Losing Body fat while maintaining muscle is a very complex subject, so hope this helps. It’s important to understand that your body type may determine how fast you burn fat.

A typical Ectomorph (slim body, hard to gain muscle, hard to add weight) should eat slightly more protein to avoid muscle breakdown, but reduce and eventually remove carbohydrates like rice, bread and pasta (complex carbs), making meals consist mainly of vegetables, fruit and salad (simple carbs). Ectomorph can include more complex carbs in their diet due to their fast metabolisms. It’s more important to reduce these complex carbs slowly in this case to help maintain muscle mass.

Endomorphs (large frame, gain fat and muscle easily) are the opposite end of the scale. These people unfortunately need to be very wary of complex carbs and must look at cutting them down to near enough zero. A Meal Replacement shake (e.g. Herbalife Formula 1, mixed with Formula 2 for increased protein) is ideal for breakfast, accompanied with a banana. Just ensure the carbs provided in these shakes are not just sugars, this will put fat on!

A Mesomorph (naturally athletic and muscular, wide shoulders, slim waste, gain muscle easily, low fat) has it easy really, as you can probably see in the brackets. Being naturally athletic they store little fat; though more than Ectomorphs, and gain muscle / strength very easily. To get increase muscle definition in this situation a steady reduction of complex carbs and high protein level sustained throughout is all that is needed.

NOTE: Continue weight training at a high intensity, ensuring that the main compound exercises like Squats, Dead lifts, Bench press and Sergeant Press are used.  This will allow full fat burn to be achieved. If you aren’t training at a exhausting pace................. START! Try Cross Training or Supersets to get effective, fast results. Check out our workouts on Fit2Talk and Youtube.

For the best results you must monitor how many calories go into the body on a daily basis. This can be done by counting the calories you are currently consuming on a regular day. Then you must steadily reduce; as already stated complex carbs. Remember to increase simple carbs and protein.

A prime example of cutting up is if you were eating 2500 calories at the present time and you cut it down to 2000. This would equate to one pound (3500 calories) of body fat lost per week. However, note that you should not reduce your calories any more than this for a fast result, as this will place your body into starvation mode (storing fat) and causing reduced muscle mass. In 14 weeks you will have lost a stone of body fat, of course a detailed training plan must also be in place and the diet strict.

Look at some of our low fat recipes and use the system above and the Ripped Diet Plan to help create your own weight loss, muscle build diet.