The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (19 page)

This is precisely why diets don’t work. When you diet, you deprive yourself of food and energy, and in the short term, this means that you lose weight. However, this also means that you gradually lower your basal metabolic rate. When you’ve achieved the weight-loss results you were aiming for and you start eating normally again, your food and energy intake will far exceed your lowered basal metabolic rate, and all the weight will start piling on again. It’s an ugly and pointless cycle.

Thus, the only way to truly lose weight and keep it off is to take a multitiered approach: First, you have to incorporate healthier foods into your diet that promote hormonal balance and reduce inflamma
tion
inside your body. Second, you have to change your daily lifestyle to reduce stress and support positive growth. Finally, you have to exercise. That’s right, you
have
to exercise.

Through exercise, you will gain lean muscle, which will increase your basal metabolic rate. With this increase, you will gradually become a fat-burning machine, even when you’re not working out. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that you become a bodybuilder. That degree of pumped-up muscle isn’t required to unlock the fat-burning properties of this program. I know this is especially a concern for women, most of whom want to avoid the muscled look. I assure you this is not what we’re going for. I simply want you to be fit and firm.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to hit the gym 7 days a week. What I’m about to share with you flies in the face of convention. I think you’ll find it to be a breath of fresh air. The key here is to make sure you’re getting the right type and amount of exercise, and thankfully, utilizing the LIFT method is the perfect way to do both.

THE LIFT METHOD

Let’s get this out of the way: Despite the slick name, the LIFT method is not an exercise fad, technique, or tool like those you’ve seen advertised on cable television at 3:00 a.m. There are no 1-800 numbers to dial. There are no money-back guarantees. If anything, LIFT is a plan of attack. It stands for Length, Intensity, Frequency, and Tempo, as these are the parameters that we’ll adjust to craft your ideal workout. Let’s run them down, one by one.

Length

This refers to the length of your workout. Depending on how overweight you are, you may be thinking that you have to put in hours of exercise to reach your goal weight. Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that when it comes to exercise, more does not necessarily mean better. According to a study published in the January 2015 edition of the
Journal of the American College of Cardiology,
a moderate amount of exercise was proven to be more effective and even healthier than a
large
amount. In fact, excessive amounts of exercise were found to be potentially harmful!
³

The study—christened the Copenhagen City Heart Study—examined 1,098 healthy joggers and 3,950 healthy nonjoggers in Denmark over the course of 12 years. It found that those who ran more than 4 hours a week or more than 3 days a week turned out to have the same mortality risk as those who barely exercised. What’s more, those who ran 1 to 2.4 hours a week and fewer than three times a week at a moderate pace had the lowest risk of dying!

This illustrates something that I’ve always told my clients: Too much working out is like driving your car into the ground. It’s not sustainable, and over the long term, it’s quite harmful. If you focus on the right type of exercise, then you don’t have to perform it for hours on end. After all, who—other than professional athletes—has time for that? They’re getting paid to exercise. We want to burn fat, so we need to spend less time working out. You’ll be pleased to hear that, for our purposes, the sweet spot is less than 30 minutes. However, this brings us to the I in LIFT: If you’re working out for a shorter period of time, your workout has to be of a higher intensity.

Intensity

Make no mistake, if you want to lose weight, you will have to put in the work, and that means increasing the intensity of your workouts. There are different ways to accomplish this, the first being resistance training with weights, which requires you to engage and train your muscles more deeply than merely jogging or doing pushups would. In so doing, you will increase your basal metabolic rate, which accounts for 70 percent of the calories you burn every day.

I’ve prescribed the workouts you’ll be performing in the guide later in this book, so try not to worry too much right now about how much weight you’ll be lifting. All you need to know is that we’re looking to hit the zone right between challenging and difficult. I want you to break a sweat when lifting these weights, but I don’t want you to have a hernia.

The reassuring news is that because you’ll be lifting challenging weights, you’ll be doing a smaller number of repetitions—4 to 8 reps
per
round—to build muscle without the risk of becoming bulky or injuring yourself. We’re aiming to hit exactly the right amount to get your metabolic rate pumped up.

When you lift challenging weights that require you to breathe in more oxygen (to fuel your working muscles), your body starts to pump out catecholamines, adrenal hormones that, among other things, trigger the breakdown of your fat stores. Countless studies show that spending less time doing higher-intensity work is the best way to burn fat and improve performance, whether that be your aerobic, anaerobic, or even strength performance.

The other method to increase the intensity of your workout is to incorporate as many full-body movements as possible. This engages more muscles in your body, which means your body needs more oxygen and so burns more calories. For example, instead of doing a simple biceps curl with a challenging weight, you can grab a weight from the floor, pick it up, curl it, then lift it above your head. This step-by-step movement is now activating far more than just your biceps, requiring you to use your leg muscles, core, and back and shoulder muscles.

Unlike many other plans, we’re not going to focus on training muscle groups. We won’t be doing a chest and arms day at the gym, followed by a legs day. As I said, we’re not looking to turn you into anything even remotely resembling a bodybuilder, as this program is about losing fat, not gaining huge muscles. We’re gunning for more well-rounded and intense workouts during this entire program that are then balanced with optimal recovery.

Frequency

Frequency refers to how often you’ll be working out, and on this program, that’s three to four times a week. Some workout programs encourage you to get daily exercise, but given the intensity of our workouts, you’ll need 24 to 48 hours of recovery time after each session. I can’t overstate how important recovery time is to any exercise plan. Unfortunately, this important aspect of the process is commonly overlooked, but it’s crucial when you’re on a thorough plan. We want to avoid overtraining at all costs! I do, however, encourage you to remain
active
and walk every day for at least 30 minutes. This will also help with any soreness you might feel after your first few workouts.

Tempo

Tempo is perhaps the most overlooked part of the LIFT method. It refers to the speed you use to lift weights during your session, and while it might not seem very important, it’s essential to unlocking the muscle-building and fat-burning potential of each workout. The key here is to perform your movements properly and with the right focus. Good form is crucial, since by performing the movements correctly, you significantly diminish the likelihood of injury.

Here’s how it works: You begin each lift explosively. By flexing your muscle to lift the weight in an explosive fashion, you’re summoning as much strength (and thus muscle fibers) as possible and burning plenty of calories. The real magic, however, is in the next part of your lift—the lowering of the weight back to your starting position. Here, it’s important to resist the pull of gravity by lowering the weight slowly, keeping your muscle engaged for as long as possible. Research shows that this is the phase of the lift—known as the
eccentric contraction
—where you get the strongest and burn the most fat. You’re aiming for a very controlled descent of 4 to 6 seconds.

Remember: Most people sorely underestimate the importance of tempo when they hit the gym, but when incorporated into your workout with the other principles of the LIFT method, it becomes a very powerful tool.

A DIFFERENT WAY TO DO CARDIO

The LIFT method applies to weight-lifting and even bodyweight exercises, but not to cardiovascular exercise, which is also an important part of your exercise schedule. That said, we’re still going to do things a little differently than you may be used to. When you think of exercise, I’m sure the first thing that probably pops into your head is going to the gym and jumping on the treadmill to jog for an excruciating, extended period of time. There will be none of that here.

As
we’ve seen, working out for extended periods of time can be harmful in the long term, and you can bet this applies to spending hours on end suffering on the treadmill. The same thing goes for long rowing sessions, long periods on the elliptical machines, or just about any type of cardio that requires you to set a steady pace and keep at it for an hour or more. What I’d like to suggest is that to burn more calories, more fuel, and ultimately more fat, it’s important to train using intervals. For example, if you choose running as your form of cardio, rather than running or jogging for even 30 minutes straight, I’d like you to run for a bit, then jog for a bit, and repeat this cycle for the length of your workout. This is commonly known as
interval training
, and it has taken off over the last 10 years or so. And with good reason: Studies have routinely shown that this method is far more effective and healthier than long-form cardio.

Here’s an analogy I like to make: As you know, driving in the city is far less fuel efficient than driving on the highway because you’re constantly accelerating and braking. From a fuel perspective, this is less desirable than highway driving, as you’re constantly paying more money to fill the gas tank. The exact opposite is true when you think about the car as your body and the fuel as fat. When you’re constantly shifting between stopping and going, you kick in the same mechanism and burn more fuel. So intervals are the name of the game when it comes to fat loss, our very aim on this program. It’s appropriate, then, that your workout week begin with interval training.

Now, let’s look at which workouts you’ll be doing in conjunction with the 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula to accelerate your fat loss and keep you lean for a long time to come.

DAY 1: LOW CARB

Interval Speed Bursts

On this day you’re going to do just 5 to 10 minutes of sprint work. Don’t worry, you won’t be running alongside Usain Bolt on a 400-meter track (unless, of course, you want to pretend you are). The idea here is
to
use small amounts of high-intensity, burstlike activity to increase your body’s release of catecholamines. These are your fight-or-flight hormones—specifically, epinephrine and norepinephrine—released by the adrenal glands in response to stress like high-intensity bursting. Yes, exercise is a form of stress. That’s why we need to use it intelligently.

One of the roles of these stress hormones is to break down stored fat in your body into free fatty acids that can then be converted into energy. This intense exercise also depletes your glycogen stores much more readily. As glycogen is depleted, your body must rely further on burning fat for energy. You do not get this catecholamine response with low-intensity exercise. (If the word
intensity
scares you, don’t be alarmed. You’ll only be doing 5- to 10-second bouts interspersed with nice and easy recovery.)

You can do these interval speed bursts (aka interval training) on any cardio machine other than a treadmill. I know many people favor the treadmill, but it doesn’t work here because it takes forever to change speeds. Here are a few ideas for interval speed bursts that get the job done.

•
Sprinting on the beach or grass

•
Sprinting on the stationary bike or elliptical

•
Jumping rope

•
Jumping jacks

•
Running in place

•
Running up and down stairs

Whichever exercise you choose, the key is to give it full-out, 100 percent effort. Again, don’t let that scare you. You’ll be fine. You won’t have a heart attack. In fact, your heart will thank you because pushing out of your comfort zone is the only way to improve your aerobic capacity (aka max VO
₂
). A famous study published in the
Journal of Applied Physiology
in 2007 showed that just seven sessions of interval training increased the amount of fat burned in a subsequent, similar cycling session by 36 percent. Cardiovascular fitness also increased by
13
percent!
⁴
Essentially, the female subjects of this study had become more efficient at relying on fat, instead of carbohydrates, as a major fuel source during exercise. Simply put, they became all-out fat burners!

Another study showed that as few as six sessions of high-intensity intervals over 2 weeks for a total of approximately 15 minutes of intense exercise increased skeletal muscle oxidative capacity and endurance performance and favored fat burning (instead of glycogen burning) during exercise.
⁵
Make no mistake, this is one of the key methods to activate all-day fat burning. Plus, since you’ll be doing just a few minutes of intervals on a Low-Carb Day, your glycogen stores will already be more depleted than usual. This makes it both slightly more challenging and highly rewarding.

Here are three speed burst workout options to choose from based on your current fitness level.

Interval Speed Burst #1: Beginner