How Much Fats Do You Need For Better Health and Fat Loss?

• Add 2 teaspoons of olive oil per meal in your vegetables or to your meat when you cook it.



• Do not add oil to a meal if you are eating a fatty fish like salmon which is rich in good fats.



• If you do not like olive oil or oily fish, eat your grilled meats and your natural vegetables but do not forget to add another source of good fats. What you can do in this case is to consume 15-20 grams of almonds or walnuts twice a day with any meal.

I recommend that you try as hard as possible to get your good fats from these natural sources. If you have issues consuming your good fats from food, I recommend an Essential Fatty Acids supplement like Labrada's EFA Lean which contains a variety of good fats. I suggest a dose of 3 capsules in 2 of your fat free meals.

Now that we have covered the myth that in order to lose fat you need to stop eating fats, let's talk about the sort of food that you can eat in order to promote fat loss.



Foods That Promote Fat Loss

When we start a diet, the first thing to do is to make the right food choices. I will eliminate all of the confusion on what to eat by detailing exactly what foods help to promote fat loss:

1. Choose the right carbohydrates like whole grain pasta, brown rice, oatmeal, potatoes, peas, corn (and yes, these are vegetables but in the category of starchy carbohydrates). Forget processed carbohydrates that come from candy, cakes, processed breads, cereals and breading as these will get you fat.



2. Choosing the right proteins like chicken (knowing that the chicken breast is much less fatty than other parts such as the thigh or the wings), white fish and salmon (yes, salmon is a fatty fish but the fats are GOOD fats loaded with Omega 3s), 90% lean steaks, egg whites (with 1-2 egg yolks as these also contain good fats), and turkey. Avoid pork (because it is high in saturated fats) and reconstituted meats such as chicken nuggets, Cordon Bleu, deli meats and fast foods that contain lots of fat.



3. Don't forget to eat your vegetables. The best vegetables you can eat are: green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, spinach, asparagus, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, garlic, and onions. You can have a desert, but it has to be a healthy one.



4. Concentrate on low calorie desserts like Sugar Free Jello and you can also have a piece of fruit with it. Samples of good fruits are: apple, kiwi, peach, strawberry, pear, pineapple, watermelon. All these fruits are good for health but like all fruits, they contain fructose. Thus, for the best fat loss, do not eat more than 2 of these fruits per day when on a fat loss diet. Note: Take a look at Hugo's article on Why Fruits Need to be Limited During a Fat Loss Diet?



5. For good fats, concentrate on getting them from the following sources: extra virgin olive oil, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts. Eliminate butter, cheese and other sauces that come already prepared as they usually contain added sugars and the wrong kind of fats!

Putting It All Together and Creating Your Balanced Diet

With all these food choices, it is now easy to compose a balanced meal without bad fats. What is a balanced bodybuilding diet you may ask? One that consists of 5-6 small meals a day consisting of 40% carbs, 40% proteins and 20% fats as laid out in Hugo's Characteristics of a Good Nutrition Program.

A normal man needs 2000 to 2500 calories a day. Thus, at 40% Carbs/40% Proteins/20% Fats he will need around 200-250 grams of carbs, 200-250 grams of protein and 45-55 grams of good fats per day divided over 5-6 meals. (Note: 1 gram of carbs = 4 calories, 1 gram of protein = 4 calories and 1 gram of fat = 9 calories).

A normal woman with average activity who is weight training and looking for fat loss needs 1200 to 1500 calories per day. That comes out to 120-150 grams of carbs, 120-150 grams of protein and 26-33 grams of good fats per day divided over 5-6 meals.

Conclusion

There you have it! Now you have a very good base to design your diet and get started on your way to fat loss. The power is within you!

About the Author

Cecile Bayeul was born in France in 1982 in a firefighter family. She wanted to become a firefighter and passed the tough professional firefighter tests which included various physically demanding feats. However, she decided to keep a more peaceful job (as her family wanted her to) so she became a nurse.

As a registered nurse she ended up studying various diet protocols for patients with special nutritional requirements due to their sicknesses.

In order to relieve stress from her job and to heal from an anorexia caused by a difficult divorce she picked up natural bodybuilding. Through bodybuilding she learned to regain her confidence and to be happy with her body.

Her passion for fitness led her to start conducting personal training not only for women but for men as well. She teaches that by embarking into a fitness program you can achieve any body that you want; something that builds up faith in oneself and develops the valuable skill of goal setting; things that at the end of the day improve every single aspect of your life!

Strength training centers around the basic desire to get stronger, and stronger. If you aren't getting stronger, then alter your regimen with these tips.

1/Change Your Exercise Selection
If you're typically performing the bench press, you may want to try incline press as your main lift for a week or two. This change in exercises will alter the stress being placed on the body and can produce faster strength adaptations. As a result, when you move back down to the flat bench again, you'll feel stronger than you were before; and that double bodyweight bench max may not be so far out of reach.
Choose exercises that focus on the weak points of the lifts you want to improve. For example, if during max-effort squat attempts you find yourself losing the weight forward, switching to a Good Morning will help you finish that attempt. If you find yourself struggling with the lockout when you bench press, a few weeks on the board press, chains, or bands should clear up the problem promptly.
Utilize this principle by doing sumo squats rather than front or back squats, or try weighted pull-ups rather than lat pull-downs.
2/Accelerate
The strongest powerlifters in the world spend half of their training time working on accelerating light weights quickly. And whenever they're moving heavy weights, they're always trying to move them fast. They're trying to increase the rate of force production. You recruit more muscles when you move weight quickly.
Whether it's the bar or your max bench press, you need to move it with your maximum force. Lifting slowly is for hypertrophy, not strength. Power, which is the combination of speed and strength, is a neuromuscular skill. Focusing on acceleration (without compromising technique) teaches you to recruit more motor units and helps them learn to work at the same time. This component of strength is one of the reasons people with similar levels of muscle development can have radical differences in the amount of force they produce.
3/Check Your Breathing
Using correct breathing techniques, like exhaling or holding your breath on the contraction (concentric) portion of the movement can help your body generate maximum force capacity.
If it's been a while since you took note of your breathing habits, start paying attention. Most people are taught to inhale on the eccentric part of an exercise and to exhale during the concentric. While you should definitely breathe, this isn't the method that works best when you need to produce a large amount of force. In the everyday world, when you need to move something heavy, you take a big breath, push/pull while holding your breath, only exhaling after or during the completion of the movement.
This is referring to movements that are near maximal effort, and it is known as the Valsava maneuver (holding your breath against a closed glottis while increasing thoracic abdominal pressure). It allows us to lift more (safely), braces us, and prevents pilots from blacking out. A lifter will probably not be squatting 600 pounds while slowly breathing out.
4/Do A Warm-Up Set
A good warm-up set gets the muscle cell motor units firing. It also helps circulate blood so oxygen and nutrients get delivered to muscle cells. Practicing the movement pattern primes your CNS. The strongest lifters in the world usually start bench press with the bar. You should too. A warm-up set can also help delay fatigue so you're able to withstand heavier weight for longer.
It might be tempting to walk in the gym and throw 300 pounds on your back; but do your mind and body a favor and warm up a little.
5/Go In Well-Fueled
If you want to increase your strength, you need to make sure you eat properly before you hit the gym. If you aren't taking in any form of glucose prior to your weightlifting session, you won't have the energy levels to perform the way you want to because low blood sugar levels are the fastest way to zap strength.
Eat complex carbs and protein before a workout, not cupcakes. Too many simple carbs can cause a blood sugar spike and then a dip. You won't make any PRs with plummeting levels of blood glucose, that's for sure.
6/Take Two Days Off
Sometimes, the real reason you aren't lifting as heavy as you could is because you're teetering on the verge of overtraining. If you typically take a day off between full-body sessions or train consecutive days in a row, try taking two full days off. No cardio or no weightlifting, pure rest.
If you're in the gym multiple times each week without giving your body enough time to recover, your muscles aren't going to build, and your bench press isn't going to improve.
Even two days may not be enough. Many strength athletes can't handle maximum loads every week or they burn out quickly. If you find your lifts aren't going up consistently, you may need to rotate your intensity and include regular periods of de-loading, where you lift lighter weights for a week.
7/Try Nitric Oxide
A nitric oxide product could help enhance strength because it'll cause your blood vessels to dilate. Wider blood vessels mean greater oxygen delivery to your muscle cells and reduced fatigue.
N.O. products can also help increase your mental focus—a definite necessity if you're going heavy.
8/Turn Down The Volume
Heavy lifting is extremely taxing on the central nervous system, connective tissue, as well as your muscles. You only have so much recovery capacity, so doing many sets of heavy weights every session can drain your recovery systems dry.

Do less overall volume. For bodybuilding, a couple dozen sets for one muscle group can be almost normal, but there is no way you're going to maintain your strength through that duration.

Instead, do fewer exercises, putting the bulk of the volume into your primary movement.
Keep your reps low, even on warm up sets. Instead of 3 sets of 10, try 3-5 sets of 2-5 reps. You will be able to move heavier weight and maintain your strength.
9/Cut Out Isolation Exercises
If your goal is maximum strength gains, take out the isolation movements from your exercise regimen. Isolation exercises drain your recovery reserves, leaving you less able to give your best effort on compound movements.
If you're doing compound exercises, you're already hitting the muscles isolation exercises would work, so there's no need to add additional isolation movements to a pure strength program.

10/Stretch Between Sets
Stretching your muscles between sets can increase dynamic flexibility and improve joint mobility. Don't static stretch the primary mover, but dynamically stretch it. For example, if you're doing legs, do leg swings to stretch instead of standing toe-touches. If you have your heart set on some static stretches for rest, stretch the antagonist, or the opposite muscles than the ones that are doing the work. For example, if you're training your chest, stretch your lats and middle back. Some data shows that static stretching can temporarily weaken the muscle. If you're trying to move as much weight as possible, weakness is not your friend.