With only a few weeks left until Spring, thoughts are turning away from heavy eating and bulking cycles to cleaner eating and training to show off those muscles for the Summer. This means adding in thermogenic (fat burning) supplements to your current stack. Obviously these are going to help you burn fat, but many of them have added benefits that most people never consider.
Fish oil, for example, will help you burn fat…but did you know it will also help you build muscle? Researchers gave 22 subjects 4 capsules each containing 1 g fish oil (600 mg EPA and 200 mg DHA), daily, for six weeks (another group got a placebo). As you can see from the chart below, the fish oil group lost about a pound of fat, but they also gained about the same amount of lean mass:
So fish oil is one of those fat-loss products that won’t just help you lose fat, but also helps build lean mass at the same time. And another study performed at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, showed that fish oil could sharpen mental focus. But perhaps even more interesting to
bodybuilders is that fish oil has also been shown to be anti-estrogenic and can even elevate levels of IGF-1, a highly anabolic hormone. Dietary fatty acids , specifically those found in fish oil, have also been shown to be major biologic regulators and have properties that improve overall health. And Krill oil, has been shown to be at least equal, though perhaps better, than fish oil, in all areas that have been scientifically studies thus far.
And how about caffeine? Caffeine can help you burn fat by preferentially “telling” your body to use body fat for fuel instead of protein and carbohydrates – but it can also help improve focus, aid muscular contractions (thereby boosting strength levels, and even boost athletic performance. That’s why we have included it in every fat burner we make!
But what about creatine? We all know that it makes you bigger and stronger, but most people forget that it’s a wonderful fat loss agent. And not only does it help you lose fat, it can give a significant boost to your working memory and general intelligence. Yeah, believe it or not, creatine can turn dumb-jocks into smart-jocks. And it also helps aid general health by improving cardiovascular indexes and heart function.
We can’t forget testosterone either – it’s been shown in numerous studies to not only build muscle, but also to burn fat and although you can’t purchase testosterone legally without a prescription, there are plenty of great testosterone boosters on the market. But did you know that adequate testosterone levels can help everything from maintaining normal glucose (blood sugar) levels, to optimal thyroid levels, to a healthy heart? And it’s been shown in some studies to help improve cognitive function as well.
But perhaps just as astonishing is Whey Protein – which we know builds muscle and burns fat like no other protein we’ve ever had in the bodybuilding market. In one study, performed on rodents, it protected them against versus tumors induced by the powerful carcinogen, dimethylhydrazine. And in vivo, research suggests it to be a potent weapon against breast cancer. Some cancer patients have even seen reduced tumor size in a published study. Whey protein consumption has been linked to improved cholesterol levels, and furthermore to be a potent inhibitor of oxidized LDL cholesterol. And would you believe that whey can improve bone health too? Well it can – it has been shown to boost total protein synthesis and DNA content of bone cells. At the same time, it also has been proven to be an immunostimulator – it boosts your immune system. Unbelievable huh? Because it also helps you burn fat, just like the rest of the compounds here!
So although many people think of losing weight as being inherently “unhealthy” – the truth is that many of the best fat burners are also very healthy as well.
In the early 1900s, normal weight patientswho suffered damage in a brain region called the hypothalamus tended to later became obese or gaunt after injury, leading researchers to suspect that the brain plays a role in both weight gain and loss. More recently, researchers at the University of Turku and Aalto University have potentially discovered new evidence for the role of the brain in obesity by measuring the functioning brain circuits involved in with multiple brain imaging methods. What they found was that brain glucose metabolism was significantly higher in the brain’s striatal regions for obese people which are involved in feel-good sensation found in the mental processing of rewards. As you might suspect, an obese individual’s reward system responded highly to food pictures, while responses in the frontal cortical regions involved in cognitive control were less vigerous.
