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Fat burning recipes that will keep you full for hours, rev your metabolism and put an end to constant cravings you have because you are undernourished! Try to work at least one in per day or more if you feel inspired, you will notice an immediate, dramatic difference in how bloated you feel, how much water weight you're carrying and energy levels!
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Running is a challenging, effective workout, there's no doubt about it. Considered the gold standard for burning calories, running does have some draw backs, often beginning runners get injured and then are sidelined for an extended period of time. Plus, it can be boring and isolating if you often run alone.
Creating a new, varied Spring time exercise program with many different challenging workouts to cross train the body protects you from injury and overusing muscles, plus our bodies love to be constantly challenged in new ways to keep our metabolism and muscles surprised, which is great for your body and keeping you mentally engaged as well. Have fun with it, create a chart or use an app on your phone to pick 5 things you haven't tried before and see if you can do them each once a week for the next four weeks!
Your goal: Design a life you love, try new things that get results in less time and don't make you dread doing them. We're looking for exercises that burn around 10 calories per minute. Some you can sneak in from the list below, get up 20 minutes early or try doing them at night instead of snacking. I'm also going to challenge you to try something new that's SCARY! Like ballroom dancing, hula hoop class or surfing, anything you've always wanted to try but haven't yet! Something that the very thought of it gets you excited and thinking "wouldn't it be so cool if I knew how to...."
That's how you design a life you love!
Here's a list of other exercises that burn over 10 calories per minute:
Weight training
As little as 10 minutes, 3 times per week can have a positive effect on your body composition. It doesn't have to be a full-blown gym session to count either!
Researchers at the University of Southern Maine used a more advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, they found that weight training burns up to 71 percent more calories than originally thought. Which suggests that a fast-paced circuit workout burns as many calories as running at a 6-minute per mile pace.
Make sure you're lifting weights heavy enough to produce fatigue within 8-10 reps and perform the "negative" portion of the exercise twice as slowly as the lifting portion, this will maximize your results.
Burpees
Here's an explanation from Wiki
The burpee is a full body exercise used in strength training and as an aerobic exercise. The basic movement is performed in four steps and known as a "four-count burpee":
- Begin in a standing position.
- Drop into a squat position with your hands on the ground. (count 1)
- Kick your feet back, while keeping your arms extended. (count 2)
- Immediately return your feet to the squat position. (count 3)
- Jump up from the squat position (count 4)
This link has a tutorial on burpees and other jumps: http://skinnyms.com/jazzed-up-jacks-and-jumps-tabata-workout/
Indoor Bike Sprints
Its possible to burn over 80 calories per minute if you give it everything you've got, make sure to follow the sprint with a cool down at least twice as long. Usually this requires a gym membership, but you can find creative solutions if you look for them. They even make under desk mini cycles now you can use while you work!
Jumping Rope
Portable and very inexpensive you can take a jump rope with you on a walk, travelling, in your car, outdoors, inside watching TV or while your kids play at the park, you can burn approximately 13 calories per minute jumping rope. It is one of the higher impact exercises on this list, so mix it in to your schedule but don't rely on it everyday. This link has tutorials on jumping rope and other jumps: http://skinnyms.com/jazzed-up-jacks-and-jumps-tabata-workout/
HIIT Circuits
From Dailyburn.com here's a beginners 20 minute HIIT circuit, where you perform 45 seconds of work, followed by 15 seconds of rest for 5 exercises and then you rest 1 minute between rounds and complete 3 rounds:
- Push Ups
- Squats
- Butt Kicks
- Tricep Dips
- Side Lunges
Tabata Jump Squats
This four-minute miracle drill burns major calories both during a workout and after. In an Auburn University at Montgomery study, participants who did eight rounds of all-out jump squats—20 seconds of hard work, separated by 10 seconds of rest—burned 13.4 calories per minute and doubled their post-exercise metabolic rate for at least 30 minutes.
This link has tutorials on a jumping sequence: http://skinnyms.com/jazzed-up-jacks-and-jumps-tabata-workout/
Kettlebell Swing
This explosive exercise works the big, powerful muscles around your glutes and quads, and sends your heart into overdrive, according to research from the University of Wisconsin. The motion of swinging the kettlebell really feels strange at first and works muscles you didn't even know you had! For between $10-$20 you can find one of these at Target and its an easy, fast workout to do while you're watching TV. This exercise will help you get those flat abs you want to show off in summer too, start with 10 sets of 10. See the instruction below from Prevention.com
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PCOS seems to be coming to the forefront in weight loss topics these days, and many experts are stating that this disease is more common than previously thought. PCOS goes hand in hand with insulin resistance, which brings up the topic of the hormone cortisol and the fact that when you drink coffee or perform long sessions of intense cardio you find a prolonged cortisol effect. Cortisol is also raised when you are under stress and it signals the body to store fat around the abdomen, along with other unwanted side effects. If you have been trying for some time to lose weight by cutting fat and increasing exercise and have seen no improvement, you might either by insulin resistant or have PCOS or both, but you will need to have specific tests to make sure.
It's important to work with your doctor if you know you have either of the above disorders, so please make sure you are following their instructions, taking your medication, etc. I want to give a little insight on the fact that tea may not have the same effect as coffee in terms of raising cortisol levels, in fact evidence is pointing us to believe it actually has the opposite effect, and can offset daily stress and help return your cortisol levels to normal. We largely believe this is due to the presence of L-theanine, which in combination with caffeine can reduce anxiety and promote calm focus, but on-going studies are not conclusive yet.
The way that hormones interact in our bodies is extremely complicated, this is one very small component of a huge symphony going on in your body at all times. That being said, small changes can lead to better results rather quickly. I'd like to share some small first steps with you to jump start your metabolism if you have PCOS or Insulin resistance.
1) If you are an cardio junkie, stop. Do low intensity relaxing exercise (leisure walking, tai chi, restorative yoga) and weight training instead to control cortisol which can be one of the major issues in disrupting brain-ovary signaling.
2) Lower your starch/sugar and dairy intake…especially if you are overweight. A paleo-based diet is very useful here or explore keto type eating plan.
3) Take an adrenal adaptogen….my favorites for PCOS are Rhodiola and Holy Basil. (Holy Basil is found in our Malibu Beach Beauty Tea)
4) Work to control estrogen by avoiding estrogen exposure (plastics, coffee, pesticides, OCPs, dairy, etc.) AND facilitating their removal= (increasing) fiber and DIM (supplement).
The two teas I would recommend starting out with would be the Malibu Beach Beauty tea during the day & Corona del Mar paleo lean tea for night.
To Your Health & Happiness!
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Negative-accentuated training
Not the laziest tip ever, but if you want to get out of the diet, gain, diet cycle forever you're going to have to change some of your body's composition to become a more efficient calorie burner. Newport Skinny Tea supports this on several levels, as do the tips we've given in this series, but here's a tip from Prevention Magazine about negative-accentuated training which was written about in The Four Hour Body as well as by many other life hackers. If you want to build fat-burning muscle in the least amount of time possible, here's a great way:
Almost everyone who's lost weight has eventually put the weight back on. Why this cruel reality? It's simple, really: During the first months of any diet, your body loses both fat and muscle. Then, when you gain back the weight, you add back only fat because it's much easier to gain fat than it is to gain muscle.
"That's the dirty little secret of most popular diet plans," says exercise researcher Ellington Darden. "They don't combine muscle-maintaining exercises with the calorie reduction. More muscle is your ticket to a better body."
It's no secret that muscle is more metabolically active than fat, so by having more lean muscle on your skeleton, you'll burn more calories even at rest. Fortunately, Darden says he discovered a super-efficient way to build muscle while losing weight: It's called "negative training," and Darden tested it on more than 100 people at Gainesville Health & Fitness in Florida a few years ago. The technique involves doing the lowering part, or "eccentric phase," of a resistance exercise very slowly. But Darden gave this old-school bodybuilding trick a tweak: He found that by using heavier weights and doing just one and a half reps very, very slowly, you can achieve remarkable results from just one or two short workouts per week.
To get a taste of what Darden calls "negative-accentuated training," grab two dumbbells, and stand upright with your arms straight and the weights resting against your thighs. Do a quick bicep curl to get the weights to your shoulders; that's the starting position. Now very slowly lower the dumbbells—that's the negative phase—taking 10 to 20 seconds to let them lower to your thighs. Then immediately curl the weight very slowly to your shoulders (again, it should take 10 to 20 seconds)—that's the positive phase of the lift. Finally, without pausing, do another negative movement, taking a final 10 to 20 seconds to lower the weights to your thighs. So the idea is that you'll do the negative movement for twice as long total as you do the positive movement. (Eventually, you'll want to increase to 30 seconds for each phase of this exercise.)
By doing one and a half reps of a lift, you can complete a workout in just 20 to 30 minutes—and feel like you've exercised for more than an hour. The moves are simply that tough, which is why you'll need several days for your muscles to recover.
The negative-accentuated style of weight training results in 40 to 50 percent greater stress being put on your muscles, compared to more conventional training methods, says Darden. This stimulates key hormones that boost muscular growth and oxidize fat-cell content at a faster rate. "It may be that the higher level of stress put on your muscles, combined with just the right amount of carbohydrates, decreases insulin responsiveness in fat cells to make them shrink," says Darden.
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Lazy version of the Cold Water Thermogenesis Protocol
Do you know what those big words mean to your lazy desire to get healthier? Ultimately, they mean that if you expose yourself to cold water, like swimmers do, you burn fat at a highly accelerated rate. I first learned about it from Jack Kruse, MD and you will have to trust me that his blog is intensely thorough and you will have to feel very motivated to read it all! It has also become a popular topic with biohackers like Tim Feriss and in the paleo world.
If you want the lazy version it requires that you stick your face in a bowl of ice water for approximately 10 minutes every day. You need to start slowly (maybe with 1 minute) and work your way up to 10 minutes. Never keep your face in water when it hurts or feels uncomfortable, you adapt to the cold over time and that's what causes you to burn more fat. If you want to further this practice- and it does get way more intense, make sure you do a lot of reading and talk with your doctor before doing a full body cold bath.
Drinking ice water does help also, you do have to raise the temperature of the liquid to your body temp and that burns calories, approximately 70 per day.
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Guilt-free TV watching
Can you get fit without thinking about it? Need a distraction so you don't snack while you watch?
Maybe watching your favorite show makes it easier to get a full body workout! Drink some water or tea to curb your appetite and get started!
Here's a routine you can do while you binge watch, do each exercise for 45 seconds or exhaustion and then rest for 15 seconds, repeat the sequence 3-6 times (each round is 10 minutes, so 30-60 minutes) use the timer on your iphone or a boss timer:
- Wall Sit
- Push-Ups
- Crunches with legs straight
- squats
- step up (on chair)
- Triceps dip (on chair or couch)
- Plank
- Lunge (to make it longer do front, side, back lunge)
- low plank on forearms
- wide leg squat or side plank (alternate)
