But if you’re dieting in order to increase your muscle definition, you probably also know that hunger can be a huge issue. In fact, hunger might be the single biggest reason why people fall off their diets, and fail to develop a leaner, meaner physique. As determined as you might be in the beginning of your cutting phase, that determination quickly wanes after the first two weeks on your fat loss plan. When hunger hits you, if you’re not prepared, you will fall off the wagon.

Luckily, there are a few tricks that can help you mitigate hunger and stick to your fat loss diet successfully over the long run, in order to reveal all the muscle that is hiding under a layer of fat. If you want to learn how to minimize hunger when dieting to make your fat loss endeavor successful, listen up.

Manage Your Hunger and Satiety Hormones

Hunger and satiety are largely controlled by your endocrine system. To manage and minimize your hunger in a way that lets you stay consistent with your fat loss plan, you first need to learn what hunger and satiety are, and how they work.

You have two main hunger and satiety hormones: ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin is your main hunger hormone, and it directly signals your brain that you need to seek out food. Leptin, on the other hand, is your main satiety hormone. It is produced mainly in fat cells, and it signals your brain that you are full and should stop eating. Generally, ghrelin levels are highest and leptin levels are lowest just before a meal, and vice versa—ghrelin levels are lowest and leptin levels are highest right after a meal.

The crucial detail about your hunger and satiety hormones is that they generally take around 15-20 minutes to fully kick in and do their job. So if you have the habit of eating like it’s a race, this might lead you to consume the equivalent of a small farm before leptin has had the chance to kick in and tell you to get off the table. This might cause you to eat more than you normally would, ultimately sabotaging your weight loss efforts.

In order to ensure that your hormones are able to do their job, take around 25 minutes to finish each meal. This way your ghrelin levels will have had the time to decrease, and your leptin levels will have had the time to rise. To incorporate this habit into your daily life, you could either time your meals, or if you’re eating out with other people, you could just take on the pace of the slowest eater at the table. Small children are often good pace-setters.

Know Your Macros

Macronutrients are your proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, and they provide you with the energy to function. What you might not know is that each macronutrient provokes a different satiety response.

Protein is the most satiating macronutrient out of the three. This is one of the reasons why you want to make sure that you’re consuming a sufficient amount of protein when you’re on a fat loss diet. It will help you feel full longer, and mitigate uncontrollable hunger. You want to consume around 0.9g of protein per pound of body weight (or 2 g per kg) per day.

Dietary fat is the second most satiating macronutrient, while carbohydrates come in last. This might be one reason why some people are better able to sustain a caloric deficit on a LCHF (low carb, high fat) diet. It’s just harder to overeat on almonds, as opposed to overeating on chocolate and donuts.

There is a caveat to this, though: while 1g of carbohydrate contains 4 calories, 1g of dietary fat contains 9 calories. So you still need to keep an eye on your total caloric intake to make sure that it doesn’t go out of whack.

Pick Foods Lower in Calories Per Gram

Another way to mitigate hunger on a fat loss diet is to pick foods that are relatively lower in calories per gram. One of the ways your body manages hunger and satiety is through stretch receptors in your stomach. If your stomach is fuller, satiety hormones are secreted to tell you to stop eating.

Since you need to eat less calories, but at the same time you want to minimize hunger, your best bet is to pick foods that are relatively lower in calories per gram. For example, 100g of boiled white rice contain 130cal, while 100g of boiled broccoli contains just 35cal.

Substituting foods relatively lower in calories for calorie-dense foods will help you reduce your caloric intake while fighting off hunger.

Double Down on Solid Food

People who are struggling to gain weight are often advised to add liquid calories. This is not a coincidence, because solid food leaves the stomach slower than liquids, and are more satiating. This is also why if you’re on a fat loss diet, you want to swap the orange juice and milk for water. You might also want to substitute solid food for your liquid meals as well, for the time being. This will help you further minimize hunger when you’re in a deficit.

Whenever you’re on a fat loss diet—especially after the first few weeks—you are going to experience hunger. How you manage that hunger will ultimately dictate the success or failure of your fat loss efforts. If you follow the tips outlined above, you’ll be able to mitigate it to a point where it’s manageable and doesn’t throw you off your diet.

This will enable you to stick to your plan for a long enough period of time to shed the unwanted fat off of your body, and reveal the muscle definition that’s hiding underneath.

The post 4 Ways to Fight Hunger on a Fat Loss Diet appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Indeed, training and nutrition are two of the primary factors we need to look at whether we’re trying to build muscle, lose fat, or gain strength. While these two factors get most of the attention, there is one additional critical factor to consider if we want to shed fat and perform at our best. It is perhaps the most overlooked factor contributing to a leaner, more muscular physique, and it is also one that, if neglected, could ultimately jeopardize your body recomposition efforts.

And that factor is sleep.

How Lack of Sleep Effects Your Body

In 2013 I moved to Portugal where I studied for 10 months as part of a university exchange program. There were a lot of exchange students like me that year, and one of them, a Brazilian fellow, became a good friend of mine. He wasn’t really the sporty type—I wasn’t able to make him come to the gym with me even once for all those months. In fact, I’d often go to his house and I’d find him lying in bed, eating pizza and watching TV. So, you can imagine he wasn’t exactly into health and fitness.

When I met him in the beginning of the first semester, even though he had an admittedly unhealthy lifestyle like most 21-year-olds, his metabolism alone was quick enough to hold off the damage that he was doing to his body. Gradually that started to change. Soon, he started gaining a few pounds a month and, as you might guess, those pounds added up over time until one day a few months later when winter passed, he literally couldn’t get into his summer shorts.

The weird thing was, he said he wasn’t eating more than he used to back at home in Brazil. Exercise wasn’t in the equation either way. The only thing that had changed was now that he didn’t live with his parents and he was at last his own man, he started sacrificing sleep and staying up late to work on university projects or to watch TV.

Could this have been the cause for his slow, but steady, progression to a dad bod? You bet.

Sleep Deprivation Influences Your Caloric Intake

Even though my friend was eating more or less the same meals as back home, one thing that led to his unexpected weight gain was the fact that he failed to account for the late night snacks that pushed his body into caloric surplus. He always had snacks like chips, crisps, or sweets lying around. You know how this scenario this goes down: you’re watching your favorite TV series after a long day at school or work and you decide to have a little bit of crisps or just one piece of chocolate, and soon enough you’re reaching out for more until you’ve unwittingly had 200-300 extra calories just before bed.

Think this is exaggerated? Think again.

In a systematic review and meta-analysis of human intervention studies assessing the effects of partial sleep deprivation, scientists found that the sleep deprived (less than seven hours of sleep per night) tend to consume 385 kcal more compared to the control condition.¹ For most people, increasing intake by 385 kcal daily is significant enough to cause serious weight gain. So, if my friend was consuming 300+ extra calories each night then it’s no wonder why he suddenly started gaining weight.

But his increased caloric intake is just the tip of the iceberg. In order to reveal the full consequences of sleep deprivation we need to go deeper.

Sleep Deprivation Influences Your Hormones

We now know that my friend, like many other sleep deprived folks, was consuming a considerable surplus of calories and ultimately that is what led to his weight (and fat) gain. But we still don’t know what it is about sleep deprivation exactly that causes us to increase our caloric intake.

One explanation could be linked to the fact that when we’re sleep deprived, we’re awake for a longer period of time. Our bodies generally burn more calories when we’re awake than when we’re asleep so it’s plausible that our bodies signal our brains to seek out more food to compensate. But as the above-stated study reveals, there was no significant change in total energy expenditure or resting metabolic rate as a result of not getting enough sleep. Meaning the sleep deprived folks had increased their total caloric intake without increasing the amount of calories they burned.

Why do we crave more food when we don’t get enough sleep? A University of Chicago study among 12 healthy males in their early 20s found that sleep deprivation is associated with an increase in ghrelin levels and a concurrent decrease in leptin levels.² Ghrelin, also known as the hunger hormone, is basically the hormone that signals your brain that you are hungry. Leptin, on the other hand, is the hormone that signals that you are full.

This study suggests that, when sleep deprived, we tend to feel hungrier and less full. This explains why the sleep deprived folks averaged a 385 kcal caloric surplus, compared to people who get to bed on time and get enough sleep.

Another issue related to sleep deprivation is the type of foods we crave when we don’t get enough shut-eye. Studies present conflicting results, so we need more research on the subject. But that being said, some studies do suggest that when sleep deprived, we’re more likely to lean toward unhealthy high-carb, low-protein foods.³

This is bad news particularly because most of these unhealthy high-carb foods are loaded with sugar, and according to another University of Chicago study, sleep deprivation also negatively affects how our bodies handle glucose.⁴ More specifically, the study reveals that sleep loss is associated with impairments in glucose metabolism, including insulin sensitivity, and notes that “it is possible that insulin resistance could also promote increased adiposity and weight gain.”

Sadly, the cascading negative effects of sleep deprivation don’t end here.

Sleep Deprivation Affects Your Brain

As if sleep deprivation didn’t cause enough trouble by screwing up our hormones, it turns out that it also messes with our brains. According to yet another study, sleep deprivation decreases activity in the critical decision making regions of the brain, the frontal cortex and insular cortex, and amplifies activity within the amygdala, the reward region of your brain that makes you seek out high-calorie foods.⁵

It’s no wonder being sleep-deprived has been compared to being drunk. In a sleep-deprived state you lack impulse control and you’re more likely to just reach out for those tasty cookies in front of you.

But there’s more.

Sleep Deprivation Affects Your Workouts

As you probably know, having more muscle helps you burn more fat. Apart from helping you burn more calories during workouts, this happens because increasing your muscle mass leads to a higher Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)—the amount of calories you burn in a 24-hour period if you were to do absolutely nothing.

That’s all good and well. Sadly, sleep deprivation can ultimately lead to less muscle, and thus more fat. Scientists found that sleep deprivation can lead to decreased protein synthesis meaning that your body is capable of building less muscle when you’re on low sleep.⁶ Another point stated in the same study is that, in case of sleep deprivation, there’s a marked increase in cortisol, the catabolic hormone. That means that not only will you build less muscle, but you can also experience muscle loss.

Finally, less total sleep means less slow wave sleep and during slow wave sleep is when your body releases the most growth hormone. The increased levels of cortisol don’t help much either, further decreasing the release of growth hormone, and again leading to less muscle—and more fat.

How Much Sleep Should You Be Getting?

By now sleep deprivation probably sounds like a downward spiral to hell and hopefully you understand exactly how it can bring your muscle building and fat loss progress to a quick halt.

But enough depressing studies and statistics. By this point, you’re probably just wondering how much sleep you actually need. In 2015 the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and Sleep Research Society (SRS) developed a consensus recommendation for the amount of sleep you need to be getting every night in order to function optimally: 7 to 9 hours per night.⁷ Of course, the exact amount of sleep needed varies depending on the individual, but it’s safe to say that 7 hours per night seems to be the bare minimum and that those who work out probably need a bit more.

That being said, I’d like to leave you with a few tips for higher quality sleep:

• Don’t look at screens (TV, desktop, or mobile devices) for two hours before bed
• Sleep in complete darkness
• Use earplugs if you live in a noisy environment
• Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day

Get Your Sleep

Sleep deprivation can be a serious problem both for your health and for your body composition. The decrease in average sleep duration in the U.S. has occurred over the same time period as the increase in obesity and diabetes.⁴ Make sure to get your fair share of quality sleep every night to keep your body fat percentage low and your health in check.

References:

1. HK Al Khatib, SV Harding, J Darzi and GK Pot (2016). The effects of partial sleep deprivation on energy balance: a systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2016), 1–11.

2. Spiegel, K. (2004). Brief Communication: Sleep Curtailment in Healthy Young Men Is Associated with Decreased Leptin Levels, Elevated Ghrelin Levels, and Increased Hunger and Appetite. Annals of Internal Medicine, 141(11), p.846.

3. Markwald, R., Melanson, E., Smith, M., Higgins, J., Perreault, L., Eckel, R. and Wright, K. (2013). Impact of insufficient sleep on total daily energy expenditure, food intake, and weight gain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(14), pp.5695-5700.

4. Kristen L. Knutson, PhD, Karine Spiegel, PhD, Plamen Penev, MD, PhD, and Eve Van Cauter, PhD (2007). The Metabolic Consequences of Sleep Deprivation. Sleep Med Rev. 2007 Jun; 11(3): 163–178.

5. Stephanie M. Greer, Andrea N. Goldstein & Matthew P. Walker (2013). The impact of sleep deprivation on food desire in the human brain. Nature Communications 4, Article number: 2259

6. Dattilo M, Antunes HK, Medeiros A, Mônico Neto M, Souza HS, Tufik S, de Mello MT (2011) Sleep and muscle recovery: Endocrinological and molecular basis for a new and promising hypothesis. Medical Hypotheses 77, 220–222.

7. Consensus Conference Panel, Nathaniel F. Watson, MD, MSc, Moderator, M. Safwan Badr, MD, Gregory Belenky, MD, Donald L. Bliwise, PhD, Orfeu M. Buxton, PhD, Daniel Buysse, MD, David F. Dinges, PhD, James Gangwisch, PhD, Michael A. Grandner, PhD, MSTR, CBSM, Clete Kushida, MD, PhD, Raman K. Malhotra, MD, Jennifer L. Martin, PhD, Sanjay R. Patel, MD, MSc, Stuart F. Quan, MD, and Esra Tasali, MD (2015). Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult: A Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Sleep 38. Jun 1; 38(6): 843–844.

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Injuries suck, and while it might seem like a lot of time-consuming work to do all of the stuff you’re about to learn, getting injured can keep you out of the gym for months at a time. Sadly, I’ve noticed that nearly nobody does that’s needed to prevent injuries to a sufficient extent or with any consistency.

I learned this lesson the hard way, as I failed to listen to my body, which resulted in me getting seriously injured. I struggled with crippling tennis elbow in both arms that prevented me from doing upper body exercises for 18 months. So take it from me: all of the time and effort you put into injury prevention will pay off tenfold.

Luckily, most injuries in the gym are quite easily prevented. You just have to avoid the following 10 mistakes.

Inadequate Warm Up

An inadequate or non-existent warm up is one of the primary factors leading to injuries in the gym. We all know how important it is to warm up our muscles, joints, and connective tissue before a gym session, yet we’ve all skipped our warm up when we’ve been particularly short on time. We knew that skipping our warm up was not a good idea, yet we decided to compromise in order to save what, 10 minutes?

That hurried shortsightedness can cause us a lot of pain and frustration, and can cost us a lot of money. And ironically, a lot of time out of the gym, too. Don’t compromise when it comes to your warm up, even if that means cutting your workout short. After all, you can always hit the gym another day. But you might not be able to do that if you got seriously injured because of skipping your warm up.

What to do instead:

Include a 6-10min general warm up routine before every single workout session. The goal of warming up is to get your muscles, joints and connective tissue ready for some serious action. More specifically, you want to stimulate joint lubrication, increase core temperature and blood flow to local tissue, and activate neuromuscular coordination and stabilization.

Your warm up routine should also prepare you mentally for the tough workout ahead, and by the end of your warm up, you should be in a mental state primed for focused action. Depending on your training program and the muscle groups you’re going to be training that day, you’ll want to customize your warm up to focus more on those muscle groups and their corresponding joints.

Incorrect Exercise Technique

Poor technique is another common factor that leads to injuries in the gym. The only reason more people don’t get injured from their bad form is because they’re still too weak to damage their connective tissue.

What to do instead:

Injuries due to incorrect lifting technique are easily preventable. Focus on learning the movement with proper form using just your bodyweight first, and only once you have it down, add an external load like a barbell.

Even if you don’t have access to a great personal trainer, in today’s day and age, you have all the information you need about proper technique at your fingertips. A simple Google search will bring you countless articles and videos detailing how to properly do any exercise in your training program. Study all you can find, and start with very light weights, if any at all. The point in the beginning is to program your nervous system to execute the movement properly. It is not to stimulate muscle growth or strength—yet.

Only perfect practice makes perfect. When you’re learning a new movement, make sure to execute every single rep as perfectly as you can. You do not want to learn a new movement incorrectly, as that can not only lead to injury, but it is also very hard to unlearn bad habits once they are formed.

Too Much Weight

This mistake is closely related to the previous one. If you’re a more experienced athlete, what you’ve probably noticed is that even if you have the correct technique of an exercise down, your form will break down at some point as you add more weight.

That’s simply because you always have a weak link that will give out first. That’s normal. But in chasing bigger and bigger poundage, a lot of guys disregard their form breaking down, which puts them in a very vulnerable position.

What to do instead:

If you feel that you’re reaching the point where your form is starting to break down and your weak link is giving out, stop. Better safe than sorry. Keep your ego out of the gym, and lower the weight or cut the volume.

The portion of the movement where your form starts to falter will indicate where your weak link in the movement lies. Make sure to do specific work for your weak link to strengthen it, so you can build strength safely and consistently.

Skipping Mobility and Soft Tissue Work

If a muscle is tight and stiff, it and the surrounding joints and tissues are vulnerable to injury. That’s why having proper mobility is imperative for staying out of trouble in the gym.

How many of us dedicate time for stretching and soft tissue work on a regular basis? I am as guilty as anyone of not doing it consistently enough, and that’s one thing that might have led to my injuries.

What to do instead:

Dedicate time (outside of your workouts) specifically for stretching and soft tissue work. Do this once weekly, at the very least. You want to make sure that your muscles have proper length and are not tight and stiff. Address any trigger points you might have in order to prevent myofascial pain. Foam rolling and massages using a lacrosse ball are great tools for that.

Developing Muscle Imbalances

As you probably know, muscle imbalances can cause some pretty nasty injuries. The role of our muscles is to initiate and control movements of bones. That makes them our best shock absorbers. In order for our muscles to carry out those functions, they must work in groups referred to as agonist and antagonist. The first initiates the movement, and the second controls the movement. For example, during a dumbbell curl, the agonist is the biceps and the antagonist is the triceps.

But if a muscle fatigues because of prolonged physical activity, then it is no longer an effective shock absorber. Muscle imbalances are caused by weakness, lack of flexibility, or poor endurance in either the agonist or antagonist.

For example, hamstring muscle tightness coupled with quadriceps weakness often results in anterior knee pain, because the tight hamstrings increase the compressive forces on the kneecap. Those compressive forces would usually be offset by a pair of adequately strengthened quadriceps muscles, but the combination of weak quads and tight hamstrings leads to knee pain, and maybe even to a more serious injury down the road.

What to do instead:

The best way to fix muscle imbalances is through stretching and soft tissue work on tight muscles, and strength training for weak muscles.

The reason why muscle imbalances are so common is because the average trainee goes to the gym to work on their “show off” muscles like chest and arms, and disregards other equally important but not so visually impressive muscles like the rotator cuff muscles. If you’re in this for the long run, and you want to be healthy and strong in older age, then you need to pay attention to and strengthen all muscles, instead of just doing curls for the girls. Don’t neglect any part of your body, and you’ll stay away from muscle imbalances and associated injuries.

Bad Spotting

These are the ones that go viral on YouTube. Bad spotting is another factor often leading to injury. Your spotter is the person that’s supposed to help you push yourself beyond your comfort zone, while still staying safe. That’s why you can’t afford to have your spotter disengaged and unfocused.

What to do instead:

Find a spotter who will take the responsibility seriously. If you don’t have a dedicated gym buddy and you’re just grabbing a random person in the gym, you should also make sure to instruct them on how to spot you correctly, just in case they don’t actually know.

If you get stuck, a good spotter will help you just enough to finish the rep, without yanking the weight off of you in an abrupt manner. That is, unless you’re completely out of it, in which case you overestimated your strength.

Overtraining

Overtraining simply means training beyond your ability to recover in a timely manner. As such, many people in the fitness industry say that there is no such thing as overtraining, just “under recovering.”

In this case though, what I’m referring to is overuse injuries caused by too much of the same movement pattern. The truth is that some types of tissue recover much slower than others. It might take your muscles around 72 hours to fully recover from a tough workout, but some connective tissues may take longer.

Overuse injuries are often caused by repetitive motions over a prolonged period of time. Micro-tears can accumulate in tendons and ligaments. And once injured, tendons and ligaments take a very, very long time to heal. I’m talking months, and in some cases, years.

What to do instead:

Even the best exercises can cause damage if used to excess, which is why you want to periodically cycle through different exercises for the same muscle group. That way, you can stay away from repetitive movement patterns, and from overuse injuries. Again, make sure to do soft tissue work and stretching for tight muscles, as that can reduce the wear and tear on the corresponding joints and connective tissue.

Poor Nutrition

Eating junk will only increase the stress that your body has to endure, and that can be a factor contributing to injury. Very low reps with heavy weights, coupled with severe dieting, don’t mesh together too well, either. Your body needs the necessary energy and materials to repair itself, and if you train very hard and don’t feed your body accordingly, you’re inviting injury.

What to do instead:

Give your body what it needs to handle the work you’re asking of it. Make sure to eat a healthy, balanced diet and cut out the junk food. Also, save the super low reps with heavy weights for periods of growth. Not only will handling your nutrition help prevent injuries in the gym, but it will also make you feel better and healthier in your everyday life.

Poor Recovery

Far too many athletes train hard, and then completely disregard their recovery. They don’t have the habit of drinking enough water, don’t get enough sleep, and overdo it on the weekends. Then they hit the gym hard again on Monday, and their form implodes or they strain a muscle because it wasn’t ready to go again.

What to do instead:

A big part of proper recovery is nutrition and soft tissue work, which we already covered. But there are other important contributing factors:

• Sleep: You need to be getting at least 7.5-8 hours of quality sleep, every single night. If you’re not doing so, you’re not really serious about your fitness goals. Simple as that.
• Drink: Get in the habit of drinking 3-4 liters of water per day.
• Rest: Maybe this sounds crazy, but you need to actually rest on rest days. Far too many trainees can’t seem to sit still, and instead make the mistake of engaging in physically demanding activities even on their rest days. Active recovery in the form of walking, very light cardio, diaphragmatic breathing, yoga, etc., is great, but don’t overdo it, or you’ll defeat the purpose.

Lack of Focus

A lot of trainees do their sets mechanically without thinking, instead of focusing on proper form and maximal muscle contractions.

What to do instead:

Leave your phone in the car. Once you start your warm up, you should get in the zone and focus on making some serious progress. You’re investing your time into this, so you should strive to make the most out of it. Forget about your problems at work, forget about what you’re doing later that day, and zero in on your workout. For serious lifters, that’s the best part of working out anyway. Lifting is therapy.

Shortcuts Make for Long Injuries

Let me restate this: injuries suck.

They hurt, they’re inconvenient, and they rob you of months or even years of training time and progress. Make sure to follow the guidelines laid out above, and live to lift another day. All the effort is definitely worth it, in the long run.

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