The Best Way To Exercise When Severely Restricting Calories

Lets face it, most people severely cut calories when they try to lose weight, and end up ruining their metabolisms. Nutritionally unbalanced diets are bad overall, and are even worse when calories are being restricted. However, a well-balanced low calorie diet can be a good way to lose fat (not just weight) quickly, but it must very carefully planned and managed.

The way I see it, when I’m carrying a lot of bodyfat, I’m in caloric surplus anyway! My spare tyre could have has much as as 35,000 calories at one time! Its getting your body to liberate those calories that is both the goal and the ideal when on a weight loss plan.

So, how to do that?

Add the correct type and amount of exercise

Yes, it’s that simple.

Choosing the correct type of exercise (and the correct exercises) is one of the most important components of a workable low calorie weight loss plan. This post briefly outlines a way to choose exercises that will prevent muscle loss, while maximizing the metabolic rate, and thus fat loss.

By FAR, the best type of exercise while on a low calorie diet is resistance exercise. Resistance exercise, and especially free weight training, has been shown to prevent muscle loss while on a low calorie diet. In fact, it can even cause a tiny GAIN in muscle tissue even when calories are severely restricted. Yes, that can happen. There is a scientific study that showed that people who ate only 800 calories but did strength training actually gained muscle while losing fat!

Just goes to show that we underestimate what our bodies can and cannot do…

The calorie burning furnace

Now, as you probably know, muscle tissue is a major consumer of calories, which shows that strength training will protect your metabolism by protecting your muscle tissue. A further bonus is that somewhat intense strength training causes calories to be burned for several hours, even days, after the exercise session. It also appears that the body favors feeding muscle cells while starving the fat cells, which will cause the fat cells to shrink. EXACTLY what the extreme dieters want. The human body is no stranger to ultra-low calories combined with hard work.

In the harsh paleolithic era, that was just a reality of everyday life. As I keep saying, our genome remembers…

Strength training guidelines

Here are some guidelines for strength training while on a calorie-restricted diet:

• do the BIG movements (barbell or dumbell) e.g. squats, deadlifts, cleans, presses, rows, etc.
• multi-joint body-weight exercises are excellent alternatives, e.g. squats, burpees, pushups, chinups, dips, ab-wheel. Moving the body through space provides a much better degree of neuromuscular activation than those silly isolation exercises, and therefore:
  • limit using machines
  • skip the isolation work
• do no more than three 20-minute sessions a week – very important to prevent burnout
• always choose strength work over ‘cardio’, but for best results do a bit of both (‘anaerobic’ cardio) for a maximum of 45 minutes TOTAL per session. Shorter is even better!

All in all, strength training + a balanced low calorie diet can have you losing huge amounts of fat in a very short period of time WITHOUT damaging your metabolism.

Just be smart about it…

Cheers,

Junaid

PS. A zig-zag type of diet that varies calorie intake to prevent metabolic shutdown is a good idea, and again just mimics a reality of life in the paleolithic era. However, to lose weight fast one can take that to extreme measures. Grab a free copy of my ‘NukeThatFat’ eBook to find out how – you can’t miss the picture on the side of the page. Its not a ‘paleo’ approach, but it works nonetheless – and VERY quickly.