When it comes to losing weight men have a slight advantage over women. Women have been saddled with a hormone that can actually inhibit fat loss. It’s called estrogen. Maybe you’ve heard of it. So for men, unless they’re loaded with estrogen, the real secret to losing weight is simply eating less calories than they use.  But it’s not really that simple.

Simply eating less everyday may cause you to lose weight but in order to know that you’re eating less you either need to go on a strict regimented planned out diet or count calories in everything you eat. Who wants to do that? So often times men will try something else that actually won’t work for very long: they’ll stop eating. They’ll skip meals during the day and only eat at night in what they think is going to cause them to drop a few pounds.

This will work for a little while but eventually their body goes into what’s called starvation mode. The human body is an incredible piece of equipment. If you’re trying to lose weight and you do so by eating fewer calories there will come a point where your body notices the reduced food intake and goes into panic mode. When that happens, your body will do two things, slow down your metabolism and start to store even more fat so that it’s there for times of extremely low food intake.

Obviously this is going to work against you. The traditional way to fight this problem is to eat 6 small meals a day thus keeping your metabolism up and your body out of starvation mode. I find that this works better for women than men, since men seem to be able to go for hours without eating and not realize it. Those six meals may turn into only four one day then three the next, and then, oh yeah, six the next day as we get back on track. Compounding that is the fact that the six meals day plan usually means six meals full of boring diet food.

Men are horrible at staying on diets.

It’s a fact. We hate diet food, we like our beer and potato chips and our red meat. And calorie cutting gets boring, real fast. Is there a way for men to lose weight without giving up the foods they love or putting themselves on a restrictive diet? Yes there is. After trying all the other strict methods of losing weight, and they all did work; I finally settled on intermittent fasting as the end all, beat all, ideal way for weight loss for men.

The concept is simple. If you eat what you normally eat most days of the week and then fast for brief periods you end up eating less calories, which causes you to lose weight, but your body never goes into starvation mode. Your metabolism and energy levels stay high so that when you’ve lost the weight you need to, you can resume your normal life without the post diet weight gain associated with traditional diet methods.

Isn’t fasting hard?

Actually it’s quite easy; especially for men, who don’t seem to get as irritable as women when they go long periods without eating. Most men find it actually easy to go twenty four hours without eating, since they usually have plenty to do to keep them occupied. Also, knowing that you’re going to resume eating after the fasting period with the foods you normally eat means that you never really feel that you’re on a diet.

Lot’s of weight loss programs will claim you can keep eating the foods you love but my experience is that they mean in tiny portions only. Intermittent fasting works even if you still insist on eating a half gallon of ice cream during the game. I truly believe that when done correctly it’s the most effective weight loss for men plan available.

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