Almost everyone I know seems to always be talking about losing body fat – whether it is a spare tire around the waist, thighs that they feel are a bit large, flabby arms, and even one friend who feels his face has gotten fatter [if so he is the only one that can tell]. A fat burning meal plan can work wonders for losing body fat – I’m living proof after only 2 months on my chosen diet solution plan for weight loss.
Aside from magic pills that I believe do more harm to a body than good, I’m a firm believer that eating right is the first step to losing body fat – and of course is the path I am on right now – even ahead of starting a real exercise program to lose fat. A proper meal plan like the one provided by Isabel as part of the Diet Solution Book is critical to ensuring you lose that body fat.
Burning body fat [and the associated fat burning meal plan] starts with ensuring your body is receiving the healthy foods and nutrients it needs – I’ve yet to run across an archeologist remake of prehistoric man that shows any obesity. Our bodies are designed after millions of years to operate efficiently – and carrying around extra body fat and weight does not fit that profile.
PS. You can jump to the next section on Fat Burning Foods if that is your preferred topic!
Choosing a Lose Fat Meal Plan
So assuming you’ve made the healthy choice to investigate how to modify your diet to optimize your body [and your health] functions, and avoided magic pills with long term side effects, you’ve presumably started looking into diet plans to help you with weight loss. A key element of any diet plan is the meal plans – basically what does a lose fat meal plan look like? Is a fat burning meal plan a super secret sauce handed down generation to generation? Of course not.
A fat burning meal plan will look different depending on which diet plan you select, although you already know I would highly recommend the diet solution program books from my personal experiences. Some common characteristics of weight loss meal plans that are proven to work include:
- Focus on more fruits and vegetables
- Decreasing your intake of harmful fats
- Increasing your intake of beneficial fats [i.e. Omega 3 fatty acids for example, as well as other healthy fats]
- Minimize or eliminate high calorie, empty foods such as candy, pastries, etc.
- Understand what organic foods belong in your lose fat meal plan, and which foods don’t need to be organic [i.e. many foods carry a low risk of contamination from pesticides, mercury, etc.]
- Moderating grain and processed flour food intake
- Ensuring adequate protein intake, and from a variety of sources including nuts.
- Monitoring or restricting/eliminating dairy products
- Being selective on types of alcohol if not eliminated completely
- Supplementing with key nutrients depending on the foods you’re eating [such as fish oil for Omega fatty acids]
A fat burning meal plan from one diet solution program may include prepared, frozen entrees and snacks that you purchase where the selection of ingredients and portion sizes have already been worked out [e.g. Jenny Craig is an example of this type of plan]. Some other lose fat meal plans may group foods into categories and assign points to them – i.e. Weight Watchers does this based on calorie content – and then you’re allowed a specific number of points each day but the food selection is up to you.
My personal preference, and an approach I knew would work for fat burning with my meal plans, was not to have a complicated point system, not to buy overpriced weight loss meals already prepared, but rather to get educated on the basic nutrient categories such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. Coupled with this education on basic healthy eating and my body’s needs, I then explored the other portion of my chosen diet solution program that discussed how to select foods – and better yet provided meal plan information and tools that allow almost an infinite variety of meals and snacks while still hitting my goals.
Whatever diet solution approach you choose, it will have it’s own meal plan associated with it. Be sure your fat burning meal plan was designed by a certified nutritionist, has been around long enough to show results across thousands of people, and that it meets your life style. There is no right or wrong in terms of most of the meal plans out there for fat loss – it is purely a matter of what will match your personality and you can stick with.
Fat Burning Foods
Did you come here looking for the top 5 fat burning foods – ones that will melt off the fat by simply having a few of them a day? The short list of foods that require no exercise to get a flat stomach in 2 weeks?
Yea, me too. When I first started researching “real” dietary changes for myself, I was amazed at the information I came across on page one of Google – and not pleasantly amazed. Some of the wide variety of “expert” tips on these advertisement laden sites for fat burning – eat more of:
- Yogurt
- Tea
- Whole wheat bread
- Oats
- Vegetables
- Fruits
- Water
- Nuts
- Coconuts
- Soup [apparently any kind]
- Weird pills with herbs from some remote jungle region in Africa
- Smoothies that required about 1 of everything from GNC
- Unusual combinations of very specific foods in each meal – like a witches spell
Starting to get the point that there is no magic list of 5 fat burning foods? No way to just snack one a couple of special items every day and watch the fat melt away? Here is the simple fact about fat burning foods: Armed with a few key facts, you can make choices at every meal – home and out – to maximize your bodies natural ability to burn fat. Nothing magical, but some science-based guidance based on how your body was engineered.
Fat burning food discussions often bring up protein (even when diet experts aren’t in the room) – and for good reason. Lean protein is essential for our bodies to function, and furthermore your body spends more energy digesting protein than refined carbohydrates like bread. For every 100 calories consumed, it takes about 30% of these calories to digest protein compared to 7% for refined carbs and other “modern” foods. Higher energy spent – burning calories and fat. Furthermore, ensuring a high protein intake throughout the day helps prevent your body from burning muscle versus fat, and has a low glycemic index which means your blood sugar is not gyrating wildly throughout the day as it does with things like breads, rice, and other refined carb foods.
If you can afford it, grass fed beef is an excellent choice as a fat burner – it has much less saturated fat compared to grain and kennel raised beef, and more importantly it has an almost perfect ratio of Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids.
Next up is fruits and vegetables. These are 2nd in line after focusing on your protein plan. As fat burning foods go again they don’t magically enter your body and attack fat cells. But they make a huge contribution to your bodies NORMAL fat burning cycle by providing:
- Soluble and insoluble fiber [which helps you feel full]
- Major nutrients – most major vitamins, minerals, and even sufficient calcium depending on types eaten.
- Regulate your blood sugar and glucose levels
Most credible diet programs would outline a plan that consists almost entirely of eating a lean protein at each meal, as well as 1-2 servings of fruits and vegetables, which isn’t as hard as it might sound.
Nowhere in here did I mention oats, wheat bread, rice, bagels, donuts, cookies, pasta, etc. – for good reason. If you really want to focus on fat burning foods, these are all your enemy from a refined carbohydrate and sugar perspective. They will completely imbalance your blood sugar ratios, wreak havoc on your insulin balance, and cause feast/famine cycles throughout the day that will have you snacking on junk within 1-2 hours of eating a meal.
The cycle of increase in blood sugar/insulin from high glycemic foods can cause your body to constantly be faced with having to store extra glucose somewhere – regardless of how much your exercising.
Finally – don’t talk to me about reduced calorie diets as a healthy way to reduce fat. If you were designing the human body, what mechanism would you put in place if “food” was suddenly scarce? Hm…maybe slowing down the metabolism to reduce energy requirements? Not what you want…
Fat burning foods do more than burn fat – they start returning your body to it’s original showroom condition by feeding it what it was evolved to function on. I challenge you to find any rendering of a prehistoric man that is overweight – our bodies functioned much better before we turned our daily meals completely upside down.
Eating should be fun, and with the right food selection [NOT HARD, but requires some education] fat burning becomes an almost automatic expected reaction…while you eat as much as you want and never feel hungry.