“Fat Burning Diets to Make You Lose 10, 20 even 30 Pounds!”

The added component here is turning fat into muscle.  So if you want a fat burning diet, then you need to incorporate weight lifting or resistance training to your food plan.  So let’s start with your food plan.  What should it look like?

Fat Burning Foods – A Myth

People seem to think that foods in and of themselves have fat burning properties.  They don’t.  Another myth is that low-fat and fat-free equal calorie free. 

If you eat any food in large enough quantities and don’t exercise, you will not burn fat and you will gain weight.  Let’s take low-fat cottage cheese or even fat-free cottage cheese.  If you eat enough containers of it, you will gain weight – I don’t care how many calories it claims to have.  Cottage cheese is actually an excellent food to eat to lose weight.  It is an excellent source of calcium, as is low-fat yogurt and light cheese.  But you also want to include foods from other categories such as soybeans (protein), sweet potato, apples, blueberries, broccoli, carrots, cabbage, and fish (especially salmon). These foods contain high amounts of fiber and protein, which helps release the fat deposits from the body.

Turn Fat to Muscle

Muscle burns fat.  That is the only thing that can burn fat.  Yes, what you eat plays a crucial role, but there is no such thing as a fat burning diet.  To burn fat, you must combine low-fat eating with weight training.  By weight training, you increase the speed of your metabolism.  Metabolism is the amount of calories, or energy your body burns to maintain itself.  The speed at which your body burns calories – that’s what it is in a nutshell. Our bodies are always burning calories whether we are sleeping, eating, etc.  But when you build muscle, the muscle enables you to burn higher amounts of calories while resting. 

Age Makes a Difference

As we get older, our metabolism slows down.  Perhaps this is why so many people think that fad diets such as fat burning diets work or are even necessary.  Just because we get older doesn’t mean that we are at the mercy of our metabolism. No way!  If you continue to exercise throughout your life, and make weight training an integral part of your work out, your metabolism will be so revved up – just like it was in your 20s.  Well, okay, maybe not like in your twenties, but close to it.  The bottom line is there is no such thing as a fat burning diet.  You have to eat right and exercise every day and above all, to burn fat, you must build muscle.