Conflicting Weight Loss Information: The Truth About Fat Loss

by Craig Ballantyne

The truth about low-carb diets, interval training, cardio exercise, body part training, and total body workouts. Find out how all of these affect your body fat and muscle and weight loss.

The truth about low-carb diets, interval training, cardio exercise, body part training, and total body workouts. Find out how all of these affect your body fat and muscle and weight loss.

I had dinner with a great client the other night. Among other things we discussed:

Low carb diets - And how they can work for some people, but definitely aren' the way to go for muscle gain. You have to have energy if you want to gain muscle, and some of that energy will come from carbohydrates. Eat your carbohydrates before and after training if you are concerned about gaining fat while you gain muscle.

Training one body part per day - Rarely is this the best approach to take. And it's definitely not the right approach to take long term, nor for fat loss. Total body training, or upper-lower body split routines (working upper one day, and lower the next) are likely to be more effective, more practical, and more efficient.

Meal frequency - And how it's a lot easier said than done to eat 6 or more small meals per day. But if you plan ahead, prepare your food, and commit to the approach, you can probably slip in one more meal at least, when compared to what you do now.

Cardio vs Intervals - Intervals win hands down, because they just get more results in less time. You just don't have to spend a lot of time exercising to see results. You do have to work harder, however.

Overall, the general consensus among readers is that there is too much fat loss and fitness information out there. Plus, a lot of experts contradict one another.

Now I don't deny that, but I challenge you to find any profession where there isn't a lot of conflicting opinions. From investing to politics, from education to computers, it's not hard to find two experts that disagree with one another.

Well, the same thing happens for a lot of people with fitness information. You read one article saying X, while another says Y. All in all, it leaves you with too much information and you probably end up more confused and frustrated than you were before getting the information.

I get a lot of questions from people who are in precisely that situation. They have so much info from so many sources that they don't know where to start.

Even worse, some of you start obsessing over details. Fitness and nutrition minutia that won't make a darn difference at the end of the day. Sometimes these obsessions lead people to go to extremes, and you can end up worse off than if you had done nothing at all!

If you, or your clients are like this, then try to remember one thing...and that is:

Consistently performing the basic requirements will give you 90% (or more) of your results.

Adding in fancy training methods, extra workouts, impossible-to-follow eating plans, and other un-necessary details will only serve to overload most people's already over-stressed lives - until one day you just won't be able to take it anymore...and the next thing you know 3 weeks have gone by since you last worked out or ate properly (because you just couldn't take the extremes anymore).

Here's a great quote from Alwyn Cosgrove when he was asked how folks can get to the fitness truth from all the hype...

"I help people to break through by looking at things logically. One of my favorite examples is when folks talk about 'fasted' cardio for fat loss. In real world terms it won't make one single bit of difference over time whether you eat two eggs and then train or train and eat two eggs. It doesn't make any real world sense. Before acting on something, think thru the process and determine if it actually makes any sense whatsoever." - Alwyn Cosgrove

Take the stress off your mind about fitness and nutrition, and let me show you how simple things can be.

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