Burn The Fat - 3 Simple Techniques For Hitting Your Fat Loss Goals

If you want to look better, feel better, and get more attention from the opposite sex, you need to reduce your body fat percentage. While major progress on this front requires a serious commitment (and a great plan to follow) there are simple things you can do to start moving in that direction. Here are three of them.

* Set Small Goals

* Develop New Habits

* Get Rid of Temptations

Set Small Goals

While setting big goals seems like a great idea, it can ruin your chances of making any progress. While there's nothing wrong with thinking big, but if you focus too hard on the final goal, it can be overwhelming and intimidating.

Let's say your big goal is to reduce your body fat percentage by 8% by summer. If you focus on that, one of two things will happen. Either it will look so difficult that you give up on your fat loss program altogether, or the deadline will seem so distant that you'll have trouble pushing yourself to meet it.

Suppose instead that you break down the big goal into smaller goals. Dropping your body fat percentage by one percent every two weeks (just an example) gives you lots of little goals that are more immediate and less intimidating. You are much more likely to stick to these kinds of goals.

Here's another example of a too-big goal. Think about avoiding junk foods completely. Could you go cold turkey and give up all your favorite treats today? Not likely. You could probably pull it off for a day or two.

But eventually you would start craving your favorite snacks. Sooner or later, your will power would fail you. And if you've ever tried something like this, you know what comes next. You go on a major junk food binge and end up fatter than you were when you started avoiding junk food.

Suppose instead you decided to replace one of your favorite junk foods with one healthier food. You might replace butter with a lower-fat alternative for example. After a week or two you would get used to that change. Then you could replace another junk food with a healthier alternative and give yourself some time to get used to that.

I realize that this is a slower approach than jumping in with both feet and changing everything at once. But you are far more likely to get to your big goal if you do it slowly, bit by bit. Over time you will have reduced your body fat to the level you wanted, or completely replaced your bad foods with the healthy foods, but without going through major stress and temptation!

Develop New Habits

Developing new habits can definitely help. More specifically, replacing bad habits with better ones can really help. If you think about it, you will see that much of the reason you got into the condition you are in now is because of your current habits.

Eliminating habits completely is virtually impossible. Sometimes you can completely break an old habit (like snacking during boring meetings) if you try, but that is really hard.

In most cases, replacing a unhealthy habit with a healthier one is more practical.

For example, let's talk about your habit of snacking in those boring staff meetings. Instead of trying to break the habit altogether (and perhaps falling asleep at the conference table), you could change what you snack on. If you usually bring a donut to the meeting, you could try replacing it with a piece of fruit or some crackers. You still get to munch during the meeting and remain conscious, but by munching on something more healthy, you are taking a step in the right direction. Making the habit healthier is much less stressful than giving up on it altogether.

Get Rid of Temptation

If you're like me, you find it almost impossible to resist your favorite snack foods when they're in the house. As much as I want to resist them, I can hear the goodies calling to me from the kitchen. They are so close and so tasty, I just can't resist. I find it much easier to resist those siren calls when the snack food in question is a 10-minute drive away.

Here's one of the great rules of the universe: The strength of a temptation is inversely proportional to how hard it is to satisfy. You're much less likely to snack on ice cream if you have to churn the stuff yourself, or cookies if you have to bake them first.

So make it easy on yourself and don't buy the foods you love to snack on or the fattening dinners that you can't resist. If you keep only healthy stuff in the house, you are much more likely to eat healthy, which means you are much more likely to meet your body fat targets.

Three Good Steps In The Right Direction

Now you know three solid steps you can take to burn the fat and get the body you want. They will definitely help you, but if you have a long way to go, they're not going to be enough. You're going to want to follow a complete fat loss program, one that's been around for year and has proven to work for all sorts of real people like you and me.