Tips for building lean muscle

Eat To Perform is all about fueling your body for optimal performance, and we believe in using data like food logging to determine what exactly “optimal” is. That said, most people don’t want to spend even a few minutes each day tracking food and for that to work, you have to focus more on behaviors and food choices. It’s not exactly the best way to go about things, but it can work if you simply don’t have the inclination to track food.

Here are seven tips that can help you lose body fat without tracking food. Number 1 is probably the most important!

The best way to ensure that you lose body fat is to make sure that you’re coming from a stable base so you have more room to remove food and create a deficit. If you’re already eating barely anything or you eat sporadically, there’s nowhere to go. For that reason, you should start off your fat loss phase by gradually and consistently increasing your food intake over a 3-4 week period. This is called a diet break.

You WILL gain weight on your diet break but it will be mostly water and muscle glycogen. This is a good thing. Once your weight has stabilized at a higher food intake, you’ll gradually remove food – mostly carbohydrates – and start to see a downward trend in your weight as you lose body fat.

As a general rule, you want to lose about 1% of your body weight each week – between 1 and 2 lbs. depending upon how heavy you are. Any more than that and you risk losing a lot of muscle mass. As always, take things gradually!

For more info on diet breaks and why undereating all the time is actually killing your fat loss, sign up for our free e-mail course!

2. Eat plenty of highly satiating foods.

The fat, fiber, and water content of a food greatly affects how full you feel after eating. As you have no doubt experienced in the past, when you feel full, your appetite is suppressed. When you’re not hungry all the time, it’s easier to maintain a Calorie deficit and lose body fat or keep it off!

• Foods to include in each major meal are fibrous veggies like: broccoli, lettuce, spinach, asparagus, kale, etc.