My fitness schedules are unique, in the sense that I tend to want to diet around the holidays. This time of year is when most follow off the rails with candy through Halloween, big family dinners during Thanksgiving, shopping/traveling during Christmas & Hanukkah. Personally, this is my favorite time to diet. Being a male wearing layers, I find it easier to deal with the downsides of dieting (i.e. feeling small, being shaped oddly, performance degradation, etc.)

Likely, you’re of the majority that starts a crash diet around a new year’s resolution to get a six pack or toned booty for beach season. The great thing about dieting, is it is not dependent on the time of the year. Whenever you decide to chisel away your love handles, there are tried and true methods that you can approach for fat loss made easy. Start your transformation here.

As for myself, the first step is to always evaluate my current caloric intake, and start by reducing that intake slightly. The human body excels at adapting, so I don’t want to immediately cut all my food and have no tools to utilize when my body adapts. Like medicine, the idea is to use the minimum effective dose necessary.

Next, I convert my workouts to be more metabolic based than hypertrophic (muscle gain). Although hypertrophy workouts can be a great tool, our goal is to maintain muscle instead of gain it. A hypertrophic workout will cause more mechanical damage, which is difficult to recover from during a caloric deficit. Metabolic workouts allow me to continue burning calories even after I’ve left the gym.

The next great tool is to take in more non-starchy vegetables. And I mean hordes of them. Vegetables cannot be overstated in their efficacy. They affect how you process nutrients, how well you assimilate nutrients, and how well balanced your hormones are. More veggies equals more weight loss. One positive of taking in more veggies is that you essentially lose weight without having to do any work except eat them. No cardio or weight training routine can even come close to this tool!

You might be thinking to yourself, “Steve, where’s your two-hour cardio sessions?”. And my answer is, I don’t do them. I’ve competed in bodybuilding shows and achieved single digit body fat percentages (a very difficult task, take my word for it) without doing any more than 30 minutes of cardio, per week. Not per day, per WEEK. I know you’re skeptical, and that’s okay. My methods are contrary to basically every periodical you’ve ever read. But here’s the rub, if you diet properly, you don’t need to do ANY cardio. Does cardio accelerate the process moderately? Yes. Is it feasible for the average individual to wake up every morning to do high intensity training, then return to the gym later that evening for weight training? No.

Your goals are going to be moderate, as compared to professional goals, so cardio isn’t absolutely necessary. Sure, it can be fun for some folks, and that’s great. To each his own! But for those of us who despise cardio, I’m here to tell you that it’s perfectly acceptable to not do any. It doesn’t make you a bad person.

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