Health Network News

In spite all of the good advice on how to lose arm fat, way too many women are still resorting to crash dieting. Why do they do it? Simply put, everybody wants a shortcut no matter how extreme it may be.

But the truth is that such guerilla dieting destroys the body’s metabolic mechanisms. In other words, it shuts down your body’s ability to burn off the arm flab. So here are 6 nutrition tips to follow so that your body (and mind) doesn’t shut down:

1. Forget about calories in versus calories out. In this day and age, everyone is busy and we don’t have all day to exercise. It’s not necessary to spend hours running and hours lifting weights every day to get rid of the arm jiggle. All that’s needed is a short workout that gets to the point in 45 minutes or less (note: you should be sweating and panting).

2. Don’t keep a journal of every piece of food you eat. You are not a machine, so please don’t act like one. Do this, and you’ll end up feeling like a slave. Eventually, you’ll reach a tipping point and throw in the flabby arms towel.

3. Focus on general eating patterns. All you have to do is make sure each one of your meals has a protein, vegetable, carbohydrate and fat source. If you want to take it to the next level, make sure you carbohydrate sources are only legumes. Do this, and everything else will fall into place.

4. Don’t practice calorie counting. Much worse than keeping a journal, because now you have become a full time accountant in addition to your other demands. The idea that a 3500 caloric deficit equals a pound of fat loss, is based on an outdated closed thermodynamic model. Forget about being a calorie counter and focus on general eating patterns instead.

5. Keep eating your pleasure foods. The trick here is to reduce the serving size of the pleasure food and to accompany it with a source of vegetables. The reduced serving size minimizes caloric impact and the vegetable source will slow down digestion (think “glycemic load”).

6. Don’t have more than one serving of alcohol per day. Again, despite all the advice on this one, many of my female clients still drink way too much. Aside from a high caloric content, alcohol shuts down all your arm fat burning hormones. The good news is that the more you exercise, the less alcohol you need to achieve that “buzz” feeling.

Ok, now you have 6 tips to follow that should make learning how to lose arm fat that much easier. Be patient and change your eating style piecemeal, day by day. If you diet the dirty way, you’ll end up crashing!

One more thing: expect to make mistakes. No one can diet perfectly for extended periods of time. The key here is to get right back on target as quickly as humanly possible.