Hierarchy of Fat Loss

It is very nice to get a validation of the Clean Eating way of life from someone who is independent of Clean Eating. The key messages of today's eCourse from Alwyn Cosgrove is that proper Nutrition is invaluable and combining that with building lean muscle to increase your RMR will produce fat loss.

Today we starting looking at what you need to do to burn fat. But before we get started I want you to know that this is not fat burning theory. I get people lean everyday. Simply put, I can get 20 pounds of fat off a client faster than my competition.

Today and tomorrow we are going to look at my hierachy of fat loss. If you want to get lean these are the things you need to pay attention to (in order!)

The Hierarchy of Fat Loss

1. Correct Nutrition
There's pretty much nothing that can be done to out-train a crappy diet. You quite simply have to create a caloric deficit while eating enough protein and essential fats. There's no way around this.


2. See #1
Yep. It really is that important. Several trainers have espoused that the only difference between training for muscle gain and training for fat loss is your diet. I think that's a massive oversimplification, but it does reinforce how important and effective correct nutrition is toward your ultimate goal.


3. Activities that burn calories, maintain/promote muscle mass, and elevate metabolism
I think it's fairly obvious that the bulk of calories burned are determined by our resting metabolic rate or RMR. The amount of calories burned outside of our resting metabolism (through exercise, thermic effect of feeding, etc.) is a smaller contributor to overall calories burned per day.


We can also accept that RMR is largely a function of how much muscle you have on your body -- and how hard it works. Therefore, adding activities that promote or maintain muscle mass will make that muscle mass work harder and elevate the metabolic rate. This will become our number one training priority when developing fat loss programs.