Every woman should train for strength and improved performance no matter what her primary goal may be. Yep. Even if you just want to look great naked, you should still train with the goal of getting stronger and improving your performance. Brace yourself for four indisputable reasons why you should focus solely on getting stronger and why doing so will produce the best body transforming results, plus a couple of additional awesome perks.

If you’re a mom, how would you like to get back into your pre-baby jeans, burn the fat off for good, and achieve a lean, toned, and feminine physique? It sounds great, right? But, you’re A MOM. Maybe you’re a new mom, or a mom with a toddler, or even two (or more!) children around…  you’re incredibly busy, so how do you find the time?

Creatine is so well researched, with so much real-world feedback supporting its use, it has often been called “the supplement that actually works.” As most of our readers realize (especially after reading our exposes, like the one on fat burner scams), it’s no exaggeration to say that 95% or more of the supplements in the muscle-building, fat loss and sports nutrition market do not work as advertised, or may even be harmful. So when something comes along that actually does work and is proven safe, it’s worth taking a closer look.

Enough is enough. Everywhere we go, we are being inundated with ads promising us that taking a few pills a day will burn fat. Turn on the television and you hear doctors recommending the latest and greatest fat burner (here’s a little secret: most doctors take only one class in nutrition during their education, and thus know very little about nutrition and metabolism). If you want to waste your money on fat burners, go ahead and stop reading. If you want to learn the truth, keep reading. We’re going to take an evidence-based approach, and see what the actual scientific research says about these popular fat burners.

Bogus HCG drops are still on store shelves – even after the recent FTC and FDA warnings. In today’s post, you’ll understand why these products are the biggest scam in the weight loss industry. Real HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadatropin) is also still being promoted for weight loss – by medical doctors no less. It too is a scam – an even more expensive one. A recent issue of the International Journal of Obesity explained that not only does the HCG plan have no weight loss effects outside the 500-calorie per day  starvation diet it comes with, it also has some serious safety concerns. The authors urged professionals in the health community to “speak out strongly against HCG use.” Gladly, I say…

How they lost 100 lbs or more was the subject of a recent Burn the Fat newsletter. Email flooded in after that, from readers who were inspired by hearing about these huge body fat losses and before/after transformations.  I was inspired too. But sometimes I think we focus too much on the almighty scale and body fat percentage and forget about something even more important…

Physique athletes (bodybuilding, fitness, fitness model, figure and bikini competitors) eat and train differently. In fact, a lot of what they do to develop the leanest, most muscular, most aesthetically pleasing bodies in the world is the exact opposite of how most people do it.  For more than 20 years (more than 10 years online), I’ve been teaching men and women the physique athlete (bodybuilder’s) method to fat loss. I often sum it up as “eat more, burn more.”  The “burn more” part includes cardio, and in today’s post, I take a reader question that clears up the misconceptions about the role of cardio, what this philosophy means and how it’s possible that you can eat more and get leaner and more muscular doing it…

Less than two decades ago, coconut oil was pegged by media activists as one of the worst foods you could eat. In a surprising reversal, today coconut oil is promoted as a health food and even a fat loss “miracle.”  On the internet, coconut oil has developed a cult following in alternative – natural health communities and it has started to get attention from the mainstream. Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle readers are asking me about it and even public health organizations are taking another look and reconsidering positions on coconut oil and saturated fat. However, there are still major misconceptions and overblown claims being made about this tropical oil, so if you want to avoid wasting money, or making a big greasy nutrition mistake that could actually make you fatter, then read on…

Vancouver personal trainer Mike Howard joins the Burn the Fat guest blogger roster this month with 50 amazing fat loss and fitness tips to help you have an amazing year. Like a lot of professional trainers, Mike is passionate about his craft, so he’s always thinking about exercise and nutrition. He’s also keenly aware of how valuable our time is. So, as he was sitting in the airport waiting for a delayed flight to arrive, he decided to use the time productively, he opened up his laptop and just started writing his first post for Burn the Fat Blog. He brainstormed his best fat loss and fitness tips, and for a list that he told me was “random,” this is some amazingly insightful advice. If you apply just a handful of these tips, there’s no doubt, you’ll get better and faster results with much less stress.

Is “starvation mode” the cause of frustrating fat loss plateaus? Is this what makes it so easy to gain back all the fat you lost (and sometimes more?)  Is this the same as metabolic damage? When I first got into bodybuilding and fitness many years ago, almost all the fat loss experts said, “Yes! Starvation mode is real and it’s something to watch out for!” But if you do a Google search for “starvation mode” today, I bet you’ll find that 9 out of 10 “authority” articles will say starvation mode is a myth. New research continues to confirm that what many people call starvation mode was real all along. The evidence is convincing, there has simply been a huge misunderstanding about what starvation mode really is. Combined with what’s going on in both the mainstream weight loss world and in the physique competition world today, that makes revisiting this subject, in detail, more important than ever…