I'm at the gym the other day waiting patiently for the one and only squat rack.  Don't judge, you North Americans, I was lucky enough to find a gym with one good squat rack.  The squat rack at my previous gym was more like something that got ripped out of an elementary school playground sometime in the eighties.  Anyways, I finished up my deadlifts, and was hoping to do some front squats before going home.  This big guy (not good big) had been busting out set after set of squats, and I realized that he was not giving up that squat rack anytime soon.  I conceded, and hopped on the leg press.  I finished my workout, did a little finisher, and was packing up to go when I asked super squats if he was getting tired yet.  He'd done squats non-stop for the forty five minutes that I'd been there, and who knows how long he'd been at it before I got there.  He was starting to look like grossly bloated marathon runner staggering over the finish line.  He replied that he was tired, but still had three hours to go.  

 "Wait, what?!  Three more hours?"  I asked. 
"Yeah, I've gotta do four hours everyday.  I'm too fat, and need to lose weight." he said. I started to cry on the inside, but managed to blurt out,
"Don't you have a job?"

 Where do these insane ideas come from?  The more I try to learn about fitness and nutrition, the more I'm blown away by the absolutely insane information that is so readily available. 

 Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule?  It states that in any endeavour, 80% of the effects will come from 20% of the causes. Your job is to find out what causes you can focus your attention on to maximize the effects.  For fat loss, what are the different causes you can focus your effort on?  Weight training, cardio, diet, eating so called super foods, praying to the ab gods, etc.  Which one of these will give you 80% of the results?  The answer is diet.  If your diet is spot on, you can lose fat without doing anything else.  To maximize your rate of fat loss from 80% to 90% add some cardio.  To build some muscle, or at the very least prevent muscle loss, train with heavy weights.  

 Diet is the cause that will yield 80% of the results.  Once you let this sink in, you can start to take all that misplaced effort and focus it on meeting your dietary targets.  This is why fat loss is so excruciatingly painful sometimes.  We are hard-wired to want to do more, to make things happen faster.  I'm sorry, but it doesn't work like that.  The only thing that you can do more of is eating less, and being more patient.  Four hours of squatting is not going the answer.

 Straighten your diet out.  Figure out where your energy is best used, and use it there. I hate spending time on something and getting very little in return, and I know you feel the same way. So, back to super squats.  I told him about my quest to learn as much as possible about fat loss and nutrition, and that I personally have lost around 20 kg in the past three years.  I asked what his diet looked like.  No fried foods he said. If I had asked about his squat program I'm sure I would have gotten a run down of a fancy template designed to increase volume exponentially week by week in order to blah blah blah.....but, for diet the answer was no fried foods.

 Please don't misplace your efforts.  Focus on the causes that will give you the most results.