Choosing the Best Fat Burner for Men
Muscle-building supplements and fat burners all act toward the same goal—to make you look and feel better.
Just by taking a more thorough look at the market, you can immediately tell that there’s an abundance of different body-shaping supplements that promise to help you create a lean and pleasing physique.
There’s one problem, though. A lot of the time, people don’t really know what to expect from these supplements or how to use them properly. In this section, you’ll learn everything you need to know about fat burners to make an informed decision.
Fat Burners
The top fat burners help people increase energy, improve metabolism, and lose weight at the same time. Most of the time, these supplements contain several different compounds that may help enhance these effects.
There are quite a lot of different fat burning products on the market. The most popular are those that contain green tea, caffeine, L-carnitine, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) chromium, yohimbe, glucomannan, forskolin, and raspberry ketones.
The Process
When looking at the ways these specific products work, there are two main terms we have to cover.
Thermogenesis
A thermogenic fat burner uses thermogenesis to help you shed fat. During the process, the body burns calories to produce heat. Several factors come into play here, like diet, environmental temperature, and exercise.
The process of thermogenesis aids weight loss as it increases the number of calories your body’s burning. However, the combination of being in a caloric deficit and being physically active should be the best route to take before relying on thermogenic supplements alone.
Lipolysis
A lot of the top-rated fat burners can help you reach your goals through this process, which is the breakdown of lipids involving the hydrolysis of triglycerides into free fatty acids and glycerol.
Testosterone, cortisol, growth hormone, ghrelin, norepinephrine, glucagon, and epinephrine all play a key role in the process of lipolysis.
How to Approach Fat Loss Supplements
The biggest problems regarding fat burners are the controversies surrounding them and the exaggerated expectations of their users. Experts say that even the strongest fat burner supplements should be the last weapon of choice against weight-loss.
That being said, a healthy diet should be the driving force behind weight loss as it’s responsible for 70–80% of a successful weight-loss plan. In this case, exercise will be the remaining 10–20%, with the final 10% being fat burning supplements that can help you maximize the amount of fat you are losing.
This is why dieters don’t get the most out of their supplements most of the time—they simply don’t use them properly.
How to Use Fat Burners
Even if you are using the best fat burner on the market, you must understand the basics of dieting to make it work. Only then will you manage to reap all the benefits of the top supplements for burning fat.
Diet Is Crucial
As mentioned above, a calorie-restricted diet is the biggest part of a great weight-loss plan. When sticking to such a diet, you can use supplements to help boost the fat loss process.
These products can boost energy, help curb appetite, promote fat storage, boost metabolism, and increase the core temperature. However, if you only rely on them and keep making relatively poor food choices, you won’t see any changes at all.
High Expectations
Another reason why even the best fat loss supplement tends to fail its users is that they simply have unrealistic expectations regarding the rate at which they want to lose fat.
Relying only on these supplements won’t help you reach the wanted effects as you can only burn fat if you use more calories than you consume. This is a rather slow process, with losing one to three pounds of fat per week. You can lose less or more than that; however, you are also risking losing muscle mass and water.
Don’t Go Overboard
Overusing even the top-selling fat burners won’t speed up the weight loss process. There’s a tipping point with these products, as there is with most supplements. This means you won’t see better results just because you take more.
Go Easy on the Caffeine
Caffeine-based products can help you lose weight. However, if you already drink a lot of coffee, you might want to reconsider your options. Mixing coffee with caffeine-based supplements can interfere with your adrenal response, making you fatigued and slowing down your post-workout recovery.
Fat Loss and Caffeine
Caffeine is among the most effective fat burner compounds on the market. Research also shows that it helps improve muscle strength endurance and that it accelerates fat loss. The compound increases the blood’s catecholamine concentration, which helps with inducing fat oxidation and increasing the basal metabolic rate.
Caffeine can also help reduce glucose metabolism when you exercise. This means that the body has to rely more on burning fat than burning carbs during anaerobic exercise.
While all this sounds wonderful, there are two downsides to relying heavily on caffeine to lose fat. The first one is that even the top fat burner supplement with caffeine in it will lose its effectiveness as the body tends to become desensitized. The other one is the fact that it will keep you up at night if you take it late in the day.
So to mitigate the first issue, you can cycle your intake or take it with other substances that help amplify its effects. Research supports that L-ornithine and naringin in grapefruit juice can help maximize the effects of caffeine.
Caffeine, on its own, won’t help you get rid of excess fat. As most top fat burners on the market, you need to combine it with a potent exercise regimen and an optimized diet to start seeing results.
Fat Loss and Green Tea Extract
Green tea has been known to help the weight loss process as it contains catechins—active antioxidants that have been found to help get rid of abdominal fat and improve the body’s triglyceride levels.
Green tea extract is one of the more natural compounds when you’re considering giving your metabolism a little extra “oomph.” Also, the plant-derived polyphenols in the compound can help the liver process fat.
Fat Loss and L-Carnitine
Dubbed as the bodybuilding fat burner, L-carnitine plays an essential role when it comes to mobilizing body fat and using it as “fuel.”
Some believe that the more L-carnitine one can ingest, the more fat the body will burn because the compound helps transport fatty acids to the mitochondria where they become oxidized.
L-carnitine-based supplements are highly popular among athletes since the greater dependency on fat as a foul source means sparing carbs and preserving muscle tissue.
Fat Loss and L-Tyrosine
This amino acid is primarily used to create two neurotransmitters in the body: noradrenaline and adrenaline. It also plays a vital role in the production of dopamine.
However, when it comes to fat loss, L-tyrosine also plays a crucial role in the creation of the t3 and t4 thyroid hormones, both of which are essential to metabolism.
An L-tyrosine-based fat cutter supplement can help adrenaline and noradrenaline levels go up. With that, the heart rate will also rise, along with body temperature. This “heightened state” will lead to a larger caloric expenditure.
Conversely, the increased dopamine levels can help reduce stress and give users a greater sense of well-being, which comes in handy during training sessions. Moreover, it will make long diets more bearable.
Fat Loss and CLA
Conjugated Linoleic Acid is an altered form of linoleic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid). CLA can’t be produced by the body but can be found in foods like lamb, beef, butter, and whole milk.
The compound is a rather powerful antioxidant. CLA-based products are considered safe fat burners for men, as the compound is also known for preserving muscle mass and even having anticarcinogenic characteristics.
Evidence shows that CLA can help optimize metabolic function and aid in reducing body fat levels. Research also suggests that around 3.4 grams of the compound a day is enough to reap its positive effects regarding fat loss.
Wrapping Up
So what’s the best fat burner for men? All of these products can come in handy in your battle for fat loss and may help achieve your goals faster. However, please, don’t forget that these supplements aren’t the be-all-end-all solution to get rid of excess weight.
Only with a calorie-restricted diet and with a proper exercise regimen can you lose weight safely and in a healthy manner. Sure, there are other routes to take, but they can be harmful to your overall health and might end up being only a short-term fix.