Guide to Losing Weight.

The desire to be lean and muscular.

Everyone would like to be lean and muscular. But nobody likes to diet. Yet, dozens of magazines offer the "ideal diet" every year, just a month before the holidays. Their slogan: "lose weight"!

With the help of marketing, many people are taking up the challenge of following this miracle diet that is supposed to get us in shape in one month. There is a strong emphasis on "losing weight for the summer". However, what everyone wants is not necessarily to be light, but to look good in the mirror. However, losing weight is not synonymous with looking good in the mirror.

The difficulty of drying training.

To look good in the mirror, it’s more about losing unwanted fat deposits, reducing a little belly fat, in short, it’s more about losing fat, in other words, cutting. And cutting is harder than losing weight. When you commit to cutting, you often also commit to a little social isolation. You don’t eat at the same times as others, you don’t go out to eat or order diet meals in restaurants. You don’t drink, even when your friends are partying.

So you run the risk that many people around you will try to discourage you or tempt you with a phrase that is heard all too often: "It's only once!"

Yes, really! When you start a serious cutting period, a small misstep can be important. It can give you the taste or the urge to make more missteps, it can also make you feel guilty. So in the long run, it is easier to not make any missteps than to allow a small "reward" every now and then. A little tip if you don't want to hear all the criticism that can arise when you decide to cut, is to surround yourself with athletes who don't criticize your decision, who understand you better and even encourage you.

The diversity of body types in the dry training diet.

Just like with a mass diet, we are not all the same when it comes to a cutting diet. Everyone has their own body type.

If you are an ectomorph, it is not necessarily difficult to lose fat. In fact, you may not have any.

If you are more of an endomorph, you cannot tolerate any missteps, otherwise your diet can drag on forever.

If you are a mesomorph, you have the muscle mass you need to burn body fat and you will see results.

But anyway, everyone will have to make an effort and sometimes give up some tasteful pleasures. That's why cutting training doesn’t just mean losing weight, but cutting training mainly means taking on discipline.

If you decide to build mass, a small deviation will not cause too much damage. However, if you decide to follow a cutting diet, you will have to be stricter with yourself.

Prepare yourself mentally! Visualize your goal. If your goal seems too difficult to achieve, find something that will give you the strength to keep going. A challenge like a photoshoot or a competition of some kind. A concrete goal that requires you to show off your body will help you resist temptation during your cutting preparation.

Don't hesitate to aim high! It's better to aim for the moon and reach the top of the mountain than to aim for the nearby hill and miss it.

Losing Weight: Basic Concepts.

The diets.

Every year, just before summer, diet ads in magazines are a hit. And every year thousands of people rush to the gyms, start a "diet" in the hope of looking their best on the beach in July or August.

Is it really realistic to think that all the extra pounds of the year can be eliminated in a few weeks, just by doing a little exercise and following a "miracle diet"? (sometimes even without exercising)

No, miracle diets do not exist! Yet, every year we are presented with different diets. Ask yourself why it is different every year. If it really was the best diet in the world, it would not have to be changed every year.

Still, it gets people moving... that's probably the positive side.

Lose weight or look good in the mirror?

But what most people really want is not just to lose weight, but to look good in the mirror! So the real question is: "Will losing 3 kilos change my figure?" No, probably not. Many people go on a diet because they eat and drink more during the holidays, and think that maybe after the holidays they can get back to their original weight if they lose a few kilos. But even if these miracle diets help you lose weight, if you stop them (because you can't eat unhealthy all year round), you will gain the lost weight back just as quickly. Sometimes you even gain more weight than you lost. That's why the result after the holidays is often worse than before the diet started.

Therefore, we must distinguish between temporary weight loss and permanent weight loss. Losing weight is not difficult, you just have to stop eating, but look at people who go on a hunger strike. They still have fat, but no more muscle. What we usually want is to lose fat. We are what we eat! If you follow any diet, you will see results. But can you maintain this diet all year round without causing deficiencies or deep frustrations?

What solution then?

So the long-term solution is to manage your nutrition all year round, so that you don’t have to rush last minute just before summer. Managing your nutrition also involves weighing your food, knowing what you eat and how many calories it adds to your body, and knowing the nutritional value of each food you eat in terms of protein, carbohydrates and fats.

At first it will not be so easy. However, as you begin to control your diet, habits will develop, both in terms of knowledge of foods and your body’s reactions to those foods. Once you develop these habits, controlling your diet will no longer be difficult. It is simply a matter of acquiring this lifestyle, of imposing your will on your body.

It is certainly true that there is a big difference between cutting and losing weight. Cutting means losing only fat with as little muscle loss as possible. And that is actually what many people would like, because it looks good in the mirror. On the other hand, cutting will require more discipline and organization. But controlling your nutrition is the only sustainable long-term solution.

What does it mean to control your nutrition?

Control means being present at every step of the diet or regimen, but also at every minute of the day, because for optimal results the diet must be combined with training. When we talk about discipline in a cutting diet, it really is a constant effort. Effort to eat at fixed times and often outside normal hours, effort to train regularly, effort not to give in to temptations of others, organizational effort to get everything in place, and so on.

This also means that you have to listen and know the reactions that you could have in each situation and try to avoid getting into a situation where you could give in to temptations: surround yourself with people who do not tempt you, with athletes. If you only hear criticism and jealousy around you, you will not have the motivation to continue. We always tend to be influenced by our environment. Cutting requires willpower that can be weakened or strengthened by the people around us. It is up to you to choose...

Therefore, any element that brings you one step closer to your goal is welcome. If you set an achievable goal, also set a date to achieve that goal, surround yourself with people who can encourage you, and also have fun and confidence in your progress by measuring yourself, then you will overcome many of the difficulties to your goal!

Diet: until when?

This is a question that is often asked: “Do I have to diet my whole life if I want to stay fit?”

This question is actually quite simple to answer: we are what we eat...

However, you need to decide what you want your body to look like most of the time. So defining a "base body" outside of a diet. This will allow you to manage and make sure you can have the occasional splurge.

Example:

For example, let’s take a woman who weighs 150 pounds and puts herself on a diet to lose weight to 120 pounds. To achieve this, she hasn’t indulged, she may have put aside some of her social life, but in the end, she achieves her goal over time.

She decides to go to restaurants again and go out occasionally.

If she does not want to return to the 68 kilos she has lost, she must set herself a limit that she cannot exceed: for example, when her weight reaches 58 kilos, which is 2 kilos above her best weight, she must resume her strict diet to lose some weight. As long as she stays below the limit she has set for herself, she can not only maintain the body she wants, but also enjoy occasional "excursions" while managing her figure.

So this is a good way to manage your diet, your figure and your social life.

Training program.

General training.

Is it correct to say that training during a drying period is different from training during a bulking period?

In short, during a mass period you are trying to gain as much muscle mass as possible and gain as little fat as possible. During a cutting period you are also trying to gain muscle mass, or rather, to avoid losing muscle mass. So the goal, muscle-wise, is pretty similar. However, the effects will be different, during a cutting period:

• You have less energy because you are supplying less to your body, which generally means you can lift less weight.
• You also have less strength because you are more tired and have less energy.

So, if you are cutting and doing similar workouts as during the bulking period, the chances are slim that you will break your records. Therefore, you need to adapt the workouts to your energy level:

And at the beginning of the cutting period, do a slightly heavier workout to keep your muscle mass at its peak. However, when the calories start to drop more and you have less energy, lower your weights and increase the number of reps. Adding isolation exercises can also help to define a certain area. However, always try not to stop with the slightly heavier exercises at the beginning of the workout.

Indeed, you have two types of muscle fibers:

• The white fibers, so called because they work without oxygen and therefore for shorter efforts.
• The red fibers, on the other hand, work with oxygen supply for longer efforts.

If we want to remain logical, we need to maintain muscle in both categories of fibers. So we need to vary between short efforts and longer efforts.

At the beginning of the diet it is not too difficult to do heavier workouts, but towards the end of the diet this becomes very difficult, if not impossible.

Examples:

You can start your cutting period with a 10-12 rep workout, which is more focused on volume. This will help the muscles lose as little as possible, even with the loss of calories.

When the weights start to drop due to lack of sugar, you can increase the number of reps if necessary, but always train to failure.

Be careful, when you increase the number of repetitions a little, your muscle may feel a burning sensation. Keep going until you can barely lift the weight.

You can also vary your cutting routine with programs such as combination sets, where you perform multiple exercises for the same muscle in a row without rest. You can also work with supersets, where you perform 2 exercises for 2 antagonistic muscles in a row, without rest.

You can also vary this type of training in different ways, such as trisets, quadrisets, giant sets, and so on. The goal is to increase the "cardio" aspect of your training by stimulating the "volume" aspect of it as much as possible.