My Findings on Burning Body Fat

If you're like me and have struggled in the in the past with high body fat, well you may want to read this.   Over the years as we get older find it harder and harder to get rid of body fat, mainly because our metabolism slows down as we get older, our cells start dying and not replacing themselves effectively due to poor nutrition, pollution around us and the weather and stress in our lives, coupled with the fact that as we age and do not engage into physical and active things we lose muscle mass which makes our metabolism slow. 

I recently did a biometric reading for my body fat and was really shocked at the high level of my body fat. I knew I was overweight as I have about a stone and a half to lose, but the most shocking finding was that  my fat content was near 40%. 

This made me want to look into the reason that my body fat content was so high. 

I started by tracking what I was eating in the first instance, I felt I ate pretty healthily. But then you can eat healthy and still put on weight and fat. 

This made me want to look into the reason that my body fat content was so high. So here's what I found

I started by tracking what I was eating in the first instance, I felt I ate pretty healthily. I downloaded an app on my iPhone called MyFitnessPal. 

This is a really cool app, I put in my daily food habits and it told me how much macronutrients I was getting. To you and me that is how many carbs, fat, protein I was taken in. 

I didn't put any restrictions on the amount of carbs fats or proteins at this point as I just wanted to know what my day to day intake was on a regular basis.  I did this for three weeks. The findings were amazing not to say the least I was eating far too much fat and not expending enough energy i.e. exercise   

So even though on some days I ate less than my caloric intake, The content of the fat in what I was eating was really high, and also because I was not exercising the food that I was eating wasn't being used efficiently and therefore my body converted this to additional fat and began to store it.

it wasn't that I was eating the wrong types of food, it was about eating the right combination of food. 
So this showed me that you can eat healthy and still put weight and body fat on

So then I began paying more attention to the percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, fat intake. The recommended percentages are 50% carbohydrates 30% protein 20% fat so I set my goals on the my fitness pal app to those recommended percentages. 

I also looked up what my base metabolic rate (BMR) was.
If you do not know what this is, it is the calculation for how many calories your body needs to function on a daily basis, for instance the calories need it for digestion for breathing, processing waste within the body, moving, for the heart to pump blood around the body et cetera. This is also known as you're resting metabolic rate.  So your BMR dictates how many calories you need on a day-to-day basis to function normally. 

 In order to reduce weight you would then need to reduce your daily intake by about 500 cal to lose about half a pounds a week, if you wish to lose more, say a pound a week, then you would need to reduce your daily calorie intake to by another 500 cal. It is not generally advised to reduce your calorie intake more than 1000 cal as it would make you too weak to function on a day-to-day basis and it is not healthy. 

If you put your height and your weight and your age into my fitness pal app it will calculate all this for you. You then select how many pounds you would like or what your ideal weight is and it will give you the option of losing half a pound a week ora pound to 2 pounds.  Although, 2 pounds is a bit excessive and very hard to do in a week unless you have a lot of weight to lose in the first instance  Normally a pound to half a pound a week is acceptable. 

So I put into a goal, I weighed myself, I measured my hips and my waist and enter the information into the my fitness pal app and I also set a goal to increase my workouts to 4 times a week.

I also devised a specific program of workouts that I was going to do on those four days so I wasn't just going to wing it every day. 

I then use the my fitness pal app to preload in my meals for the day, in other words I plan to head on what I was going to eat. I found this really useful and helped me to keep my carb,  protein, fat content in relation to the goals I had set. I could pre-enter the breakfast lunch and dinner onto the app and look at the nutritional content to see how they met my goal. If I was over on the far side or under on the protein side I would simply remove an item and replace it with something else, until I found the right combination of food that would give me my macro percentages. 

Which I thought had little or no fat where most surprising, such as a slice of bread has a lot of fat and when removed from a meal plan reduce the amount of fat intake. By doing this has helped me to understand more about the level of macronutrients in the food that we eat, and has helped me to understand more about better food choices by being able to plan in advance. 

Of course the hard part is trying to stick to your meal plan for that day and I would say about 80% of the time I have done so, it's also good to plan in cheat meals, by this I mean days where you know you will be going out to a restaurant for a meal or to friends for dinner, or maybe a takeaway.  

My personal results so far,  I have reduced my body fat by 3% over a four week period which is pretty good and I have also lost 6.5 pounds in doing so. 

So here is what I did in summary 

1. Have an end goal in mind (whether it is a weight goal or to get into a dress size goal)
2. Track your eating habits using an app or a food counter or by writing it down
3. Plan your daily meals in advance using the app or writing it down and sticking to it
   Monitor your intake of macronutrients i.e. carbs, protein, fat daily. 
4. Adjust calorie intake as you lose weight (monthly)
5. Preplan a workout routine for the week including rest days
6. Make sure you drink 2 L or more of water on a daily basis. 
7. Plan your cheat days ahead so you know how much calories you will be taking in (If you do this on a heavy exercise day, you won't feel as bad!)
8. Increase your exercise activity to boost your calorie deficit rather than drop foods form your diet. 
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