There's only one-way to reduce body fat: you must create a calorie deficit. But oversimplifying the way we think about calorie-counting diets or calorie-consuming exercise isn't the way to accomplish that. Instead, by far the most effective approach is emphasising optimal nutrition in combination with improved fitness to build metabolism and encourage the body to burn more calories even while at rest.

When it comes to weight loss, caloric intake does matter. Put too much of anything in your body and it will halt your weight-loss efforts, but calorie cutting alone is not a particularly effective or sustainable approach.

First, focusing excessively on caloric intake can discourage you from eating enough of the right things: healthy fats, proteins, vegetables and legumes. Fail to provide enough calories and nutrition to support your body's basic needs, and you can actually lower your metabolism, encouraging your body to put on even more weight over time.

If you want to lose weight and keep it off, then you have to emphasise good nutrition first, making sure that the quality of the calories you eat is high and that you are eating enough of the right things to boost your body's energy, vitality and metabolism.

Second, you need to focus equally on the calorie-burning side of the equation, boosting your metabolic rate and building muscle through a well-designed exercise or activity programme. I call this approach "24 E-max" which is simply our shorthand for "maximising 24-hour energy expenditure". The advantage of e-max is that you don't just lose weight, you get stronger, fitter, and you improve your muscle-to-fat ratio in the bargain.

The 4 Factors of 24 E-Max

I'm going to explain how to increase your total calorie expenditure by focusing primarily on two types of formal exercise: weight training and cardio. That, plus a few other neat tricks, will get you burning more calories around the clock. But first, let's look at the bigger picture by reviewing the four major e-max factors: expenditure, efficiency, enjoyability and expandability.

1. The Expenditure Factor

The simple, proven fact of body-fat reduction is that if all else remains equal and you burn more calories, you'll lose more body fat. This makes total daily energy expenditure the most critical of the four factors.

There's been a great deal of hype in recent years on what type of stored fuel your body burns ? fat or carbohydrate ? during various types of activity. In my view, there's not much point in worrying about the type of fuel burned, how it's burned or when you burn it because, in practical terms, it just doesn't have much effect on your end results. What matters is overall energy expenditure.

While low-intensity exercise burns more fat during the workout, it doesn't burn as many total calories. When you exercise at a higher intensity, you burn more carbohydrates than fat for fuel during the workout, but you burn far more calories and, therefore, more fat overall.

Fat oxidation does matter, but if you burn more carbohydrates during your workout, your body compensates over 24 hours and burns more fat later in the day, so it appears to be a wash. At the end of the day, all the calories you burned might best be considered together as one big pool of energy. The goal is to burn as many calories as you can all day long ? and keep that up consistently over time.

Click here to continue reading Ronald Abjavee's points on how to lose weight.