Tips to burn excess fat and increase fitness

Tips for losing weight and increasing fitness:

Based on my personal experience in shaping my body with really amazing advising from my friend Reagan Bachala, I intend to slowly add tips for people in losing excess fat and improving fitness levels. I will add tips continually.

First of all keep in mind that these are only tips NOT medical advice.

The foremost and the most important thing is that you must have strong motivation to improve your shape and fitness. It's like fuel for a car.
In this journey you expect a CHANGE in your looks and capacities and for that you need a CHANGE in your diet and activity levels.

You need an indicator for measure CHANGE. Since results actually are time consuming you need a more sensitive indicator. Initially you cannot use your feelings (of tiredness while working out, of hunger while eating) because you have to change them. So you have to rely on numbers (calories burnt or consumed, heart rate, number of reps, number of days you workout etc.).
For motivation remember, higher metabolism earned has many more benefits than the high metabolism you inherit genetically. Increasing metabolism is the key in burning excess fat effectively. For that you first need to train your cardiovascular system by working out in the cardio range then work on increasing the muscle mass in your body by weight training.
It's true that following numbers is hard. It is because it is a change and usually change is hard. The main heuristic useful in changing effectively is to reduce the effect of perception of change while actually changing. So below are some suggestions based on that idea.

Change of diet

Eat similar number of calories for fulness but eat good (more protein, more fibre, more water, low fat, low carb) stuff.
Eat more frequently - every 4 waking-hours. Eat stuff like nuts, dry fruits, cheese sticks, low-fat yogurt with berry flavor, straw berries, blue berries, black berries.
Be planned, have your food with you always. Pack food in packets and carry them along with you.
Never wait till you are absolutely very hungry. But never eat a lot even when you are not hungry.
Drink lot of water, lot of fat free and/or 1% milk (Milk has calcium which helps in burning fat).
(Addition on March 25, 06) Atmost once a weak you can cheat your body by eating whatever you like. But please remember it's only ONCE a week. This technique is a much simplified version of zig-zagging.

Change of activity

Workout where you have fun.

Start playing games like racket ball, cricket, cardio-video games
Go to group workouts with music.
Make friends at workout places. You might add to your motivation to go there.

Plan everything so that you don't blame workout for missing other assignments in your life.

Additions from here March 25, 06

Initially go to workout for about 2-3 times a week. You can feel like you are free after those two or three sessions.

In point 3 I said results are time consuming. There are two things. One I really mean that, so keep your frustrations levels on check. Two I mean the results are progressively gradual, so keep your effort upto the mark.
One good thing about progressive and gradual change is that body gets time to adjust to the changes and kind of assimilates the changes. Achieving hard target weights (and actually staying there) in two or three months might be possible for some people. But those cases are exceptions rather than rule. So trying to compare your journey to exceptions would either make you another exception or more likely frustrate you. The reason is simple. If you try to find explanation for exceptions and try to understand those phenomenon you are simply not being effective. See my post that explains more about being effective.
April 20, 06 (edited 4/21/06). The statement that negative calorie balance (burning more calories than taking in) is need for weight loss, needs careful analysis otherwise it might result in quicker but not persistent results or even plant seeds for problems in the long run. Negative calorie balance is good only if the calorie debt is taken care of by fat. Body is a complex system and is evolved to be defensive (that's why most are inherently defensive). That's why if you don't workout and just cut down on calories the body won't burn more calories and thus cutting down on calories is just a waste because it is just worthless "effort". You can think of an analogy (Warning: using analogical reasoning could be tricky but usually in non-adversarial practice it works). If one reduces earning and is defensive he will spend less.

So the bottom line is that we need much more than negative balance of calories. What is need is to train our body to use the stored fat and get it out of the defensive mode. Once we train it that way for about 2 years then things get easier. Sure that higher metabolism burns more calories but so does work needed to store fat! More fat meaning more fat cells and they need energy to be maintained. The point is we need good metabolism (metabolism that makes you feel and look healthy and good) that is metabolism required to maintain muscle cells. So how we do it - simple increase those cells and feed those cells using the energy from fat cells. We need training for that again. We need to spread the intake of calories around the day so that glucose levels in body does not shoot up too much unless immediately after workout. Based on my experience breakfast could be about 700+100, lunch 600+100, dinner 400+100 calories. Of course with 5 day/week workout and good calories as mentioned in previous points.