Getting Rid Of Fat – Page 4 – newstasis :: a blog about improving wellness

Thinking About Fish Oil

People should eat more fish because fish is an excellent source of protein and fish oil.

The benefits of taking fish oil are huge – check out Fish Oil And Fat Loss for a fairly detailed list of the positive effects. I personally have noticed a decrease in the joint pain since I started taking them about 8 months ago. My skin has improved; I have less acne and fewer ingrown hairs. My body feels better than it did before I started taking them. I am stronger than I have ever been and I have been able to add a fair amount of lean mass while maintaining a fairly low body fat percentage. I take between 3-8 grams of fish oil per day and would recommend this to others, particularly people who are over weight or active.

I take 1 gram capsules which I leave in the freezer to eliminate the fishy after-taste. I try to take them with other food so the body won’t use the fat for energy – I’m not sure if this makes any difference but it seems logical that the body will use the sugar first. My morning breakfast is oatmeal, protein powder, water with some fish oil capsules and a few multi vitamins.

Of all the supplements I take, fish oil is one that I can say does something for me. If I stop taking them for a few days, my shoulder pain returns. The ones I take are made from wild Pacific salmon. They cost less than a $0.50 / day and for the benefit they offer, they are a bargain. If you are not taking them already, consider buying a bottle and taking them for a few months to see it they help to improve your health and well being.

You Model What Becomes Normal

This page from kidshealth.org goes over some recent numbers about childhood obesity and the finding that 1 in 3 children is now considered overweight or obese. That’s a lot of young people who are suffering now and will be suffering for most of their lives. Carrying extra body fat makes all activity in life more difficult and there is an innate tendency for people to judge obese people more harshly as a result of their weight. I think some harsh judgement is fitting for someone who has control over the food they buy and eat, it is unfortunate for the younger obese person because up until a certain age, they have almost no control over what they eat.

I have little doubt that there are psychological reasons for many eating behaviours but when it applies to the escalating obesity rate with young people, I believe the obesity preceeds any psychological problems. If the young person’s brain is void of issues then the cause of the obesity is environmental in the form of poor eating behaviors taught by their parents or caregivers. Simply put, fat people breed lean people and then proceed to make them fat.

Fattening up a child is one of the worst things a parent can do because it harms their child but there is something even more insidious about it. Fattening up their children serves to make the obese parent feel more normal because it creates another fat person. Think about it this way, if 2 fat parents have 2 lean children, the ratio of fat to lean people in the family is 1:1. But if 2 fat parents have 1 lean child and 1 fat child, the ration of fat to lean is 3:1. If 75% of the people are obese, obesity can be regarded as the norm. If both children are fat then they have a 100% obesity rate making obesity completely acceptable. Obese parents, by making their children fat, create a life preserving fiction that being fat is normal and nothing to be concerned with or treated.

Fat parents rarely teach their children how they should be eating, what foods to buy and how to prepare these foods to maintain a lean body. They also never model lean as a way to live life. Their food choices are taught to their children, along with the obese lifestyle, as things that are normal. Lacking evidence that says anything different, the children learn that these things are how it is. They do not see a choice until much later in life when the habits are formed and their is a solid foundation of adipose tissue ready to soak-up the extra calories and store fat. By the time they realize that they do have a choice the odds are stacked against them that they will ever be a healthy weight because their body’s have become so good at storing fat.

For the obese parent it is not too late to stop abusing your child but you need to start now. You need to make a big effort to eliminate the behaviors that made you fat in the first place and begin to model the behaviors that will help to maintain leanness. You need to do this even if you will never enjoy a long lean life; just because you were victim to the consequences of poor eating behaviors doesn’t mean that your children need to be. There is more than enough information available that will help you make the right choices that to continue to make the wrong ones amounts to deliberate ignorance. The clock is ticking because your children are watching you and making your behavior the reality. How you act now is how they will act in the very near future. Give them a solid foundation to make their life easier than yours has been.

Getting Your McMotivation

Over 6 months a man named Chris Coleson lost 80 pounds eating food from McDonald’s. It’s great when someone is that successful in changing their body composition. I think the story is LESS remarkable when the McDonald’s thing is added in but I have little doubt that we would have heard anything about Chris Coleson’s weight loss had it not been for him eating only McDonald’s because Chris wouldn’t have lost the weight.

The McDiet itself amounts to an almost starvation diet – Chris was eating about 1400 calories per day down from close to 5000 per day. He was weighing in around 275 lbs and would have needed around 2400 calories per day to maintain his weight. A 1000 calorie per day deficit is huge and isn’t anything that I could recommend that someone do for very long. It would have been unpleasant and very difficult to do.

It is pretty unlikely that you have ever eaten 5000 calories in a day more than a few times in your life. It’s pretty tough to do. When I am bulking, I’ll increase my food intake to around 2500-3000 calories per day and I’m basically force feeding myself. I have no concept of what it would be like to double my food intake and make it a daily habit to eat that much. But I can guarantee this: IF I was able to make it a habit to eat 5000 calories per day it would be one tough habit to break and I doubt that I would have the will-power to reduce my food intake by 75%. Chris did exactly this.

“I would literally sit at the refrigerator and just eat out of the refrigerator,” he said. “I would attack the kids’ school lunches that [my wife] had prepared the night before.”

I think it would be safe to say that Chris had some compulsive eating behaviours before he made the decision to drop the weight. Another factor that makes his accomplishment so interesting. For some reason, his belief that he would lose weight eating only McDonald’s was enough for him to stop his compulsive eating and enter into an almost starvation diet for 6 months. Why would this thought be the catalyst for Chris’ success?

Chris knew all along that his behaviour was what was making him obese but like many people who have consumption disorders he had likely given up on his ability to do anything about it. He also knew that his obesity was shortening his life given the family history of heart disease but again, he had likely given up hope of doing anything about it. He had lost control and needed something external to help him find the motivation to make things right. Setting the goal of losing weight by eating only McDonald’s was the external factor he needed.

I think that is the lesson that we should take out of this: you may need to set an unreasonable goal in order for you to achieve the really tough things in life. Good for you Chris!

5 Things To Think About by Alwyn Cosgrove

Cosgrove’s Five Ah-Ha! Moments: The Education of a Misguided Trainer by Alwyn Cosgrove is a T-nation article outlining 5 important moments of enlightenment. The ones dealing with body composition are the ones that I found the most interesting:

Ah-ha! #2: For fat loss, the post-workout period is where the most important “something” happens.
…When comparing total calories burned from exercise, the researchers found the endurance training burned 28,661 calories, while the interval training group burned 13,614 calories. In other words, the interval-training group burned less than half the calories of the endurance-training group. However, when the researchers adjusted the results to correct for the difference in energy cost, the interval-training group showed a 900% greater loss in subcutaneous fat than the endurance group. In other words, calorie for calorie, interval training was nine times more effective than steady state exercise.

What we can conclude from the study is that interval training is much better at eliminating fat than steady state cardio REGARDLESS of the number of calories burned during the training session.

Why would this be?

I’ll speculate a few reasons:

1) The cost of recovery is greater for interval training than it is for steady state training in terms of absolute calories and duration.

2) The body is less efficient at adapting to interval based training so the cost of recover never really decreases. The body adapts very quickly to steady state training so after the first couple of workouts, the recover cost is already a lot lower. There is a diminishing marginal cost associate with steady state that doesn’t appear to be there with interval training.

3) Interval training relies on a variety of energy systems to get the work done and there is a great recovery cost when replenishing stores to multiple energy systems as opposed to just one.

Ah-ha! #5: Hypertrophy is a systemic response and effect, not a localized one.
All the talk about bodypart training versus full body routines, isolation exercise versus compound exercise, etc. is based upon a fundamentally flawed concept: that hypertrophy is somehow completely regional-specific.
The researchers compared the effects of a weight training program on 5RM strength and arm circumference and divided the subjects into two groups. Group 1 performed four compound upper body exercises, while Group 2 used the same program but included biceps curls and triceps extensions.
The results showed that both groups significantly increased strength and arm size
However, the addition of direct arm training to group two produced no additional effect on strength or arm circumference after 10 weeks of training.
The additional localized training did not result in anything that the bigger compound exercises didn’t provide.

This one blew my mind because I finially had scientific confirmation of something I’ve been saying to people for a long time. People often ask me how do they get their arms to grow or how do they bench press more. My answer is always to say “squat more” or “start to deadlift.” Those who follow the advice grow and get stronger upper bodies while those who take the time to point out the flawed logic remain exactly the same.

Two important things here: don’t ask for advice if you don’t want to follow it and more importantly, the body is only going to get as big and as strong as it needs to. If it isn’t as big or as strong as you would like it to be, do things that increase the demand for size and strength even if it isn’t in the areas that you want to improve and you will grow.

I think this happens for a few reasons:

1) The hormones that make the body grow impact the entire body and not just the area that is trained.

2) The body will conserve energy at every opportunity. If it isn’t being taxed in a particular way, it is going to do only what it needs to do.

3) The body strives for balance because muscle imbalances lead to injury and an increase in effort (wasted energy).

It’s a great article that may change the way you view things.

What I Learned In 2007 – Eric Cressey vs. Patrick McKinney

Inspired by T-nation author Eric Cressey’s What I Learned In 2007, I decided to put together my own list of things that I learned in 2007 (note – Eric’s 2006 article was my first ever post so be sure to read this years version).

1) Gifted athletes do not necessarily look remarkable but there is something weird about the way they look when they train. A few weeks ago we did the athlete testing for SST’s 12 week football academy. There were a variety of assessment tests but the one that stood out to me was the penta jump. This is basically a standing long jump with 5 jumps instead of just one, all linked together in a fluid unstopping order. It is a skill, but talent does impact ones performance.

Many of the athletes performed unremarkable, which is what we expect to see at the start of the camp because many of them are untrained and are coming off of a month or two layoff from exercising. But one of the athletes, a 14 year old, look weird doing it. He seemed to float away from me when he jumped – each jump took him so much further down the turf than any of the other athletes. His distance way 6-8 feet longer than any one else in his age group. I wasn’t very surprised to see his sub 5 second result in the 40. He’s 14 years old and pretty small. I’m looking forward to seeing how he’ll continue to improve as he grows pounds of muscle and gains more complete neural control over his muscle firing patterns.

2) Fish oil supplements eliminate most of the shoulder pain I experience when I’m lifting heavy. I’m both shocked and happy to have found this to be the case. There is practically no fire in my shoulders in the days following my chest / back workouts. There used to be pain that prevented me from sleeping and stopped me from training heavy in the summer. This is all but gone now, thanks to 6-10 grams of fish oil per day.

3) Great athletes embrace coaching, lifters tend to ignore it. How someone responds to feedback plays the biggest role in the quality of feedback that they get. The gifted 14 year old listens to all the advice and coaching that he is given and he continues to improve, and people continue to coach him. This isn’t surprising because people do not like to waste their time. IF someone isn’t going to follow the advice that is given to them, people learn very quickly to stop giving it to them. Personally I begin to disengage from a person after the first time they role their eyes and DON’T change their movement pattern – they can role their eyes, call me a prick but so long as they change their movement pattern I’ll keep coaching them.

When it comes to lifters most of them do not want to lift correctly. They lift the weight and not the movement. I look away a lot when I’m at the commercial gym because I don’t want to see someone hurt themselves and feel responsible from helping them. I’ll offer advice to a young lifter on the off-hand chance that they want to become better, but more often than not they don’t want to hear it. This is too bad for them and good news for Rachel because she’s going to be an athletic therapist and will have a lot of people to work on.

4) Energetic coaching is more important than knowledgeable coaching when it comes to working with young or inexperienced athletes. Young people don’t not have the movement inventory or body awareness that older people have because they have spend less time in their bodies interacting with the earth. Most athletic movements are going to be new to them and they are not likely to have the motor control to move their bodies in the way that is required in order to be performed the movement correctly. For this reason, advanced coaches are not going to be able to use their knowledge to facilitate improvements within this population. More importantly, given that it is frustrating to be bad at something, particularly when a coach or another athlete does it with ease, inexperienced athletes may find quitting an easier choice if they do not find any enjoyment in an activity. An energetic coach can help bridge the gap between a lack of experience and learning a new skill and will often help the young person find joy in an otherwise unrewarding experience.

5) Rotator cuff muscles are primarily fast twitch fibers and should be trained in the 7-10 rep range with fast effort and slower negative tempos. This one could have read – people should train their rotator cuff muscles. I started doing internal and external rotation exercises just after I started working at SST after the cause of my horrific posture was pointed out. While I am still imbalanced in this area, I’m catching up and standing taller than I ever have.

6) Steady state cardio promotes fat storage while high intensity interval training creates more EPOC that will result in greater fat loss over the long haul. I credit RPM with starting my brain thinking about this one. The choreography is interval based with exertion levels growing from comfortable to breathless. One of the things I found once I stopped trying to keep my heart rate at 150 was that I was more tired at the end of the workouts and couldn’t do so much riding. I also noticed that there is only have a finite length of time that I can get my heart rate above 160 and once this time is up I get too fatigued trying to bring it up there again.

As this relates to fat loss: you need to workout very intensely to promote fat loss, but you need to workout at various levels of intensity to get the most fat loss because it requires the most amount of energy to adapt to many different level of effort. Also, if you workout at just one intensity, your body will quickly adapt to make it more and more efficient to work at that level the next time. This means if you are working out at a level that requires fat as fuel, the body will adapt to store more fat to fuel the effort next time. If you keep it at a steady state, your body will become so efficient at working at this level that it will stop losing fat. Given that your activity level will not change, it is unlikely that you will alter your diet to account for this improved efficiency and will begin to eat a calorie surplus thus promoting fat storage.

7) Spell check and proof read your resume a number of times before you submit it. We initially passed on a trainer candidate because of the typos on his resume. I looked over his resume a week later and thought that maybe there was a good reason why the mistakes were there. When we chatted it was obvious that there wasn’t a good reason but that he was a good candidate. He did fantastic in his interviews and we hired him. He is a gifted trainer with a wonderful demeanor that allows him to connect with almost everyone he engages. I’m glad I called him because he is a real asset to the team and a good human being. But I almost didn’t take the chance because of something that is very easy to avoid.

Working out vs. Training

I used to workout and I got pretty good results. I had a nice lean body and was more or less able to eat whatever I wanted. My friends would say that I looked good and I didn’t have any fear taking off my shirt.

Now I train and I get great results. My body is a work in progress. I can’t eat what I like anymore and I don’t listen to people when they comment of how I look. I take my shirt off to change and my girlfriend gets more out of the way I look than I do.

What are the differences between working out and training?

Purpose:
People who workout are trying to improve their appearance or some characteristic of their body. It could be to lose a few pounds, to lower cholesterol or normalize their blood pressure. In most cases there is an end point and once the individual reaches it, they can enter their maintenance phase and don’t need to workout as much.

People who train are primarily trying to improve their performance. They are pursuing something, a number or reps, a weight, a time, but they are after something that is slightly more objective than “looking good”.

Drive:
Most people who workout do so fairly consistently. They do more or less the same thing every week e.g. cycling class on Monday and Wednesday, upper body weights on Tuesday, lower body weights on Thursday and whole body on Saturday. They do more or less the same exercises during these workouts and rarely change things up because they are happy to be improving.

People who train cycle through their exercises and change their programs when things stop working. They are not content with simply improving, they need to be improving as fast as their potential allows them.

Intensity:
People who workout do so primarily with moderate intensity. After their workouts they are glowing and look like they are full of energy. They’ll be able to laugh and joke right after and will probably have a shower before going home.

People who train look close to death after they finish. They will have given everything they have to their training and will likely be gasping for air, soaked with sweat and generally feel worse than they did when they started. They’ll be consuming a protein shake while trying to recoup enough energy to change and go home. Their energy level will be low for a while and they are not going to be joking or laughing.

Passion:
People who workout feel less strongly about what they are doing. More often than not it is about feeling good in the moment and having fun. While working out may be an aspect of their identify, it does not define who they are. They workout based on their schedules. They’ll tell you that they workout and will often try to convince others to do the same. They may even invite others to workout with them.

People who train ARE their training. Their training takes over many areas of their life and is often the focal point of everything they do – training sessions determine when they eat, sleep, work and socialize. They’ll make you wait until after they have finished training and won’t try to convince you to train with them – if you aren’t already doing it you aren’t anyone they would want to train with.

Satisfaction:
People who workout get a lot of satisfaction from working out. Good enough is good enough. They won’t talk about achieving their potential because they feel they already are.

People who train tend to have fleeting moments of satisfaction. They may experience a high or bliss right after competition or achieving one of their goals, but soon thereafter they find themselves raising the bar and starting towards an even higher goal. They will never be happy with their performance and this is why they continue to train.

Never Give Up – CrossFit Video

From the CrossFit website we learn that “CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.”

They have a lot of videos on youtube if you would like to see what it is all about. ‘DL, J RingDip, RopeClimb‘ is one that tells the story. It is a little messy but it is a great example of determination and how the body responds to high levels of lactate.

Throwing-up is a natural response by the body to high levels of lactate and high levels of lactate is the natural response to intense exercise without sufficient oxygen. Lactate inducing workouts are fantastic for fat burning because of the massive amount of EPOC (excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption) they create.

I believe that this type of training is going to become very popular because it is effective at leaning a person out, building relative strength and developing mental toughness. It teaches a person how to ride the line between too much exercise and just enough exercise and this will allow them to get the most out of their time at the gym.

I don’t see many people working out like this at commercial gyms but did get people to the threshold a few times when I was a trainer at one – my boss didn’t like it very much because it was “bad for business.” I don’t know what he was talking about because my clients got results and renewed with me; but it could have had something to do with the fear instilled in the new members who see them holding buckets to their faces.

Time To Fail, Again – Problem with Commercial Gyms

It is January and the busiest month of the year for all commercial gyms. This month alone counts for 15-20% of the years new memberships. The problem is that 5% of the people who sign up will NEVER set foot back in the place except to cancel. In 6 weeks another 25-35% of them will have stopped coming. In three months another 25-30% will have stopped. By this time next year, only about 15-25% will remain.

I appreciate this time of year for a few reasons. There are a lot of new people in my class, so I have a new opportunity to change peoples lives by helping them find that “oh my God” moment when they have pushed harder than they thought they could and realize that they are still in the fight. My classes are full and there are people waiting at the door to get in; this means that those who do make it in are going to work harder and not leave midway through.

But on a more cynical / realistic level, this time of year marks the start of one of the worst periods for 75-85% of the people who join the gym. It represents the moment in time when they made a mistake and actually believed that they had the ability to change their life and become the healthy person they thought they were.

I’ve seen 1000’s of people join and quit the gym. I’ve sold 100’s of people on the dream that they could look like me, the trainers, the regulars and the sexy people on TV, only to have their dream fall apart a few weeks later when they realize that they are not ready to achieve their goals. I used to feel bad about it so I stopped selling at a commercial gym.

When I’m teaching RPM at GoodLife, I try to be encouraging, upbeat, high energy and honest about what the participant are about to go through. I tell them that it is going to hurt, I let them know that it is going to take a few weeks of sustained effort before the class starts to get easier, I mention that I was once brand new at it and that I found it to be one of the toughest gym experiences I had gone through in spite of the fact that I raced mountain bikes and had been active for most of my life. I try not to sell anyone on the “you can do it” dream and instead try to sell them on the “it’s going to suck until the end of class” reality.

I’ve learned that there are 10-15% of the population that are going to burn 80% of the calories. These are the people who are already working out and will remain working out regardless of everything. These people need coaching on form and that is it. They supply the motivation and will find their way to the gym when the roads are closed due to snow, on Christmas day when everyone else is at home, and when they are in their time of need. Working out for these people is similar to prayer for the faithful – it’s what they do when they need to find peace.

How do you become one of the 10-15% if you are not one of them?

The easiest way is to get a personal trainer (PT). Over the years I’ve gone from considering PTs as jocks who count reps to considering most of them to be jocks who hold the unmotivated to their promises. I’m not certain but I have the feeling that most people show up to their appointments because they have public integrity and don’t want to go back on their word to another person; but it could have something to do with the $0 refund for no-show appointments – the notion of losing $60 for not showing up to an hour appointment may serve as more of a motivator than the fear of dying from an obesity related illness.

There is a lot of talk in the business about personal training and how much commercial gyms profit from it – very often the gym pays the trainer only 25-35% of the hourly cost of the session. This means they get 65-75% PLUS the monthly membership cost. But, when you get down to it, most PTs are getting a fair wage based on what they actually know and they also get to be “Personal Trainers”, which carries some prestige in many gyms.

But it is an undeniable observation that those who train with PTs WILL stick with their workouts for a longer period of time. If you are not one of the 10-15% who treat working out like worship, getting a PT will allow you to behave like one of them and it will help you stay diligent with your workouts.

I have nothing to gain directly from encouraging people to train with a PT because I do not work for a commercial gym – SST uses floor coaches to offer guidance to all of the members who are working out. My suggestion that working out with a PT will increase your likelihood of success is based on years of observing the sales cycle in a commercial gym. If you are not already working out there is a 85% chance that you will fail to become one of the ones who work out UNLESS you get professional help. Get an expert and change your life. Otherwise you may just be helping to buy all the new and shinny equipment I love to workout on.

Toxic People And Body Composition

Article by Chris Shugart “It’s Sabotage!” is about toxic people {NOTE – the article is no longer available on t-nation but has been posted on the bodybuilding.com forum}. I love reading this article because it really resonates with me. I used to have a lot of friends who would rip on me for trying to improve myself and I have to admit that their influence was negative and effective. The big issue with toxic people is that you don’t necessarily see their influence until it has had an impact and the greater the impact, the harder it is to undo. If you make a clean break from the toxic influences in your life, you can begin to build more positive support structure but first you need to identify those toxic people so you can banish them forever. (Okay, maybe not forever because many of them don’t even know that they’re behaving like non-friends, but put them out of your life until they make a positive change in how they interact with you and the rest of the world).

I bring up toxic people in reference to body composition because very often there are negative people in your life who keep throwing up reasons why you shouldn’t try to change the way you look and feel. For the most part, their reason have nothing to do with you and are based solely on their own feelings of low self worth. For some reason, many people can only get up by getting others down. They have failed to see that their is almost unlimited success available in the world and instead see the world in binary terms such that any success of another person is an immediate failure in them.

I don’t see the world in these terms. I believe that there is unlimited success available when it comes to fitness and health because these things are measured by ones individual ability and not by comparing performance to another person. For example, there is no reason why most people in the world cannot have a body fat percentage of 15% and be able to run 3 Km. There is no reason for people not to be able to do a pull-up, 10 push-ups, and be able to walk up a flight of stairs without gasping for air. Assuming these things are a measure of fitness and health, my fitness does not improve anytime another person fails to achieve one of these benchmarks.

Translation – I do not get healthier when another person becomes less healthy. I gain nothing when someone else falls deeper towards disease. I actually believe that the world becomes a worse place when someones health and fitness falters. I do not enjoy seeing people fail at the gym, fail to make the right choices when they shop or fail to make the decision to stop smoking, drinking, or being a total layabout.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a supportive family and close friends who don’t try to rip down my passions. When I started to learn how to play guitar, my friends put up with it. When I started to correct my eating habits, my family supported me and stopped offering me dessert. When I decided to take some time off from working, I was supported in my decision because my friends and family believed that I was working towards something.

What does this mean to those who want to change the way they look? Well, simply put, you need to start to clean out the crap from your life. There is an undeniable correlation between your successes and the successes of your 5 closest friends. If your 5 closest friends smoke, there’s a very good chance that you smoke. If they eat crappy food and blame the government for their place in life, there’s a very good chance you eat crappy food and blame the government for everything. If your closest friends are like this, there is an almost 100% chance that you will fail at everything you set out to do because your friends will help to facilitate your failure through negative comments, derailing behaviours and basically making you feel like crap for ever thinking you deserve better.

If you are tired of being overweight and lazy, and all of your friends are overweight and lazy, it’s time to get some new friends, ones who aren’t overweight and lazy. Even if you don’t / can’t get new friends (which is a possibility because healthy people know the potential negative influence that overweight under motivated people possess) you may need to get rid of your old friends and go it alone for a while because your chances of success are much greater if you have no negative influences.

Always keep in mind that true friends want for you what you want for you not what they want for you. They will look to you for inspiration and will try to be inspiring to you. They aren’t going to measure their successes in terms of your failures. Anyone who wants you to fail needs to be taken out of your life forever.

Eating For Fat Loss – A Consensus Is Near?

Anyone who asks me how to lose body fat will hear me say the following things:

Eat 5-7 smaller meals a day, 1 every 2.5 to 3 hours
Eat protein at every meal
Eat vegetable at every meal
Lower high and moderate GI carb intake
Consume your carbs after an intense workout out
Eat breakfast everyday
Start or keep exercising

There are other things that I will say but these are the standard answers to everyone but the very lean or very active people.

In T-nations The 2008 Fat Loss Roundtable, Part I and Part II, some other suggestions are given:

Dr. Mohr: Here are four such rules:

Eat a fruit and/or at least one vegetable with every single meal.
Plan ahead. Don’t go to work without any food at all, then wonder why you opted for fast food at noon, hit the vending machine at 3 PM, and are famished on the way home so you decided to order a pizza to pick up for dinner.
Define your goals and write them daily. If you don’t know what you’re working toward, you’re going to continue to struggle.
Move more! I’m all about complexes, interval training, large body movements like deadlifts, etc. but what about the other 160-plus hours during the week when you’re not at the gym? Walk more. Get on a bike and use that as your transportation. Use the stairs instead of the elevator.

And:

Mike Roussell: Yes, what I call the 6 Pillars of Naked Nutrition:

Eat five to six times a day.
Limit your consumption of sugars and processed foods.
Eat fruits and vegetables throughout the day.
Drink more water and cut out calorie-containing beverages (beer, soda, etc.).
Focus on consuming lean proteins throughout the day.
Save starch containing foods until after a workout or for breakfast.

I’ll admit that the lists are not exactly the same, so saying that these experts agree completely would be inaccurate. BUT, if you look closely and consider the practical consequence to these suggestions, the behavioural outcome IS the same.

When you read the t-nation articles it will be obvious that these guys draw their conclusions from research and experience, the same places I get mine from. It will also be obvious that they hold out little hope that an individual will change their behaviour until they take a hard look at the way they think about the world, themselves and their relationship with food. In fact, the claim is made that binge eating is the number one eating disorder in America.

If you have some body fat to get rid of and what you are reading here does not come as a surprize, you need to ask yourself WHY you are not doing what you know you need to do. There is too much evidence now about the right way to achieve your goals that you can no longer blame your lack of success on a lack of knowledge.