Personal Trainer For A Month

Thank you polostar! I will look those up and follow your advice. Do I need to do the diet? I mean my body is in great shape but not toned. Is the diet necessary or just training could work?

Ceviche, yes I was aiming to settle but then I heard it's not as fabulous to live there as it is to always know ur leaving and then come back when u miss it.. So I decided to give myself a month to test the waters. I was thinking to use airbnb to book a studio. I think I'm pas hostels at this stage :)

Precisely because you're not a newbie or out of shape, and because you're in great shape, diet is more important I'd say than even exercise in attaining the toned look you want. For obese or out of shape people all they need to do is eat less and do some basic exercise and if they stick to it they will see significant results quite fast. By contrast a fit man trying to achieve a six-pack or 8-pack or a fit woman trying to achieve a toned look has it much harder.

I'd say between the two, intermittent fasting is the more important. You should look up what it means, especially "leangains" website, but basically for me it just means skipping breakfast. This isn't a problem for me as I'm no longer hungry in the morning and a strong tea or coffee will suppress your appetite until lunch. Pretty much everyone used to do a version of IF before, e.g., not eating for 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. For better results extend the fasting window to 16 hours and eat within 8 hours. For me this means I may have dinner at 9 or 10 at night and then not eat until 1 pm or 2 pm the following day. It's not that hard. For maximum fat loss combine this with doing LISS (even just walking for 1 hour) right before you have breakfast/lunch at 1 pm in my case. If you're terribly hungry in the morning a teaspoon of coconut or olive oil, or butter, should be OK and will not totally take you out of the fasted state.

Following a paleo/pastoral diet is fun in my opinion. I follow a variation of this 12 point diet http://cpconstantlyvaried.com/2011/05/04/201105archevores-12-step-program-dr-kurt-html/ but I'm not very strict. As you can see you can eat a lot of things, and in Argentina this diet is great imo because you have great meat, decent fruit and vegetables, and not much else (if you've lived here before you know restaurant fare is usually bad, Italian food sucks here; unfortunately the dairy is also not good, and I do like eat a bit of dairy). The advantage of this diet combined with intermittent fasting is that you have hunger pangs much less often once you cut most refined carbs and sugars. Furthermore given your aims consider this aticle,

http://roguehealthandfitness.com/are-carbohydrates-needed-to-build-muscle/

It is intended for bodybuilders but note what it says about a low-carb diet:

"After 30 days on a ketogenic diet, i.e one with a very low carbohydrate content, probably under 50 grams a day, the athletes’ strength and power had not diminished. However, even these elite athletes, who one would presume were already in terrific shape, lost about 2 kg of fat, with a “non-significant” increase in muscle. This shows that if anything, at least for gymnasts, who require a high level of strength, the ketogenic diet was better than their regular diets."

and

"Results: the ketogenic diet group gained 4.3 kg lean mass (muscle) compared to only 2.2 kg for the traditional diet group; the ketogenic group lost 2.2 kg of fat, compared to 1.5 kg in the traditional group."

Ultimately though you will have to rely on your own experience. Different people have different genetics and bodies respond differently to foods. For example North American natives like Iroquois, etc., will absolutely blow up on a grain and carb diet because before European arrival this was almost entirely absent from their food (it's also the reason they are more susceptible to alcohol) so they are not adapted to it. North Europeans (who actually also share some interesting genetic links with Native Americans, discovered recently) also only began eating grains about 1000 years ago, so although they are not as vulnerable as Native Americans to carbs and alcohol, they are much more so than peoples who have farmed for thousands of years, like East Asians and peoples of the Levant. Given that you are Lebanese maybe you will tolerate some grains better in your diet. But you have to find out these things on your own; I would recommend the diet I pointed out, it is very comfortable and easy to eat great food that way. I never bother to count calories.

If you drink, you should avoid beer and stick to wine and certain spirits (whiskey is good).

Resistance training and HIIT will be necessary for the toned look you are going for...you don't want to be skinnyfat. Don't worry it is not easy to gain muscle and you won't look like a bodybuilder, but if you will only do mid-range cardio you will find it difficult to lose last few vanity pounds and also have a healthy toned look:

http://tnation.t-nation.com/free_online_forum/diet_blog_hammer_velocity_shugart/running_makes_you_fat
 
I haven't found any diet to be any different from another. It all seems to be a matter of just eating less. Whether it is paleo, keto, mcdonalds, or asado & beer I get fatter when exceeding calories and lose fat when there is a deficit. Muscle always stays the same with adequate protein.
 
The Ketogenic diet has shown to be effective in children with epilepsy.

Here's an interesting article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. I wouldn't trust weight lifting blogs nor any unreliable source unless it comes from a doctor or medical journal. Today it's the Keto diet, tomorrow the Atkins diet, and so on and so forth.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/85/1/238.full
 
The Ketogenic diet has shown to be effective in children with epilepsy.

Here's an interesting article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. I wouldn't trust weight lifting blogs nor any unreliable source unless it comes from a doctor or medical journal. Today it's the Keto diet, tomorrow the Atkins diet, and so on and so forth.

http://ajcn.nutritio...t/85/1/238.full

I heard about the epilepsy thing too. Ketogenic also possibly reverses early Alzheimer's. Atkins was never recommended by bodybuilders as far as I know (and btw bodybuilders generally don't do paleo).

One of the links in my post includes studies from a medical journal I think.
 
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