10 Tips to Lose Fat Realistically with Minimum Effort

In the past three months I challenged myself to lose my belly fat and put on some muscle.

Since starting in November I’ve lost about 17 pounds of fat, and put on 5 pounds of muscle.

I carefully monitored what worked and what did not, and studied the biochemistry science behind the actual process of putting on fat, burning fat, and increasing muscle.

The discovery process is still on-going, but now that I’m within 5 pounds of the athletically fit goal I seek, I’ll present the top 10 tips I’ve discovered for achieving the goal of losing fat and decreasing body fat percent with minimum effort.

1. Drink lots of water! – At least 32 ounces, or about 4 cups, a day, with more if combined with a diuretic like caffeine or exercise. Drinking water, somewhat counterintuitively, helps the body get over water retention, and helps your body adjust to a recomposition faster.

2. Eat Proteins – Proteins have the greatest thermogenetic effect and help to build lean body mass when combined with anaerobic strength training. The accumulation of lean body mass in the form of muscle increases your basal metabolic rate, allowing you to burn more calories just through daily activity.

3. Eat Spinach and other greens – Spinach is nutritionally dense, tasty even when raw, and a great appetite suppressant when eaten with a meal.

4. No Snacking – Most snacking occurs due to reasons that are unrelated to hunger. Before snacking ask why you want a snack and whether you are really hungry. If you find that most times it is hunger that drives you to snack between meals, consider increasing the size of your meals.

5. Anaerobic, strength building exercise – 3-5 times a week I do the following 4 body-weight exercises in 2-3 sets

-Air Squats, with free weights if available

-Push-ups

-Lunges, with free weights if available

-Planks, or Sit-ups/Crunches

These exercises have been great for raising my metabolism and toning muscle.

6. Cold shower – The benefit is primarily psychological, and for whatever reason, a good appetite suppressant.

7. Give into cravings before they spiral out of control – If you have a craving, and it has persisted for a while, just eat or drink it. The key is to eat or drink a portion that is just big enough to satisfy the craving. This is where eating slowly helps a lot.

8. Sprint Training and Jump-roping – I’ve found these to be fantastically efficient ways to build muscle mass, strength, and endurance.

9. Recreational exercise – The best way to lose fat through exercise is to find an activity that you would do even if you weren’t attempting to lose weight. For me, I’ve found long-distance running to be that activity. Recreational activity is the best way to have fun, improve skills, and even meet people while losing fat and building muscle.

10. Taking weekly measurements – If you measure it, you can manage it.

I’ve found that the process of fat loss and body recomposition is a constant battle against plateaus – where your body resists to change for days and weeks on end. The best way to smash through plateaus as you attempt to reach your goal is to be diverse in your activities and to constantly change things up as soon as something isn’t working anymore.

Next time, I’ll be discussing what I think is wrong, or misleading, about many common fat loss tips. In future installments I intend to go into far more detail about what does and does not work, and how I exactly arrived at the list of tips above.

Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor by any means, but as a former science researcher I’ve applied a lot of my own adherence to experimentation and modeling to develop my personal strategy for achieving optimal fitness.

Update for August 24, 2009

When I don’t have enough to collect into a proper blog post, I will be collecting various bits and pieces in an update post such as this.

• On the productivity front, I’ve found it easier to use Anxiety for short term next day tasks and Google Tasks for longer term tasks. Also, I’ve combined the Grand Project idea (long term projects such as writing a book) with Tim Ferris‘s idea of setting short term goals over a 2-3 month period. My project ideas list now breaks up projects into short term goals. I’ve added a reference to the list on my daily routines list too so that I look at it every day. I am essentially attempting to establish a workflow of documents which I go through on a daily basis by having documents reference each other. You can do this easily in Google Docs! Just highlight some text, click link, and choose the document from a drop down box instead of entering an url.
• Fellas, layering for casual, business casual, and formal is key to looking good without much effort. Let’s end the terrible reign of constantly casual in America!
• I’ll be putting up culinary tips I’ve collected from various places (and personal experience) either tonight or tomorrow morning. I’ve had some basic experience cooking for myself, but I intend to learn more and cook more in the near future.

And now, a request for some suggestions and thoughts:

• It’s tough to schedule a problem set homework assignment primarily because technical problems may not necessarily benefit from a continuous application of effort for hours on end. I’ve heard some tips on dealing with this, such as dividing and conquering the problems by level of difficulty and giving oneself an excess of time in the case that a problem is extraordinarily difficult to solve in relation to the others. How do you guys handle problem set homework assignments? Is there any particular secret or should we just expect to put in an unknown amount of time? Update: This article should help with this question.
• Science was borne out of philosophy, and philosophy for Socrates (by way of Plato) is a response to pure sophistry and rhetoric. That is to say, philosophy differs from sophistry as it tries to ascertain some truth beyond just the interplay of words and convincing enough arguments. Science in this respect is much like philosophy in that its proponents argue that it is concerned above all with some truth independent of rhetoric. Feyerabend, and perhaps a postmodernist or two, would argue otherwise, saying that science is a community activity whereby a scientist (with some sort of accreditation) tries to convince other scientists of some competing explanation of phenomena. I tend to side with Feyerabend and his ilk, but what does this mean for the veracity of scientific claims and why shouldn’t the general public just dismiss science as an endeavor as just a series of clever verbal jousts?

This post is way too long, in the future I will have tighten these up significantly.

My Daily Organization System (WIP)

“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and organize” – Al Gore

As this is my last free summer I’ve taken the opportunity to test out and devise different ways in which I can organize myself for maximum productivity and enjoyment.

Here is what I’ve devised so far with my rationale:

• I use Gmail for email and for sending myself reminders when I am away from my personal computer. The benefit of Gmail is that I can use Multiple Inboxes (a feature of Google Labs) and that I can access my email and its interface from any computer.
• I use Google Calendar, synced up with iCal and the calendar on my iPod Touch, for scheduling and keeping track of events and deadlines. What’s great about Google calendar is that I can easily import other people’s calendars and even the University’s calendar. There’s also a small task list which I can enable. However I’ve begun using…
• Anxiety for mac, to keep track of my task list. Anxiety places a task list on the desktop which hovers over all open windows, and sports a cool and intuitive interface.
• The greatest tool in my arsenal is Google Docs. I have created the following folders: Personal Notes, Business Notes, Creativity Notes, Daily Notes, Scholarly Notes, and Travel Notes.
  • In the morning the first thing I do is take a look at my list of daily routines, to remind myself (until I get into the habit) of what I should do every day. This includes everything from hygiene (like flossing) to more specific things like checking the University Department website for colloquium information.
  • I also remind myself that I should only be checking email and the web in the morning, midday (during lunch preferably) and before the end of the work day.
  • The most important reminder is to transcribe and review all notes that I’ve taken for the day. Speaking of note taking…

• I am playing around with the idea that prodigious note taking is the only way to stay on track. While for some it may seem onerous to take notes all throughout the day, for me it has actually been liberating. By taking notes I no longer have to hold onto ideas and obligations in my memory, like so many grains of loose sand in my fist.
• However, to avoid taking notes and promptly forgetting them (as I had done with many of my classes), I’ve made alarms in iCal and reminders in my daily routine list to review all my notes. Furthermore, any notes that I’ve written in my pocket moleskine notebook or my iPod Touch are transcribed in some form into my daily log. My daily log, which sits in a “Daily Notes” folder, is a separate document for each day recording my notes, my food and drink consumption, my workout and physical activity, and any notables such as ideas, accomplishments, and reminders of the day. I also record in my daily log the planned activities for the next day as well as the planned meals. The template for the Daily Log can be found as “Daily Log Template” under the Business and Personal Finance categories.
• I also use notes for other purposes. I keep a document for cooking tips and tricks, a list of projects that I’m working on (broken up into steps), some tips on grad school, writing and publishing, scratch notes for blog posts and ideas about the design for this website, and even a note with note taking tips

Finally, the principle which motivates most of my organization system is that the only way to be productive, get things done, and even stay healthy is to short circuit bad habits and prevent myself from slipping into them. This may even mean using a bad habit and turning it into something good. For example, I have the habit of checking email every morning (which can lead to wasting time when I should be getting ready for the day). I’ve used that habit to instead refer myself to my daily routines document in Google Docs, which reminds me of the things I need to do every day.

The next step is to incorporate my personal finances into this system, and then find a way to further automate the organization process.

I definitely appreciate any suggestions or ideas about organizing for productivity in the comments below.