You know the commonly understood formula for weight loss. It is the premise that virtually every mainstream fitness routine accepts. However, it is an urban myth. What is it? Eat less + increase activity=weight loss. This is not true. It appears to be true just like the world appears to be flat, but you know it isn’t true; the world is round. Follow this urban myth of weight loss and you will end up stranded somewhere, frustrated that you didn’t reach your weight loss goal. Even worse, you may will circle the world of mainstream empty weight loss promises and come back to where you started, more overweight than when you started. Let put this urban myth to rest once and for all. I repeat, Eat Less + Increase Activity DOES NOT EQUAL Weight Loss. Why? Here is the answer: Print this out, underline it, and paste it on your bathroom mirror? Your body is not a calorie checkbook! Treat it like one and three things happen: Phantom weight loss: some fat burning yes, but more muscle wasting and dehydration. Weight loss plateau after 2-3 weeks due to your body developing a tolerance to what you are doing. You gain all the weight back plus more once you quit due to a depressed metabolism. This is the typical outcome of any diet and cardio scenario. This is the truth of burning body-fat, and staying lean, looking good, and feeling good all the days of your life: Your body has a fat burning engine that we can compare to a campfire. To turn the engine on you will need the proper mix of wood (nutrition) and air (exercise) to keep the flames (metabolism) burning fat. The hormones or your body ignites the flames of your fat burning engine. As most women are keenly aware, hormone levels fluctuate over time so the ideal timing and ratio of wood and air to keep the fire burning does vary over the day, the week, or the month. To avoid weight loss plateaus, we need to account for this. Weight loss plateaus are the body’s hormonal (and enzymatic) tolerance to what you are doing. So what happens when we chose to cardio ourselves to death for 1 hour or more a day while cutting our food intake in half? Well let’s compare it to the campfire scenario. What happens to the flames of the campfire when you take half the wood out and point a strong gust of wind at the campfire? That’s right you got it. Without fuel to sustain the fire, and a strong wind blowing on the flames, the fire will burn out. Bye, fat burn, hello slow metabolism. Excessive cardio, like a hurricane wind, blows out the fat burning flame because it because the body’s hormones to “bottom out” and metabolism goes south. This response is even more severe if you “go on a diet” and the same time. Some exercise (air) is necessary to burn fat, and weight training with accessory cardio accomplishes this. Most people fail because they focus on burning calories. Who cares about burning calories? We want to burn fat’not calories. This preoccupation with the calorie checkbook idea and endless cardio + hardly eating to “bring down the balance” continues to be accepted despite the fact it fails miserably to deliver. Even hormone conscious experts, like the people who have developed the zone and south beach diets don’t recognize the application of their hormonal science to exercise, and its interrelationship to nutrition and the body hormonal clock. However, doctors are disease specialists and clinical nutritionists are food chemistry specialists. They focus on the science of the chemistry of the human body, not the art of applying strategies derived from science to a person’s lifestyle to get fat burning results. Hey, most of them don’t even follow their own advice. Not a criticism, just a acknowledging that they face the same challenges we all do. Personal Trainers are health and fitness experts, in the trenches applying proven strategies for results. We look to science, but it has to hold up under application, it has got to deliver. This is where the cutting edge lies. So this is the cutting edge on burning off body fat. Get rid of the notion of the calorie checkbook because that is bleeding edge of yesterday that leads to nowhere. Consult with Tanya via Skype, phone or facetime. Send questions to tanya@tanyaevans.com Www.tanyaevans.com