PITCHFORK FAT LOSS3 Insanely Simple Secrets to A Remarkable Unreal Body

PITCHFORK FAT LOSS: 3 Insanely Simple Secrets to a Remarkably Unreal BodyBy Dom Cadden

Quit looking for the magic pill. Stop searching for the easy route. Wade through the pseudoscience, hysteria and health propaganda that stands between you and the body you want.

Transforming yourself into a lean and functional machine is a matter of taking a pitchfork and stabbing at the three things that help your cause on their own, but when combined, create a synergy greater than the sum of its parts.

On the one prong is nutrition. On the next is training. And on the third prong are supplements.

Supplements are the icing on the cake, the spark that brings all other components together and optimizes your fuel. It’s a three­part solution with one simple truth: bring together only the elements you need in the amounts you need and you’ll get a system that you can stick with and a body you can be proud of.

PRONG 1: NUTRITION

Diet is a dirty word. It’s often associated with hunger, anger, restricted choices, sacrifice and loss, and elation when the damn diet reaches its inevitable end point. We prefer to talk about nutrition: a system of eating with lots of options and input from you. It’s an approach to keep for life because it allows you to still have a beer and enjoy food­­­stuff that living is all about.

We like to think of the value that you can add to your food or how to get more value out of your food, rather than fixating on what foods we remove from your life. But there’s no doubt that if you want to change your body, you probably need to look at what goes in your mouth every day. You can’t just double up on exercise or load up on supplements and think you can skip nutrition. Good nutrition is not just about making the right choices; the problem is knowing what the right choices are in the first place. Knowledge is power, so let’s get to the facts.

Do the Math

There’s no escaping it. The biggest part of dieting to become lean comes down to the simple arithmetic of putting fewer calories into your body than the amount of calories burned through exercise and other activities. It’s true that there are other factors­­­fancy things like muscle preservation, metabolic rate and fat oxidation­­­but the big catalyst for change is a calorie deficit.

All good things take time, especially if they are expected to last. A calorie deficit shouldn't be a drastic drop. It shouldn't leave you feeling faint, dizzy or ravenously hungry. People do lose weight with starvation diets, but not in a healthy manner. For a start, the weight drop is indiscriminate; in other words, a lot of the loss of pounds on the scales comes down to water weight (very temporary) and muscle (exactly what you don’t want to be losing!). The monster

losses on TV shows like The Biggest Loser make a one­pound a week loss on the scales look pathetic, but guess what? Health bodies around the world recommend losing half to one pound per week because it's a safe rate of weight loss if you don’t want the weight to come back.

Secondly, rapid weight loss from heavy fasting is often temporary. There is a rebound effect that comes from the body kicking into a primordial starvation mode to protect itself from times of famine. This means the body reacts to the sudden cutback in food by lowering basal metabolism (the rate at which it burns calories even at rest). This is made worse by the loss of muscle because muscle plays an important role in holding basal metabolism. Combined, these factors cause lost weight to come back, even if you're eating better and exercising more than you were when you originally put the weight on!

Ideally, you should try to have some awareness of the calories in your foods. As a guide, 1200 calories a day for women and 1500 for men are considered to be the point where your metabolism and muscle mass cannot be supported and your body will go into starvation mode. In other words, depending on your size and activity level, you may need considerably more than this to maintain muscle mass and prevent your metabolism from slowing.

Concentrate on having a healthy diet that you can sustain without crashing off the rails or having whole cheat days. Remember that a cheat meal once or twice a week can be OK. Make sure that you're creating a calorie deficit on your normal diet. It helps when you know that a gram of fat, even if it is a good fat from foods such as nuts, fish avocados or olives – has nine calories, compared to the four calories found in both a gram of protein and a gram of carbohydrate. Fiber has zero calories, even though very fibrous foods such as many vegetables are extremely rich in vitamins and minerals that we need.

It’s not all about the numbers, though. If you’re trying to lose fat, then calorie density­­­or the weight and bulk of foods­­­seems to be an important factor.

The theory is that we become accustomed to eating roughly the same volume of food per day to feel satisfied. In fact, a study at Pennsylvania State University shows that when the calorie density (which they calculated by dividing a food’s total calories by its weight in grams) of foods was reduced by 30 percent, on average the subjects ate 30 percent fewer calories, but felt just as full.

The idea is that you can maintain the same volume of food as you’re used to, but lower the number of calories in each portion. You can lower the calorie density of foods by either decreasing the fat and sugar content or increasing the water and fiber content. You can also combine the two.

Increase Caloric Density add more water­heavy fruits or vegetables to your meals have a tossed green salad with lunch or dinner eat thick vegetable soups eat more high­fiber cereal, whole grain and legumes check the labels on packaged foods and steer clear of foods with more than 10g fat

per 100g, except for good fats in small serving; e.g. nuts, avocado avoid high­sugar foods. many manufacturers reduce fat in their foods, but keep the "taste" in them by adding more sugars. eat more fruit instead of drinking juices limit your portions of fat; a gram of fat has 225 percent of the calories of a gram of

protein or carbohydrate

avoid dry foods, such as biscuits, crackers, dried fruit and reduce bread consumption

The Power of Protein

Diet theories change faster than a Disney starlet’s image once she turns 18, but some truths are scientific fact. First, a relatively higher protein intake (about 1.5g per kilogram of body weight) can help with fat loss. Another way to put it is that it’s safe to maintain a rate of up to 20 percent of your diet over an extended period of time. There’s no point going well over this limit because it will come at the cost of restricting carbohydrates or other essential nutrients. In addition, there’s an increased risk of cancer associated with excess consumption of animal proteins.

Protein helps in three ways. First, protein has a greater thermic effect than fat or carbohydrate. In other words, the body has to raise the rate of energy use to digest protein. When this extra protein comes at the expense of extra carbohydrate, especially simple carbs and sugars, it prevents frequent and intense insulin responses that cause energy to be stored as fat.

Protein, specifically the amino acid leucine, helps preserve muscle during weight loss. More muscle helps maintain a high metabolism, which is your defense against fat jumping back aboard. On top of this, many studies show that subjects report feeling “fuller for longer” when they’re on a higher protein diet. The powerful appetite­suppressing effects come from the fact that protein stimulates the release of the hormone cholecystokinin from the stomach cells, which then travels through the bloodstream to the hypothalamus, where it tells the brain that the stomach is full.

Sports dietitians say that to get the best out of the protein you eat, it’s best to limit yourself to an ounce of protein in any one sitting because this is the limit the body can most effectively make use of all the nutrients available. That means that you should aim to have around an ounce of protein at every meal and half to three­quarters of an ounce of protein mixed with carbs after training.

Carbs Aren't the Enemy

We’ve all been flooded with talk of low­carbohydrate and even no­carb diets, but everyone needs carbs. It’s just that the type, amount and times of days that you eat carbs may vary depending on your circumstances.

Carbohydrates have many functions apart from providing a quick (‘simple’ carbs) or sustained (‘complex’ carbs) form of energy. They are essential for brain function and they are the mortar that works with protein as a building block to building muscle or repairing and regenerating muscle after exercise. Carbohydrates are also vital for the transport or action of enzymes, amino acids that can help play a role in fat loss and a healthy metabolism. So you can see that with carbs it’s wrong and even dangerous to go zero tolerance on them. The problem with many people is that we have too much of the wrong type of carbs too often and at the wrong times.

Like Best Actor contenders at the Oscars, carbohydrates are often judged on their complexity. Complex carbs have three or more sugars, which are usually linked together to form a chain. This chain has a bunch of things in it – fiber, vitamins, and minerals – which lengthens the time it takes to digest to a point where the carbs are converted to glucose, a sugar that can be transported in the blood and then stored at the site of the muscles in the form of glycogen.

Simple carbs have only one or two sugars in them and often not much else. So while the complex carbs take a little longer to digest and provide a slow or sustained release of energy (sugar) into the body, they don’t raise the sugar levels in the blood as quickly as simple carbohydrates. The first big difference between simple and complex carbs that complex carbs will be more nutrient­rich and provide an energy release that is sustained over a longer time, plus the extra fiber they contain makes you feel more satiated by your food.

The second major difference is that the speed of the release of sugar into the body influences the rate of insulin release. Insulin is a hormone that plays a key role in regulating blood glucose levels and the use of fat for energy. A rush of sugar into the body can cause an insulin spike, which in turn can upset glucose regulation. When this happens habitually, the body can develop sensitivity to insulin.

Long term, these spikes in insulin to deal with the constant influxes of sugar are characterized by weight gain, especially around the mid­section of the body. You can see this when you look at two overweight people from different cultural backgrounds or even different generations. The one that tends to hold most of the weight around their middle will tend to have a history of eating a lot of simple carbs, often on the form of sugars (including drinks such as sodas and beer), white rice, white flour products, processed foods with much of the fiber removed – while the one who tends to have their fat more evenly distributed will often come from a background with a diet that contains a more complex carbs or a lot less carbs in total.

Complex carbs are commonly found in vegetables and pulses (e.g. yams, potatoes, beans corn, lentils), whole meal bread, whole grains and cereals. Simple carbs are often foods that contain a lot of added sugars or they are heavily processed, which includes foods such as white rice. You can see more about this by checking out the Glycemic Index which ranks foods on a scale from 0 to 100 according to the extent to which they raise blood sugar levels after eating. Simple carbs and added sugars have their place, particularly before exercise and after exercise, when the muscles cry out for sugars to help replenish lost glycogen to recover and repair themselves. For better health and maintaining a lean body, simple carbs be limited and make up the minority of your carb intake.

Now let’s look at gluten, which has become the pariah of carbs. Gluten refers to proteins found in wheat, barley and rye, so it’s present in most breads, cakes, cookies and pasta. It’s true that gluten is dangerous for people with a gluten allergy (coeliac disease) which affects one in every 141 people in the USA, and many others have some degree of intolerance to gluten.

Just because a few people have issues with gluten doesn’t necessarily make gluten a problem for the rest of us, according to Dr Alesio Fasano, Director for Celiac Research at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston. He has stated that it’s a myth that gluten­free diets lead to fat loss. He says there is no direct link. It depends on what you're replacing for the gluten foods you would normally eat. If it means replacing breads and cookies for lots of vegetables, then of course you'll feel better and lose fat, but he points out that many foods marketed as gluten­free are often “hypercalorific.” Hypercalorific foods have a very high calorie count, often thanks to a higher concentration of fats and oils; for example, a cake made with almond meal instead of wheat flour.

Eating healthy and losing fat is challenging enough; there’s no need to restrict our options and enjoyment of foods without good reason. As we will discuss later, variety is the golden rule for diet because it ensures that you get a wide variety of nutrients. Try to get your carbs from a variety of sources, like rice, oats, corn, vegetables, and legumes, rather than just gluten. This way, your intake of gluten will naturally go down. There is still a lot of research being conducted on the role of gluten in the health of people who have no allergy or intolerance to it,

but for now, we see no good reason to turn our backs on all the other nutrients found in things such as whole­wheat and rye breads or barley in soups and stews.

The Skinny on Salt

The message on salts can be a confusing one. When talk turns to exercise and sports drinks, the role of sodium, which makes up much of the salts in our diet, is hyped for its importance to hydration. There’s good reason for this. Sodium does help the body retain water, which is vital in sustained activity, especially at moderate to high intensity. At the same time, the Recommended Daily Allowance for sodium is just a measly 2.3 grams daily­­­a little under a teaspoon.

It’s commonly stated that sports drinks are only required if you are doing moderate to high intensity exercise for more than an hour. In other bouts of activity, you’d be better off hydrating with plain old water or, for shorter, higher­intensity sessions, perhaps a diluted (1 part to three parts water) of a non­acidic fruit juice such as apple.

There may be some exceptions to this – for example, if you habitually sweat a lot and can taste or feel a film of salt on the skin when you exercise; or after a period of heavy sweating in high heat without adequate hydration.

So sodium definitely has its use, but ingesting more sodium than we need tends to encourage excess weight through water retention – on its own, sodium doesn’t make you carry more fat. The connection is that sodium and a range of other salts are usually cascading through fast food and highly­processed, calorie­dense snacks and other foods. What’s worse, since salt is a flavor enhancer, it becomes hard to stop eating or say “no” to these foods. The simplest way to reduce salts overall in the diet will be to cut down on these foods. Read a label – if the level of sodium and other salts is very high relative to the RDA of 2300mg, then you’ll tend to find that cutting out or limiting that intake of that food will be good for a whole lot of other reasons besides the salts contained in it.

Supernutrition and The Principle of Moderation

Lots of foods and drinks have an appropriate point of moderation, even if this can differ wildly from food to food. Alcohol, chocolate, coffee, carbs, and nuts are enjoyable foods that a lot of buzzkills slash and burn out of their diets. Fortunately for us, these foods have positives when taken in the appropriate doses. Even arsenic in moderation is OK (don't try this at home!). It’s just worth considering that getting it wrong results in a bad case of death, rather than belly flab.

While the point of moderation for general health and well­being doesn’t change for some things­­­caffeine and alcohol, for instance­­­it’s worth remembering that for many other things your nutrition needs and allowances change with circumstances. These variables include things such as activity level, activity type, stress level, age and whether you are trying to shift your body weight up or down. This last point is a deal­breaker, because it is always much easier to maintain a weight level than it is to move it down – or up, for that matter.

The challenge of moderation also goes the other direction. One of the common mistakes in nutrition and especially in training is the mindset that if a bit of something is good for you, then doing/eating/drinking stacks of it must be even too much water can be extremely dangerous. Common victims here are protein, supplements and energy drinks/gels and even water. On the other hand, carbohydrates are currently maligned like North Korean reality TV shows. If I have one more person with dull eyes telling me with slurred speech how they’re

losing weight because they’ve cut out all carbs, but they don’t have much energy, I’ll push them over – and I’ll probably only have to use one finger.

The principle of supernutrition is to get as many nutrients as you can through the foods that you eat most of the time. That means eating very nutrient­dense foods and even enriching them where possible so you get more nutrients from the same amount of calories (or close to it). Easy examples of this would be adding a green salad with no dressing or a no­oil dressing to your meal, cooking with lots of fresh herbs or adding a high­quality protein powder to your homemade cookies, cakes or pancakes. Think in terms of what you can add to your diet to make it more nutritious, rather than cutting out more and more foods. This way, if you live a little and eat a bit of not­so­nutritious food or ‘empty calories’ (foods that have no or very little real nutritional benefit beside their calories, e.g. sodas, white bread) some of the time, you’ll still come out ahead. This will become a habit that you can happily stick to for life.

Supernutrition incorporates ‘super foods’ (extremely nutrient­dense foods) such as cranberries, açaì, kale, cold­water fish, with an emphasis on eating a variety of foods (especially different protein sources), taking measures to increase your ability to absorb nutrients, and by supplementing your foods with spices, herbs and high­fiber vegetables. This last group will barely increase your calorie intake, but it will increase your nutrient and fiber intake. This is why in calorie controlled diets, it can be a good idea to have soups based on blended vegetables, and ‘green’ juices (juices made from green vegetables) to help keep up your body’s energy by supplying more nutrients through less calories.

Extra fiber can add bulk to your food to keep you satisfied – you can use tricks such as adding diced broccoli or silverbeet stalks to bulk up steamed rice, for example. Fiber also helps regulate blood sugar, which can help prevent dips in energy and cravings. It can improve the absorption of minerals, especially calcium, and it stimulates the intestinal fermentation of short­chain fatty acids, which do ace things like suppressing cholesterol production in the body and stimulating the production of antibodies, T helper cells and other mechanisms that protect your immune system.

Drinks

Remember that drinks count! All those cappuccinos, hot chocolate and teas with sugar or honey add up. Try to cut back to one per day and avoid sugared soft drinks. A small glass of beer or wine each contains about 135 calories, but the damage doesn’t stop there. The alcohol halts your ability to metabolize fat. Cut back to no more than four drinks per week.

PRONG 2: TRAINING

Training to change your body composition and become leaner requires a combination of training in a very important set of proportions. These proportions roughly shape a pyramid. At the base is incidental exercise, and then above that is aerobic exercise. The next level up is a type of training that is often termed anaerobic, sprint or HIIT (high­intensity interval training). At the peak of the pyramid is strength training. All these work together to not just lose fat, but build a body that will be better able to stay lean and maintain muscle. Working through this combination of training also establishes a functional body that is then ready to focus more on specific aspects of training related to your sport.

Incidental Exercise

Our society keeps getting fatter because we simply don’t move as much or as often. Cars, drive­throughs, remote controls, home delivery, escalators, elevators, computers, Internet and sedentary jobs give us less reason to get off our butts and move. For many people, their programmed training sessions are the only real exercise they get!

The first step to buck this trend is to avoid the easy way out and stop finding ‘good reasons’ to not exercise in your day­to­day life. Leave the car at home or the office and walk where you need to go sometimes. Take the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. Carry your groceries. Primp your garden instead of your Facebook page. Play with your kids instead of letting someone else do it. Clear your head at work or before bed by taking a stroll instead of sitting down to coffee or watching TV. All this extra activity adds up, plus the frequent raising of the heart rate, even slightly, helps to break sedentary habits and lift metabolic rate.

A good aim is to try and reduce your “bottom business” – the time spent on your butt every day by 10 percent. Don’t think in terms of the calories each of these small bouts of exercise will burn, think of them all combining to make your body a better fat­burning inferno further down the track.

Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic conditioning is the foundation for many sports. Take soccer, a long distance running race or any fighting art. The first concern is to be able to see out the distance of the game, event or bout, and this comes from steady­state aerobic training. The better your aerobic conditioning, the more gas you will have in the tank to lift your speed, intensity and power when you need to.

Aerobic exercise has an important role in fat loss, as does high intensity interval training (HIIT) and strength training. Think of aerobic exercise as the longer­duration, moderate­ intensity exercise that you do at a steady pace with little or no rest. Aerobic means ‘with oxygen’, which refers to the body’s use of oxygen to generate energy in the muscles. A guide to whether an activity is aerobic for you is to see if you can carry on a conversation while doing it without being too short of breath. This means that a person with greater cardio­ vascular fitness will have a wider heart rate range for their ‘aerobic training zone’ compared to a less fit person.

Aerobic exercise enables the use of a greater proportion of fat for energy because the use of oxygen allows fats to be used in the process to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the basic energy carrier for all cells, instead of just glycogen. It’s a slow process, though – glycogen will always be used initially to produce energy, but as the activity progresses in the aerobic zone, the body will turn increasingly to use fats in the process.

Aerobic training usually doesn’t have the excitement of a sprint session or the machismo of strength training, but it doesn’t have to be brain­numbingly repetitive, either. In fact, if fat loss is your goal, then you actually want to change up what you do in your sessions, since the body will become more efficient – and therefore find ways to use less energy – with the same activity over time. Another pointer is to pick activities where you use as much muscle mass as you can and your body is not supported – for example, choose power walking or running over cycling or swimming.

If you’re all about your sport, then you may want to do a lot of your aerobic training using movements that mimic those in your sport – for example, a soccer player will run. The

flipside of this­­­and this is increasingly common practice in sports training­­­is that aerobic training in one activity will largely translate to aerobic fitness for another activity. So you’ll see swimmers who will run and runners who will swim, the advantage being that by varying their activity they can help protect their body against repetitive strain/impact wear and tear.

Those who are trying to get leaner can also use the timing of aerobic exercise to get a head start. Aerobic exercise on an empty stomach burns fat better, say researchers at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Before breakfast, your body is low on glycogen, so it turns to burning fat more quickly. Caffeine can also help spark up fat burning enzymes, and several other thermogenic or ‘fat burning’ aids and supplements tend to work better in a fasted state.

Anaerobic Training

Anaerobic training involves working up to a heart rate level higher than the aerobic threshold, where you struggle to breathe in enough oxygen. Typically, it involves short intervals of activity or a variation from high to low intensity. High­intensity interval training (HIIT) is a type of anaerobic training that involves short, sharp sprints or burst of high intensity activity with short rests in between. When you’re strapped for time, a session can be as short as 20 minutes or up to 40 minutes – with true HIIT, it will be difficult to push longer.

Fartlek is another type of anaerobic training where you do an activity continuously, but you vary the speeds at which you do it. For instance, you could start out walking, 400m, then jog for 200m, walk again, then sprint 50m, and so on, and you can play around with the surface, too – use stairs, sand, hills or shallow water for variation. It’s a system that can be used for many activities, such as cycling, kayaking, rollerblading or boxing drills.

HIIT has been proven to work for fat loss even with intervals as short as 10­20 seconds. Rest periods are short – short enough so that you feel you never have full recovery, i.e. you only just get to a point where you have adequate oxygen and the ability to repeat an activity with little drop­off in time or performance from the last interval. As a general guide (and this will vary with fitness and the intensity of the activity), aim for a rest period that is equal to the While you’re getting fitter, these sessions also provide a fat­burning effect after the session is over because of something called EPOC, or excess post­exercise oxygen consumption. This means that while the exercise period itself pushes your body into a zone where it forced to use glycogen stored in the muscles, the heart rate can remain elevated for hours after a session and promote fat oxidation.

Fartlek is also proven to be much more than a funny name, with the combo of sprint intervals and non­stop activity hitting overall conditioning and fat loss better than an extended one­ pace activity can.

If you’re trying to get leaner, then your anaerobic training should be all about the intensity – keep some time credits for your aerobic training. Unlike the aerobic training, the duration of the session, how much muscle mass you use and whether your body is supported are all much less important.

Resistance Training

If you’re trying to get leaner, then resistance training should play a role in your training plan – but it’s important not to overdo it. Guys especially like to pump away because it feels good and

if they squint at the mirror real hard they believe they can see the fat turning to muscle right before their eyes (fat and muscle cells cannot transform into each other).

The truth is that the more aerobic and anaerobic training you do, the more fat­burning you do, and the same isn’t true of resistance training, but a little is still very important. Resistance or strength training helps you maintain muscle mass even if you’re losing weight, and holding muscle will keep your metabolic rate up. In fact, even without trying to lose weight, we all experience sarcopenia – the loss of muscle mass that occurs naturally after our mid­20s – unless we move to stop it through an activity such as resistance training. The less muscle we have in proportion to our total body mass (weight), the lower our metabolism will be, which means the calories we burn also decrease.

Another factor is that GH (human growth hormone) and testosterone have a significant influence on body composition and fat accumulation. Intense resistance training will naturally spike GH levels, which will help maintain lean muscle mass. For men, resistance training can help slow and even halt decline in testosterone – in several studies, men as old as 70+ experienced increases in testosterone after training with weights.

There is no single magic exercise, despite what Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley told you on that infomercial at 2am. It gets worse. Spot reduction the idea that if you do lots of crunches/leg adduction exercise then you lose fat from your gut/inner thighs – is just a myth, like the Loch Ness monster or secure data systems.

Here’s the scoop on how to choose your exercises. If you’re after fat loss or just want to hold your muscle and strength while you train for your sport, then the trick is to do exercises that works the big muscles and hits as big a group of muscles as possible. Better still, pick exercises where your body is not supported – i.e. you are standing up or you are suspended (e.g. chin­ups, TRX Suspension band exercises). That means squats instead of leg extensions, deadlifts instead of lat pulldowns, cleans instead of bench press and pull­ups instead of biceps curls. Do box jumps and jump­push­ups if you don’t have weights. This is not about working up to the maximum weight you can do for a single lift – pick a moderate weight that you can lift 8­10 times then repeat again after a slightly incomplete rest period (around the 1 minute mark).

Alternatively, set up a handful of exercises and go through them one after the other in a circuit before resting. With a good, efficient resistance training workout can be done in as little as 20­30 minutes excluding warm­up and cooldown. Twice per week training is enough to maintain muscle mass.

After all this activity… rest!

Sleep and adequate rest plays a vital part in getting the body you want. Not just so you recover from a tough training session and replenish your energy, and not just so the growth hormone that kicks in during REM (‘deep’) sleep repairs and rebuilds muscles to help make them bigger faster and stronger – adequate sleep also helps you get lean and stay lean.

Researchers at Northwestern University found that people who didn’t get adequate sleep (seven hours) became hungrier and gained weight, particularly those subjects aged between 32 and 49. The University of Chicago added that a lack of sleep changes the levels of two important hormones related to fat metabolism, leptin and ghrelin.

Keep a track of how much sleep you really get. Often low mood or emotional or mental stress can feel like physical tiredness. If this is the case, exercise will actually help by releasing endorphins that lift mood and promote relaxation – but it’s getting started that’s hard. Plan ‘low mood’ workouts that will distract you, but won’t stress your mind – e.g. a

scenic walk or ride, hitting a ball against a wall or zoning out with cardio equipment and a fave movie.

If you are truly overtired from training, lack of work or whatever the world has thrown in your face, you’ll know it in your heart. No, not in the touchy­feely sense, but right up in there with all the arteries and ventricles and gore. On a ‘good’ day, test your resting heart rate after you have woken up but while you’re relaxed and still in bed. Use this as your base. If you test yourself the same way on another day and your heart rate is elevated significantly, you probably need to get some rest in. You can get a more accurate measure – complete with charts and graphs and things – with heart rate variability (HRV) apps, which measure the variation in the time interval between heartbeats.

PRONG 3: SUPPLEMENTS

Supplements are exactly what the word indicates they should be: supplementary to your normal nutrition from food, rather than a replacement for food. In fact, it’s often said that supplements work best when the diet is already very good, as this means that the supplements are not doing all their work just to make up the shortfall of nutrients that are required to get to us to a balance where we are functioning kind of OK.

The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of a nutrient is the average daily dietary intake level sufficient to meet the nutrient requirements of approximately 97% of the American population. However, in times when our bodies are under stress – including physical stress from training and exercise – our requirements of certain nutrients increase. In addition to

this, we can often benefit from going over and above the RDA for many nutrients, especially when there is a synergy with physical activity. There are limits, though – once again, it’s that gym and health scene mentality that if something is good for you, then eating crazy amounts of it must be just awesome. Sometimes this can be counterproductive, occasionally it can be toxic and usually it is just a waste of money. Supplement makers suggest a recommended dosage and you would be wise not to exceed these guidelines.

Overall, supplements serve a few basic functions. At one end, they fill in the gaps for nutrients that our body requires. At the other end, they can supply an active ingredient that helps the body with a specific purpose – fat loss, for example – at a concentration that is very hard to get from food. For instance, even five cups of brewed green tea every day is not enough to make you lose fat, whereas a concentrated extract from green tea has been proven through many scientific studies to help fat loss. In other cases, you could get the additional amounts of a substance from food, but it would compromise your diet in other ways. For example, creatine is easily accessible through meat and fish, but using these sources to get the additional creatine needed to help athletic performance and recovery would mean you’d have to eat a lot more extra protein and calories from meats.

Of course, if every supplement product claim was true, we’d all be 250lb ripped monsters capable of doing triathlons and training seven days a week. The challenge is to separate the good stuff from plain marketing hype – the range of supplement wonder ingredients is immense, but the list of ones that have proven scientific evidence of health benefits when taken in supplement form is a lot smaller. Here are some that have science on their side and a good practical use for you in the quest to be a lean, mean fighting machine.

Thermogenesis

Thermogenesis is not a substance itself, it’s a process that helps fat loss when certain ingredients work together to increase metabolic rate. When you exercise, you naturally increase your body's core temperature, which consequently boosts your metabolic rate naturally. Thermogenic blends cause your body temperature to increase in a similar fashion, whether or not you are exercising. Strictly speaking, the thermogenic process raises the rate at which you use up calories rather than directly working on fat. Indirectly, this process helps create the calorie deficit required to lose body fat. However, some ‘thermogenic’ supplements combine thermogenic ingredients such as caffeine and yohimbine with ingredients that directly work on fat, such as green tea extract, as well as others that may suppress appetite.

Caffeine

The effects of caffeine on fat oxidation (“burning”) are well established. Caffeine stimulates the sympathetic nervous system to help free up fatty acids for oxidation. This works well during low to moderate intensity exercise, but the effects are less obvious during moderate or high­intensity exercise.

Caffeine has also been proven to produce short­term thermogenic effects (i.e. burn more calories at rest) even at low doses (100mg – a weak cup of instant coffee). The real results come at a higher dose – 3.6mg per pound of bodyweight can significantly increase the rate of calorie burning at rest in the three hours after you have it, as long as you’re not a habitual high­caffeine consumer.

You’d need one helluva coffee to reach 3.6mg per pound of bodyweight – a triple espresso. The problem is that the caffeine in foods is bound in compounds that change how it acts. This and variations between products, how it is stored and how it is prepared for consumption also make it very hard to be accurate or consistent when gauging how much caffeine is in a food and how it will act (i.e. peak strength, how long it will take to reach peak

strength and for how long that will last). This is not the case with caffeine anhydrous, which is dehydrated and concentrated caffeine that is standardized and used in many thermogenic or ‘fat burner’ supplements. The chemistry of this and the caffeine found in foods are identical, but the delivery system is different.

Caffeine anhydrous in a product from a reputable brand will provide a precise dosage at a concentration that makes it easier to consume larger amounts at the appropriate times – and the timing is important, as these products when used prior to exercise.

Green Tea

Green tea is a well­researched substance that contains compounds known as catechins. One of these, epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), can inhibit an enzyme that breaks down norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter involved in regulating metabolic rate and fat­burning. This action keeps metabolism and fat­burning elevated for longer, especially when coupled with additional caffeine to free up fat from fat cells.

Obesity Reviews journal notes that green tea’s effect on fat oxidation works both at rest and during exercise on fat loss. For best results, the ECGC concentration should be high – in an extract, rather than drinking a standard green tea.

Yohimbine

Yohimbine is a chemical that can be found naturally in the bark of the yohimbe tree. Like caffeine, yohimbine has a role in fat loss and thermogenic supplements because it works both as a thermogenic aid as well as promoting fat oxidation.

Yohimbine is a stimulant that increases adrenaline levels in the body, which in turn increases metabolic rate. It also inhibits a regulatory process in fat cells that would normally work to preserve fat – so the end result is that you and yohimbine win, as your body turns to using more fat for energy than it normally would, even in well­conditioned athletes. The Institute of Sports Medicine in Belgrade, Serbia, did a double­blind study on top­level male soccer players and found that “body fat significantly decreased” in a test that lasted just 21 days.

Yohimbe and its derivatives have also long been famed for their sexual properties. In fact, a standardized form of yohimbine (yohimbine hydrochloride) is available as a prescription medicine in the United States. It has been shown in human studies to be effective in the treatment of orgasmic dysfunction in men and the treatment of reduced libido in women.

White Willow Bark

In the days before the dangers of ephedra were known or acknowledged, ECA ‘stacks’ (containing ephedra, caffeine and aspirin) were the big deal in fat loss. The role of aspirin was believed to act as a conduit to enhance the way the heavy­hitting ephedra and caffeine did their job, plus it was reputed to also stop your heart jumping out of your chest from the ephedra.

As supplement­makers sought to use more natural sources, they turned to white willow bark, which acts like aspirin and has been used medicinally since Ancient Egyptian times.

When you eat aspirin, it breaks down into salicylate, a compound that is derived from plants such as willow bark. In 2012, a study on mice at the University of Dundee in Scotland showed that salicylate affected an enzyme known as AMPK, which has a key role in regulating cell metabolism. Tests showed that salicylate switches on AMPK, increasing the breakdown of fat. This indicates that the salicylate in white willow bark may play an important part in encouraging fat loss.

Creatine

Of all the sports performance supplements, creatine is the most widely used and the one that has been most extensively tested – and it comes through with the goods. Creatine is known for its cell­volumizing properties, which means that it draws water to cells in the muscle, which helps produce an increase in strength and it can also make for an increase in muscle size. Better hydration at the cellular level also aid recovery, which is why even endurance athletes will often use creatine.

Results from creatine can vary – it is often thought that people who have naturally high creatine levels may not see much benefit. The only way to truly test creatine level in the body is by muscle biopsy.

Creatine is a substance that is believed to work better in ‘cycles’ – taking a regular dose for a period, then going of it for a set period. The theory is that since you also make creatine in the

body, halting supplementation from time to time encourages your body to keep making creatine itself instead of waning production because so much is supplied from an external source. An alternate theory is that the body adapts so readily to any external aid in performance that it is good to “trick” it by omitting that aid occasionally so that it fails to adapt. In recent years, the logic behind cycling has been challenged, but anecdotally, many athletes still prefer to cycle creatine because it has been proven to be beneficial in their experience.

The challenge for health supplement brands is to produce a creatine supplement that has a bio­availability in the body – unfortunately, with creatine it’s not simply about the number of milligrams listed on the bottle. Another consideration when you shop is to resist the temptation to get your creatine as part of a ‘one stop shop’ protein powder where individual dosing of active ingredients is not possible (or such details are hidden under the term ‘proprietary blend’). For better quality creatine and better results, you’re better off looking to get your creatine via a dedicated product; for example, a pure creatine supplement.

Nitric Oxide

Nitric oxide sounds like something a mad scientist made in a test tube, but high nitrate foods such as beetroots juice naturally boost nitric oxide in the body.

For many years bodybuilders have known the benefits of nitric oxide for muscular pumps and hose­like vascularity, but more recently scientists have found other, much more practical benefits.

Research from the University of Exeter showed that taking a dietary supplement to boost nitric oxide in the body can significantly boost stamina during high­intensity exercise.

The results suggested that taking the supplement can allow people to exercise up to 20% longer and could produce a 1­2% improvement in race times. That may not sound a lot, but it’s often the difference between winning and losing. Two years after this study, very similar results were reported in a study at Australia’s RMIT University.

Professor Andrew Jones from the University of Exeter explained that the supplement increased performance by increasing the ability to utilize oxygen in the muscles during exercise. It was also found to significantly reduce systolic blood pressure.

The supplement tested contained the amino acid L­arginine, which enhances the production of nitric oxide in the body.

Multivitamins and Multiminerals

This is the smart choice of supplement, especially for those who are under a lot of physical, mental or emotional stress. It's also important people who can’t always control the content or consistency of their diet. The trick is to not get distracted by the numbers – more is not always better and you will never actually use 16 times the RDA of vitamin E (a vitamin that is toxic in excess, by the way). Instead, look for a supplement with as broad a spectrum of vitamins and minerals as possible and use it in low doses. This helps ensure that you are evening out any deficiencies in your diet without going into overkill on other vitamins or minerals that you are getting sufficiently through your food intake.

B Vitamins

A B­group vitamin supplement is another great option for general health, but it becomes particularly important when you're hitting the training hard or trying to change your body composition, whether that’s putting on muscle, losing fat, or a combination of the two.

The Bs include B1 (thiamin), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B6 (pyridoxine), B7 (biotin), and B12 (cyanocobalamin). They're really the A­Team for the active person. They play a role in everything from protein metabolism and energy production to maintaining healthy nerves and breaking down fat and carbohydrates.

Vitamin B12 is essential to the production of red blood cells that carry oxygen through the blood to the body's tissues, so this is especially important to support exercise and recovery from fatigue. However, it is only found in animal sources, so vegetarians and vegans in particular may want to at least consider taking this as a supplement, as well as looking for foods and drinks fortified with B12. It's also recommended that people over age 50 increase their intake of B12 because 30 percent of this age group has a thinning stomach lining that makes it difficult to absorb B12 through food.

Glutamine

Some of your immune cells use glutamine as a fuel. After an intense workout you have muscle breakdown and your immune system is activated, and glutamine is taken from the muscle for recovery. There is some evidence to show that supplementing your diet with extra glutamine can support the immune system better and protect you from muscle breakdown or loss. Glutamine is not toxic, so there is no risk in taking additional glutamine.

Glucosamine

Glucosamine has been well­studied, and there is limited evidence that glucosamine slows down joint degeneration. It’s still enough for sports dietitians with pro and national sports teams to put their faith in glucosamine supplements, which they use with athletes who are in sports where there is a lot of repetitive jarring of the joints. It's a harmless supplement, except for people who have a shellfish allergy or diabetes, because it can increase blood sugar.

One final word of warning – some dietary supplements may interact with medications, which then makes the medications less effective. They may also pose risks if you have medical problems or are about to have surgery. Also bear in mind that according to the USDA, most dietary supplements have not been tested in pregnant women or nursing mothers. If you take medications or any of the above scenarios apply to you, it’s best to talk to your doctor about the supplements you’re taking.