Gentlemen always strive to be the best version of themselves. They eat well, work out, and live a healthy lifestyle. You can easily get a hot dad bod once you set your mind to it and follow these 3 simple steps.
Are you the best version of yourself?
If you want to get in shape, then follow these 3 simple rules.
Eat Fewer Calories
This is not complicated. Your body is a machine and the food you eat provide it energy and nutrients. If you eat too much food, you will store the extra calories as fat energy. If you eat too few calories, you will pull from your stored fat cells and convert fat to energy.
The first step in learning if you are eating too much or too little is to count all your calories. I use this app called MyFitnessPal and it is great for counting what you eat and keeping track of all your nutrition. Best of all, it’s free! The app will help you create a daily calories goal and it will be up to you to make sure you stay under this number.
Calories in and out are only half the battle in this section. I know you have heard the phrase “You are what you eat”. If you eat junk food, you could fill up your max calories in just one meal and only meet 10% of your daily nutritional needs. Yes, you need to get a certain number of grams per day in proteins, carbohydrates, and fats in order to have a proper diet and a good working body. Junk foods will not meet these needs.
The answer is simple, eat nutrient rich food and you will be able to eat a lot of it (maybe more then you use too) and give your body exactly what it needs to live a long healthy life. The MyFitnessPal all will help you in this area too.
Exercise
Your body is an extremely efficient machine and will learn how you operate. If it learns that you are eating too few calories for days at a time, it will adjust your metabolism in an effort to preserve those stored fat cells. This means you will either stop losing fat or you will need to exercise more to continue burning calories.
Doing this over and over you can see how it will end. You either will be working out all day long as you continue to try and stay ahead of your body adjusting to your new lifestyle or you will quit and gain all the weight back. But I have a solution (well, not me, qualified experts have been saying this for years).
You need to build muscle. That’s right gentlemen, lifting weights is the key to keeping your metabolism high while you are living in a calorie deficit. Not only that, but as you burn fat, your muscles will start to grow and show through your skin. This is a 3 for 1 sale. Lifting weights will help you lose fat, build muscles, and look better all at the same time. Talk about a great time saver.
But there is a trick to making this work properly, you need to workout (lift and a little cardio) after about 12 hours of fasting. We will get to the fasting part later. For now, lets focus on lifting weights.
This was really simple for me. I bought a set of adjustable dumbbells (power blocks from Amazon) and I lifted weights before work every day. I keep them in my office and it only takes about 15-20 minutes, 5 days a week. This has worked really well for me and will for you too. I also do a little cardio (rowing) in the morning for about 5 minutes just to get the heart pumping in this fasted state to add a little extra fat burning to my morning.
Intermittent Fasting
The last piece to the puzzle is Intermittent Fasting (IF for short). This is by far the easiest part to do once you adjust to it. For me, it took less than a week to be very comfortable with fasting for 16 hours every day. I started on the 8/16 intermittent fasting program where I fasted (no eating any calories at all) for 16 hours and then I eat all my calories in the 8 hour window.
The secret to the fasting is this. Once you have fasted for 10-12 hours, your body begins to burn only fat for energy. For 4-6 hours every morning while I was working out, I was accelerating my fat burning and muscle building because I was in this zone. Once I started working out, I was no longer hungry, extremely focused on anything I was doing that morning, and my body was building muscle 1600 times faster then if I worked out in a non-fasted state. I was supercharged!
I slowly made my fasting window larger and reduced my eating window until I reached 20 hours of fasting and 4 hours of eating. This fit my schedule better as it provided me more time in the day to work while making myself healthier. Since we all live crazy lives, this schedule can and should be as flexible as you need it. If you want to skip weekends, do it. If you have a party to attend and want to eat and drink, go to the party and have a blast. But, you should control these “Fun Days” and not let it get out of hand. If you can control them, will reach your weight goals much faster.
Conclusion
Most people every year do the same thing the first week of January. They make a resolution to lose weight and get healthier but often fail in that effort. The reason they fail is they create a goal but are not committed to see it through or do not have a plan. Well, here is the plan, if you provide the commitment, then get ready to buy all new clothes because the new you is just around the corner.
This is not a diet! This is a healthy Lifestyle you can live and gain all the benefits of a fit, smarter, and more focused you. The core principles need to be in place for the rest of your life. These are simple:
- Eat healthy food and fewer calories then you burn.
- Exercise several times a week and build muscles.
- Do Intermittent Fasting to focus burning stored fat over carbs during your workouts.
Using this method, I was able to drop about 2-3 pounds every week and about 10 pounds every month. There is no reason why you can’t do this too if you are as committed to your goals as I am. Just focus on the basics, read up on you-tube about Intermittent Fasting and other exercises programs, and be committed to getting your new hot dad bod. I wrote a similar article about Intermittent Fasting, How I lost 40 Pounds in 4 Months. Check it out and tell me what you think.
Have you ever tried to lose weight, struggled and gave up for one reason or another? Let me know below and tell me if you are willing to give this plan a try. If you were successful, what did you do to be successful. Gentlemen help each other out when needed and I suspect there are a lot of men looking for help in this area. Lets share the knowledge and we all will be successful in the end.