By Nick Nilsson
Author of Metabolic Surge - Rapid Fat Loss
Losing fat is not as hard as you might think...and Angry Birds has some wisdom in it that can help.
First, if you're not familiar with it, "Angry Birds" is a phone game where you use your finger on the touchscreen to slingshot a variety of cartoon birds at evil green pigs who've stolen their eggs. You have to knock down different structures to get at the pigs to destroy them...different birds do different things and are useful for getting through different materials (if you're still confused, Google "angry birds" and you'll see what it's all about in detail).
I want you to think about your stubborn fat as the structures that are sheltering these evil pigs and the birds as your training and nutrition strategies.
When you start to lose bodyfat, it generally comes off relatively easily (especially if you have a lot to lose). In the game, there are structures made of wood. They're easy to break and the no-frills red birds can bust right through them.
Your "easy" bodyfat is the wooden structures and it's easily taken care of with standard training and exercise (the red birds). At this stage of the game, just about anything you do to lose fat is probably going to work.
Once you're past the first few levels, it starts to get a bit harder, just like when you're training to lose bodyfat.
With fat-loss, this is the period where things start to slow down a bit and have you to tighten up your training and eating in order to keep making progress. In the game, this is where they start adding concrete barriers, rocks and ice blocks to the structures.
You have to use SPECIAL angry birds to get through these....
...Yellow birds that accelerate, blue birds that split into three birds, white birds that lay explosive eggs, black birds that explode like bombs, big "fat boy" red birds that plow through everything, and boomerang birds that loop back around to destroy things.
The structures get more and more complex (and they give the stupid pigs helmets!) and you have to use various combinations of the birds to bring them down on the pigs.
This is EXACTLY what happens with stubborn bodyfat...
You have to use birds to...no wait, nevermind...what I meant is that you have to use very specialized, very targeted training and nutritional techniques to get at that stubborn bodyfat and get rid of it.
Using standard training programs and nutrition (the small red bird) will get you a good way towards your overall goal, but it won't allow you to access the stuff that's locked away due to hormonal issues that you might be experiencing.
To access this stubborn fat, you have to use nutritional and training techniques that are targeted for the structure you want to go after.
For example, if you've got love handles that won't go away, your problem could be insulin management. To access this fat, you need to keep blood sugar levels stable by either eating low-glycemic or low-carb, which moderates insulin secretion.
Boom - that's your yellow bird that just took out the concrete block so you can get at the pigs on other side.
Now you're in a stable blood sugar state and you use Lactic Acid-based training to bring the pH in your blood down. This is seen as an emergency situation in your body and it secretes Growth Hormone in response. This hormone is an extremely potent fat-burner, and also helps preserve muscle tissue AND targets belly fat.
Boom - you just dropped a triple bird on top of those pigs and followed it up with an egg bird to take out the rocks in front of the other pigs.
We also want to focus on building muscle mass, to keep your metabolism up so you can burn more fat while at rest, which is CRITICAL to achieving low bodyfat levels. That's your density training (volume-based). Then we focus on pure strength with specific circuit training.
Boom - you just dropped an explosive black bird on the pigs, which knocked out a bunch of them all at once.
As you get more advanced in your training and your bodyfat gets lower, you NEED these special birds to keep making progress.
If all you're doing is standard fat-loss training and eating, you'll be able to achieve only a certain level of results and you will eventually hit a plateau. As you progress and start running into obstacles and plateaus (you get stuck on a level), you need more specific, more targeted strategies to achieve your goals.
Otherwise, you're just flinging a small red bird into a concrete block over and over. And nobody wants to do that...
I hope I achieved my goal of simultaneously enlightening you about stubborn bodyfat and confusing the heck out of you with a strange video game analogy.
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