1000 Calorie Challenge - Does It Really Work?
The 1000 Calorie Challenge is a unique diet and workout plan that is designed to help you lose fat very fast. The program was created by Joel Marion and Arnel Ricafranca, two well known nutrition and fitness experts. Joel Marion has even been called one of America’s Top 50 Personal Trainers. In this program Joel and Arnel strive to create a unique blend of workouts and nutritional guidelines to help both men and women shed body fat very quickly. This fast fat loss is achieved by combining intensive workouts, strategic eating, and hormonal manipulation (more on that further down in the review).
The goal of the program is to help you create days with a big calorie deficit, meaning that you burn more calories than you put in. This will make you melt off body fat quickly. The goal is to improve your fitness while you’re burning fat and to make it leaner, fitter, firmer, and toner.
In this 1000 Calorie Challenge review, I’ll go over how this program actually works, what it requires you to do, and help you see whether this program is really for you. So, is the 1000 Calorie Challenge a scam or does it work…?
The 1000 Calorie Challenge Concept
The reason why this program got its name is because it revolves around the 1,000 calories number. The program is built around doing workouts that burn 1,000 calories (at least). This may seem difficult to do but it is very possible, I’ve done such workouts before and I still do.
In addition, the program also has 1,000 calorie diet days which are combined with the workout days in a strategic way to create a massive calorie deficit, keep your metabolism up, and allow you to do the program as conveniently and easily as possible.
By combining 1000 calorie workouts with 1000 calorie diet days (in a researched strategic way) you can create a massive calorie deficit as you’re taking less calories in and burning more at the same time.
Naturally, doing workouts that burn 1,000 calories is not the easiest thing in the world. You may not be up to it at your current fitness level. You’re not expected to be come to this program already in shape, what would be the point, right?
The 1,000 Calorie Challenge helps you to quickly progress from your current fitness level to being able to do 1000 calories workouts on a regular basis. This does involve some effort as you do need to do intensive workouts but you may be surprised by how fast your fitness improves by following this program.
How do you do Such Workouts
While it’s not easy to burn so many calories in one workout, especially when you want that workout to be under an hour long, it is possible. Joel Marion and Arnel Ricafranca do it with a concept called R-Quatro, manipulating 4 workout elements that each begins with the letter R:
- Reps – How many repetitions you perform in a set during your workout
- Resistance – How much weight you lift.
- Rest – What is the length of time you rest between sets
- Rounds – How many times a specific workout circuit is performed.
On each week, while you’re building yourself up to the full workouts, you do a workout consisting of a handful of exercises, mostly bodyweight and others that require minimal equipment such as dumbbells. During that week, you do the same workout 3 times but each time you make it harder by doing one or more of the following:
- Increase repetitions
- Increase resistance
- Reduce rest time
- Increase the number of rounds that you do.
This seems simple enough and logical, but you need to do it right to not overexert yourself and to give your body what it needs to boost its fitness level fast and safely.
Between one week and the next, you increase the intensity of the workouts by doing regular sets one week, then supersets the next (doing two exercises with no rest in between), then tri-sets (a 3 exercise circuit), then a 10 exercise circuit.
This is where you’ll be burning 1000 calories per workout. This is truly the 1000 calorie Challenge that Joel Marion and Arnel Ricafranca have created. And it only takes you 4 weeks to get to that level. Naturally, you will be burning off body fat fast during those 4 weeks, but after you build your fitness level is where the real fat burning occurs.
And it doesn’t just happen during the workout time. These workouts give you an Afterburn effect in which your metabolism remains running higher than normal for hours after your workout, sometimes for more than a full day after! The result is more calories and fat burned away.
Again, this is not something that’s easy to do. If you don’t know which workouts to combine in your circuits, you may do it wrong. This is why I don’t advise trying to create such circuits yourself. It can go wrong in a number of nasty ways. By following the 1000 calorie challenge, you will follow the guidelines of experts and do it the right way.
This program is for you only if you’re ready to make the effort required in those workouts. It does take dedication and determination to do it.
1000 Calorie Diet Days
Part of the program is combining a few 1000 calorie diet days with your workouts. This is done to get a bigger calorie deficit and an even greater fat loss. Getting a 1,000 calories in a day is pretty low and you may have heard that low calorie dieting can cause your metabolism to slow down.
It is true that low calorie dieting can cause metabolic slowdown but only if it’s down for a length of time and doesn’t involve changing your calorie consumption. Indeed, I don’t advise going on a string of 1000 calorie days one after the other.
It is possible to have a low calorie day followed by a regular calorie day, or even a high calorie day, and not to experience any metabolic slowdown. In the 1000 calorie Challenge, this is exactly what is done, because while you are doing low calorie days you also have Cheat Days in which you can eat fattening foods like ice-creams and cakes, and you have moderate calorie days in which you eat a medium amount of calories.
The low calorie days help you increase your calorie deficit and burn more fat, your Cheat Days help you to avoid metabolic slowdown and to be able to eat your favorite foods while you’re losing weight. This is another way in which e the 1000 Calorie Challenge is doable.
In Conclusion
The 1000 Calorie Challenge works by combining a reduced calorie diet with highly metabolic workouts, a combination that has been proven by research to increase fat burning by as much as 44%.
This is a program that requires you to be committed and determined to lose a lot of body fat and get lean. It is a program for very fast results so you do need to make an effort to succeed with it. This is an excellent program for getting fast fat burning results.
The workouts in this plan are short, intensive, and very effective. They can be done by men and women both and you don’t need to be very fit to begin with them. If you are willing to make an effort, you may see your body fat melt away quickly once you combine the power of these workout with the unique eating plan the 1000 Calorie Challenge program teaches.