post workout! Think about this…if you were to wake up on morning and do one of my metabolic resistance

training workouts you would continue to burn calories faster until Thursday morning! It’s like doing a 3 day workout!!! This method of training is known as metabolic resistance training and it is phenomenal for fat loss.

The only way to burn body fat is to expend more calories than you consume. Now you know that 65-75% of the total calories you expend each and every day come from your metabolic rate doesn’t it make sense to perform activities that cause the biggest elevation in your metabolic rate? A properly designed metabolic resistance training program will facilitate this dramatic rise in your metabolism. If you really want to drop some body fat you need to start a metabolic eight lifting plan.

#6 NO VISION

If you were to believe all the infomercials on TV you would believe that losing body fat is easy, effortless and happens overnight. This is the message which the diet and exercise companies repeatedly convey during their advertisements on TV and in the magazines. If only it were true! Let’s put the record straight here – people can either tell you the truth or tell you what you want to hear. These adverts are telling you what you want to hear. I’m here to tell you the truth – which is this…the only time losing fat is easy is once you know how hard it can be! Be under no illusion – exercise can be uncomfortable, some men find it is un-enjoyable, changing life long habits is challenging and making sacrifices isn’t fun but when you know that each workout you finish and every meal choice you make is taking you one step closer to looking how you want to look it becomes a heck of a lot easier. Losing fat can be quite a challenging journey and one which needs a clearly defined finish line. You won’t just start exercising and making sacrifices each week for fun – you will do it to change your body and achieve a great result. This is why it is so important that you create a vision of what you want from this program. Having a clearly defined and measurable image of how you want to look is the destination on your road map, it’s like a carrot dangling in front of your eyes which will continually help you to move forwards. Have you ever got into a taxi and told the driver to “just drive”, without having a clear destination in mind or any way of knowing when you will get to wherever you are going? Of course not, so why do the same in your fat loss journey? If you fail to plan you plan to fail so don’t make the mistake of starting your fat loss plan without a clearly defined end vision of how you want to look in mind!

The reason people fail to lose fat is simply because they stop doing the actions that actually move them forwards to their goal, taking the

time to set a clear vision of how you want to look reinforces why you are doing the challenging tasks I the first place. If you want to get a great body you need to get some vision!

#7 FATTITUDDE

I see a lot of guys with Fattitude! Fattitude prevents men from losing weight. But what is it? Fattitude is the “fix me” approach to getting thin, everybody wants fat loss for free these days, and they expect it to happen without the hard work. I’ve seen many men buy the pills, potions, powders and magic machines claiming to burn the fat for them in an attempt to duck out of the discipline and hard work needed to actually achieve the result.

Having a Fattitude means playing the victim when it comes to your appearance and placing the blame on all the things which are out of your control for being overweight and fat. Men with Fattitude believe that everyone and everything around them is responsible for them being overweight. But only they have actually created this physique. People with Fattitude say things like, “I can’t lose weight because of my job", "my schedule doesn’t give me the time to exercise “, “I have to drink alcohol at my business lunches” or "It’s my genetics that make me fat". As long as they are not responsible for their weight they are the victim and remain in the clear.

This is the root of many weight problems. By refusing to accept personal responsibility and take ownership over their actions to achieve fat loss men denying themselves the ability to change. If you have a Fattitude you are not in control of your weight, everyone and everything around you is and unless everyone and everything around you changes (which it inevitably wont) neither will your waistline. If you fail to change your mind set and take personal responsibility over losing body fat you too will continue to struggle with your weight. Life is the sum total of all the decisions you have made over the years. As soon as you adopt the mind set of the Victor instead if the Victim amazing things will start to happen, you will start losing body fat and feel in complete control. Creating this mindset rarely happens on its own, having someone to coach and help you create these changes to your thoughts is what’s needed, my personal training service includes coaching you to facilitate such changes.

So there it is - 7 reasons why men fail to lose body fat. If you like what you have heard, if you really want to change your body and if you truly feel ready and willing to embrace some changes to your lifestyle do get in touch – I would love to train with you to look and feel amazing.

Train Hard, Eat Smart – Look Great!

Andrew PascoeVision Personal Training