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Losing fat is a collaborative process between calorie intake, types of calories, metabolism, calorie burning and timing. Sound complicated? It doesn't have to be. Everyone on the planet can lose body fat with one goal—calories in being less than calories out.
Burn more calories than you take in, and fat comes off. The challenging part is that there are a million different combination or ways to do this. The key is to find what works for you. What fits into your mindset, what can you adapt into your schedule and what will you be able to do consistently?
Below are five easy—and often overlooked—ways to lose fat. Anyone with the faintest desire to lose body fat can easily incorporate these into their weekly routine. Putting them all together is certain to result in some noticeable fat loss within a few weeks.
Losing weight faster requires healthy eating habits. Re-train your brain with NOOM:
Split Up Your Meals
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This is simple, straightforward and effective. You can continue eating exactly what you eat now; however, instead of eating a full lunch at noon, eat half at noon and save the other half for 2:30.
Your body will respond by maintaining an elevated metabolism. This means you can eat the same amount and organically burn more of it off.
Vary Your Cardio
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If you do the same type, duration and intensity of cardio consistently, your body will quickly adapt to this and you will substantially diminish your returns over time. Instead, one day do 45 minutes low intensity on the treadmill and the next day do 20 minutes on the stair-stepper at high intensity.
Changing variables like time, time of day, intensity and type of exercise will keep your body off-balance enough to dig into its fat reserves much easier.
Drink Lots of Cold Water
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First, drinking water keeps your system clean and active, thus keeping your metabolism moving. Drink lots of it. Whatever you drink now, double it. Water has no calories; however it takes calories to digest. Furthermore, your body temperature is around 98.6 degrees. It will do whatever it has to in order to stay there.
By drinking cold water, your body will have to expend energy (calories) to bring this water up to 98.6 degrees. So opt for ice-cold water if given the option.
Pick Snacks That Work for You and Not Against You
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Negative calorie food is a food that is purported to require more calories to digest by the human body than it provides to the body by eating it. While there is no concrete evidence to support this, there are multiple fruits and vegetables that are borderline negative calorie that make for excellent snacks.
These are broccoli, celery, lemons, limes, asparagus, mandarin oranges, cabbage, watermelon, peppers, carrots and apples. While these may not be negative calorie foods (depending on your metabolism and density of the specific piece of food), they will take up space in your stomach and quench your hunger with virtually no penalty of ingesting unwanted calories.
Lift Some Weights
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Perhaps the best way to increase your metabolism and burn fat is to build muscle. Muscle is catabolic, meaning it burns calories even when it's not doing anything.
If you don't already, add some challenging weight training into your routine. You may put on a little muscle weight, but you will now burn more fat and calories and look phenomenal. Stick to free weights when you can as these build more and in less time than guided machines.
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