New Year, New You Quick Start Guide

Welcome to the lolo Lifestyle Blog. If this is your first time here, we’ve compiled a convenient list of articles to give you a solid starting point for the New Year.

There is a lot of confusing and conflicting information out there on the subject of nutrition and exercise, and we’re here to cut through all the noise with scientifically-backed advice that has helped thousands of people reach their goals.

Diet Advice

• 5 Surprising reasons diets fail: “Diets don’t work!” It’s a common refrain I hear all the time. Of course, nothing works if you do it wrong. Learn the common pitfalls that trip people up so you can avoid them yourself.

• 7 tips to build your custom diet plan: Once you understand the pitfalls to avoid, then you can learn how to structure your own meal plan so that you can eat real food, satisfy your appetite, and lose weight without starving.

• Eat as many fruits and vegetables as you want: The worst thing you can do is try and starve yourself. Deprivation leads to a quick end to any diet, so don’t eliminate all food, replace the bad stuff with a ton of good stuff. It will fill you up without making a dent in the calories that actually make it into your body.

• Pick food you actually like: People assume the food they like made them fat, so they must eat food they hate to get thin. All this will do is make you miserable. Food is a joy. You don’t need to deny yourself all joy, just substitute some unhealthy choices for healthy ones, and continue to enjoy what you eat.

• Cut out refined sugar: This is perhaps the single most important thing you need to learn in order to lose weight. You could also check out the Truth About Diets series to understand the biology of what makes you gain weight and how to lose it.

• Ditch the soda and sports drinks: Sugar is bad, but liquid sugar is the worst. You can consume hundreds of calories of beverages and still feel hungry. In fact, it will increase your appetite soon after. Fortunately, studies have found that liquid calories are the easiest to remove from your diet without making you feel hungry. It’s the simplest way to make a huge difference. If you’re a soda fan, switching to diet soda is a good first step, but don’t do it for too long.

• Don’t cut out fat, replace it with healthy fat: To lose fat you need to control your appetite and fat is great for managing satiety (the feeling of fullness after you eat). Some fats even make you less likely to store body fat. Eating the right fats will actually make you lean.

• There are worse things in processed foods than sugar: Learn about soybean oil, the other nasty ingredient in processed foods, and what you can replace it with to not only shed some pounds, but greatly improve your health and extend your life.

• Increase your protein intake: Keeping your protein intake above 20% of your total calories is crucial for keeping your metabolism up as you diet. It will also prevent your body from digesting your own muscle tissue as you lose weight.

• Don’t track calories, track your habits: I’m a believer that you need to track what you eat to see what you need to change, but the majority of people do a pretty poor job of correctly estimating their calories. This leads to more problems than it solves. We ultimately know the difference between a good meal and a bad one, so just track that and you’ll see results.

• Don’t undo your workouts with compensatory eating: Women fall victim to this more than men, but it can effect anyone. Burning hundreds of calories during a workout can cause you to subconsciously increase your intake. A few extra bites of a meal here and an extra snack there can quickly replace everything you burned (and then some). Keep track of your intake in a journal or our GO tracking app, fill up on fruits and vegetables to control hunger, and keep your workouts short and intense in the beginning to curb your appetite rather than increase it.

Exercise

• Music matters: We focus on music a lot here at lolo because it makes a huge difference. The right music distracts your brain from the effort and can improve your results by as much as 25 percent.

• Start with short but intense workouts and build up: High intensity interval training (HIIT) offers many benefits over conventional training. You may not burn as many calories as you would with a slower paced, yet longer workout, but even if you exercise for an hour, it’s a small part of your day. HIIT causes metabolic and hormonal changes in your body that will help you burn extra fat all day long.

• You need to walk before you can run: Lots of people default to running when they first start a new fitness plan, and since lots of people’s bodies aren’t ready for that kind of strain, lots of people get hurt quickly. You don’t need to run a marathon to lose weight and drastically improve your health, you just need to move. Learn how to start up safely and effectively, so that you don’t sideline yourself with an injury.

• Split your workouts if you can’t squeeze it all in at once: Multiple short bursts of exercise can actually be more effective at burning fat than a single session, even if the total calories burned is identical. If you don’t have time to hit the gym, use our apps to fit in short workouts at home whenever you have a few free minutes.

• Fasted training burns more fat: I get the question all the time if it’s bad to workout on an empty stomach or not. The short answer is that it’s actually ideal for fat loss. Your body will turn to stored fat sooner into your workout on an empty stomach, plus it improves your insulin sensitivity throughout the day so you’re less likely to gain weight when you do eat.

• Weight training first, cardio second: Much like with fasted training, lifting first and then doing cardio helps you burn more fat. Resistance training does a good job of mobilizing fat (releasing stored fat from fat cells into the bloodstream), but it is terrible at burning it. Lift weights first to mobilize your stored fat, and then do cardio to burn it up before it can be stored again.

• Pick workouts you like: Just like how you’ll quit dieting if you hate your diet food, you’ll stop exercising if you hate your workouts. Not only that, but studies have found that when people don’t like their workouts, they tend to move less the rest of the day and eat more fattening foods later to reward themselves for enduring something awful. Studies have shown people prefer and enjoy HIIT workouts and are more likely to stick with them long-term, and that’s ultimately the key to hitting your goal.

• Keep moving all day: This is another little subconscious trick your body does to you to prevent weight loss. People that burn a lot of calories during a workout tend to fall victim to Non-Volitional Exercise-Induced Inactivity later in the day. That’s just a fancy way of saying you sit around later to compensate for moving around so much earlier. Monitor your movement with a step counter or our GO tracking app before you start your routine to see how much you normally move and make an effort to keep moving after you start working out.

Some Helpful Series

• Truth About Diets: An excellent 8-part video series from guest-contributor and Exercise Physiologist Bryan Haycock summarizing how your body processes the foods you eat, how any diet can help you lose weight, and what to do when your diet stops working.

• Fueling Workouts: When it comes to exercise, proper nutrition is often as important as the workout itself. This four part series covers the different pre and post workout eating strategies you should use for Muscle Building, Race Training, and Weight Loss.

• App Focus: Learn about the scientific-research that went into some of our most popular apps, and see why they’re so effective at helping you reach your goal.

There is plenty here to help you get off to a good start, but I’m also happy to help with any questions you may have. You can post comments here if you think others would benefit from the answers or you can email me directly at chris@lolofit.com. It’s a busy time of year so I’ll get back to you as fast as I can, but sometimes it can take a few days.