This article could be a whole book but here are my ten biggest mistakes when trying to lose body fat (in no particular order):

1) Not understanding the importance of nutrition

If I could shout at you through your screen and hit you over the head with a Timmy Mallet’s style weapon until you got the following message into your head, I would.

“You cannot lose substantial amounts of body fat without paying careful attention to nutrition”.

Far too many people get fitter by going to the gym but remain frustrated by their muffin top and beer belly. I often see people who could be and actually deserve to be, much leaner and better looking physically! They’;re not simply because they’re too damn lazy when it comes to food preparation.

A tough one hour workout (and I mean tough) might shift 500-600 calories. However, a very easy-to-consume crappy sugar-shake disguused as a performance-drink, can put at least half of that back in within 1-2 minutes. This is often followed by “I’m starving” when you get in from the gym.

You reach for a quick peanut butter snack whilst your main meal of white pasta and steroid/chemical infused non-Organic chicken is cooking. Once the pasta’s ready, you caress it with a dollop of sweetener-infested Dolmio sauces and scoff it down.

Congratulations, you’ve just eaten about 3 times as many calories as you burnt in the first place.

The truth is that healthy eating can be a hard adjustment at first which is why many people avoid it. However, after the first week or so you will be flying in terms of fat loss, energy levels and workout performance.

The best thing is to go ‘cold turkey’ straight away rather than phasing things in.

Eliminate caffeine, alcohol, processed foods, gluten and dairy for 2 weeks without compromise and you’ll amaze yourself.

There is a lot to more advanced nutrition but even this level of commitment will bring awesome results often in the region of 5-6 lbs per week depending on your start point.

2) Quantity over quality

This could also be titled “activity over achievement”.

Since the dawn of the health club, there seems to have grown a new breed of fitness enthusiast who believes that more is better.

It isn’t uncommon for people to do upwards of 8-9 classes a week including pointless ones like BodyPump and 3-high-knee-repeater twisting aerobics. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is more than 1 per day. I know of a group in Nottingham who think it big and clever to do 3 of their gyms classes in a row.

Why? Why? Why?!

Fat loss (and most other elements of fitness bar long-duration endurance events) is best achieved through consistency of intensity of training (combined with nutrition as mentioned above).

If you can last more than 45 minutes, sorry, you’re just not working hard enough. If you don’t believe me, please come and join us at the Guernsey Fitness Camp . Thou shalt believe…

There are numerous studies showing that after 45 minutes of hard exercise, the body begins to break down muscle.

Less muscle = lower metabolic rate = less fat burning (to put it simply).

Shorten your sessions and increase the intensity.

A full body physique enhancing session could look something like this:

Big bang exercise (works the whole body hard!) Deadlift (5 sets of 5 reps with 90 secs rest)

Super set: Walking lunges with push presses (4 sets of 10-12 each with 45 secs rest)

Metabolic circuit: 5 rounds as fast as possible with good technique of…

Shuttle run x 200m

Burpees x 20

Reverse ab curl / hanging leg raise x 15

Clearly this will be adjusted for different skill levels but it shows the key elements of working the whole body with heavy exercises then finishing with a tough circuit. The combination will build lean muscle and spike your metabolic rate for 24 hours afterwards.

3) Underestimating the social factor

If your mate is fat, don’t listen to ANYTHING they have to say on anything to do with health and fitness. I don’t care what they read.

If your parents are overweight and diabetic , maybe now is the time for the education in life to swing the other way.

If your colleagues keep trying to tempt you with cake runs and the like, GROW SOME BALLS and just tell them you’re not interested. No-one MAKES you do anything!

Be acutely aware of what you surround yourself with. Training in a group setting with others who want to push themselves will do wonders for your results.

4) Thinking you need carbs

The only time you need carb-rich foods is when you’re competing in a long-duration endurance event. Even then it’s all about timing around training and competition.

If you’re trying to shed body fat and you sit on your backside all day at work, eating porridge, muesli, sandwiches and pasta dishes especially if it’s not after a tough training session is the fastest way to get pissed off with yourself for not getting results. Sorry, I know we all love porridge in Britain but that’s the way it is!

More detailed information on carbs can be found here —> When do you need carbohydrates

5) Not super-hydrating

The human body is 70% water give or take.

Every single cell depends on water for structure and function and it is essentially these cells which burn calories and help you drop fat.

As well as this, when you’re in a state of dehydration (even minor), your body goes into ’survival mode’. This in-built mechanism is designed to do all the things that help increase our chance of survival, avoiding death. One element of this mechanism is clinging on to body fat for those times when we don’t have access to food. Unfortunately the human body hasn’t evolved to know that food is always within reach now (in Western society). So you start storing body fat more easily, then pile lots of bad food in!

Aim for 1 litre of pure, bottled, ionized, oxgenated water for every 20-25kg of bodyweight. So for an 6okg lady that’s 3 litres of the stuff.

Aside from the aid to fat loss itself, when losing weight you often release lots of toxins stored in fat cells from times gone by. This can make you feel awful at first so drinking lots of water will help flush these toxins out as fast as possible. If your body senses high levels of toxins it will effectively shut down the release of fat from cells, putting the brakes on your attempts to get lean!

Indirectly, water also helps fat loss by replacing the diet cookes, full-fat cokes, caffeine drinks and fruit juices which add unnecessary calories and stress to your body (baaaaad for fat loss!)

6) Fearing fats

Fats don’t make you fat. Too many processed carbohydrates at the wrong times, too much stress, not enough hard exercise and not enough clean food and water make you fat.

Fats from natural sources such as nuts, avocados, oils especially extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil and olives are a great source of calories which will increase your metabolic rate, increase testosterone levels for great weight training sessions and improve your immune function for better training and living. All of which are conducive to rapid fat loss!

Also, fish oils are known to improve fat metabolism and reduce inflammation. Again, when you’re training lots as you should be, you need to prevent or at least reduce your post-training muscle damage so fish oils 3 times per day are a key weapon!

7) Short-termism

Short-termism is a killer of many physique transformation efforts.

This can be due to people believing that immediate sweat and effort is more important than stimulating metabolic changes all week long. For instance, you will probably feel more worked if you do a 45 minute spin class than a 45 minute resistnace session simply because you’re sweating more and out of breath.

First, there are many, many ways to utilise resistance training to achieve the sweat / cardiovascuar element, and second, once you’ve finished the spin class, your metabolic rate returns to normal with your heart rate. After intense weight training however, the body has many more repair jobs to do which elevates the need for oxygen in your body. This in turn increases your metabolic rate thus burning more calories whilst your asleep or sat at your desk – free fat burning until your next session!

Believe me this burns calories…

 Another form of short-termism is the good ol’ fad diet.

Anyone can starve themselves for a few weeks and drop a few pounds.

However, have you ever noticed how the woman who do the most diets are usually the fattest?

Think about all those ladies in your office always talking about ‘diets’ – few of them are that slim and those that are probably look like the Grim Reaper.

Build your health first whilst shedding body fat at a steady rate and over a year you’ll likely lose 4-5 times more body fat and lead a much happier, healthier, energetic life! A study showed that in a comparison of healthy eating and the Atkins Diet, the Atkins Diet group lost 10lbs very quickly (around 2 weeks if my memory serves me correctly) however after 52 weeks they hadn’t lost any more and some had put it back on! The healthy eating group however, lost around 40-50 lbs over a year.

If you want a lean figure like an athlete, don’t try to get there before putting in the groundwork of consistent training, solid goals and DAILY clean nutrition.

Not understanding recovery

This could have gone with quantity versus quality.

Understand that your body doesn’t improve whilst you train. In fact it gets worse!

By the end of an effective session you have less energy, less strength and you’ve just broken down lots of muscle fibres! Don’t worry, that’s the idea!

When you then take time to chill out, relax, recover, eat good food to replenish your muscles and sleep, THAT is when growth hormone levels rise and muscle is rebuilt.

Trying to just train harder and harder will usually see you head in the opposite direction from where you want to be.

Within a few weeks you’re permanently tired, you have to drag yoruself to the gym and body fat is going nowhere!

Take time to eat well, get lots of sleep in and perform mental and physical regeneration with activities like yoga and you’ll see huge improvements in body composition and energy levels.

9) Believing that you must always enjoy exercise

Sorry this ones just rubbish!

It’s one of those ideas used by government agencies desperately trying to cajole ever-increasing numbers of obese people into getting their backsides off the couch and doing some exercise.

The reason many of these people dont’ want to exercise is that from their vantage point, the cost:benefit ratio is too high.

The reason for this is that due to misguidance, the exercise they do is ineffective thus not very inspiring!

The truth is that for the best results, you simply have to do stuff sometimes that hurts, makes you sweat, makes you swear and generally makes life uncomfortable for a short period of time.

The results will be phenomenal! Remember, nothing is more enjoyable than walking around the beach in Guernsey with a flat stomach, full of confidence!

10) Following the mainstream

Whatever ‘they’ do, do the opposite because ‘they’ are usually fat, unhealthy, diabetic and on a crash course with a heart problem.

The following is a list of things the mainstream do which are conducive to long-term disappointment, injury and failure in achieving fitness goals…

- BodyPump (and all it’s cousins…)
- Aerobics
- Jogging to lose fat
- Fixed machine use in gyms
- Zumba and all other ‘latest variations’ of ineffective gym practices that just induce some sweat
- Sugar-filled supplements
- High protein diets
- Seeking solace in those who are also too lazy to stict to the nutrition plan (girls it’s not productive to giggle over chocolate and wine – you know you’ll only cry about it when you get home and look at the bingo wings)
- Running every 10k race under the sun
- Bootcamps that do little but make you run around a park for an hour chasing each other playing kiss-chase

I could go on but you get the point.

Start thinking about what you’re doing and stop making the same mistakes over and over again.

There is a lot more to each of the points above but each can be easily improved with  some concerted effort and solid-goal setting practices.

For more info on personal training and program design, please email jon@stormforcefitness.com . It’s your life – enjoy living it with a fit, healthy body!

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