Hi,

In the last post on you are what you eat, you found out that the body does not like change.

So if you have been feeding it too much food and then go on a diet, it will react.

It reacts by reducing your metabolism.  It does not matter what kind of diet you go on. 

The grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, the caveman diet, the Atkins diet, the latest celebrity diet – it doesn’t matter.

Your body will react.  And the more ridiculous the diet reduction is, the more strongly your body will react.

So reduce you calories by 1000 a day and your body will react swiftly.

Even if you use diet pills to keep your metabolism artificially high.  Eventually their effectiveness wears off and you come crashing down.

And eventually the weight loss stops. 

That is because you can only reduce your calories so much or you will die. 

Your body will reduce its metabolism to keep pace with your reduction in calories or energy coming in. 

And along the way you will feel pretty miserable.  Why?

Because you will have no energy. 

About this time you say the diet sucks and you go off of your diet. 

Well guess what you go off of your diet and start pounding the food just as your metabolism is at its lowest point. 

Guess what happens now?  You gain back all of the weight really fast.  And by the time your metabolism and your eating get back to its homeostasis levels you have gained everything back and usually added a few extra pounds.

You have just been through the yo-yo effect of dieting.

This will happen with every diet you ever go on.  This will happen whether no matter what kind of micronutrients you are eating. 

Now eating a healthy diet will be better for you than a junk food diet, but the bottom line is you can gain weight on any eating plan if you are taking in more calories than you can burn.

While it is great that science is providing us with more information, you can’t just forget about – like many new age diet and fitness gurus do – the basics.

So trying to eat more protein and fat and less carbs can not overcome the basics of calories in versus calories out. 

We’ll address the second aspect of why diets don’t work in the next post of you are what you eat.

Thanks

Hi,

In part one of you are what you eat we left off with why did the Atkins diet proponents gain weight back.

They gained weight back because they went on the diet in the first place. 

Here is the thing about dieting.  First of all any diet is pretty much a scam.

This is because no one is telling you that full truth about dieting. 

And if you are like most people you are not going to stay on a diet your whole life. 

Those two points make it almost 100% probable that you will regain all of the weight you have lost.  And in many cases you will actually gain more. 

So let’s look at these two statements.

When you diet or deprive yourself of calories you body reacts to this.  Your body will react even if you have been giving it too many calories for a very long time. 

Your body has become adjusted to a level of caloric intake.  Changing this level will cause your body to react.  This reaction will be against the change. 

So if you reduce your calories coming in which is in essence reducing the amount of energy coming in you body will react by reducing the amount of energy it expends.

It does this by slowing down your metabolism.  Why does it do this?

Because of something called homeostasis.  Your body wants to keep things sailing along smoothly.  So it likes things to stay the same.  Even if staying the same is unhealthy for you.

So a reduction in energy coming in upsets homeostasis.  Your body reduces your metabolism.  This way everything goes back to the same old way. 

It does take your body awhile to recognize this change and react to it.  So you will lose weight for awhile until your body catches us to the reduction in energy coming in. 

That is why you can lose weight pretty easily at first, but the weight loss slows down and eventually stops.

So what do you do next.  You reduce the calories even more.  And again, your body reacts and slows your metabolsim down even more.

Ever wonder why so many diet pills make you hyper.  That is because they are trying to stimulate your metabolism in an unnatural way. 

They are designed to keep your metabolsim ratcheted way up while you are on your diet.

Problem is that they only work for awhile also.  And when their effectiveness wears off you come crashing down. 

And then the weight loss stops and the weight gain restarts.

More in the next post.

Thanks

Hi,

The saying “you are what you eat” has been around a long time.  But, is it really true when we are talking about weight gain?

This brings up the question of is it what you eat or how much you eat that is more important?

I just read a post by a well known fitness guru who said that “No one, and I repeat, NO ONE is fat because they eat too much fruit”.

Well maybe that is true and maybe not.  He has fallen into the same trap that many diet and fitness gurus fall into. 

They think that if you eat healthy foods all the time you can’t get fat.  That is a nice myth. 

You get fat by how much you eat.  If you eat too much – or more calories in than you burn each day – then you will gain weight.

If all your calories come from fruit and those calories add up to more than you burn you will gain weight and could get fat.

Now you will have to eat a lot of fruit to do this.  And most people do not just eat fruit and nothing else all day. 

The same is true of vegetables.  And yes there are some overweight and even obese vegetarians. 

This used to be pretty easy to figure out.  However, as science has provided us with more information it has become easy to add this information and speculate about it without thinking.

So science has provided us with the concept of micronutrients.  Yes, everyone has heard of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. 

But, it has only been within the last ten years or so that everyone has jumped on the micronutrient bandwagon.

The perfect example is the Atkins diet.  Or more correctly the bastardization of the Atkins diet. 

Eat as much protein and fat as you want, just cut out the carbs and you will drop weight and body fat like instantly.  This was the Atkins battlecry. 

Unfortunately it wasn’t entirely true.

Yes, if you cut out carbs from your diet, you will lose weight.  And if you cut out fat from your diet you will lose weight.  And if you cut out protein from your diet you will lose weight.

Cut out anything from your diet and you will lose weight.  However, this weight loss is not sustainable. 

Even the Atkins diet advocates found this out as they too gained the weight back after a period of time. 

What to know why?  Stay tuned for the next post of you are what you eat.

Thanks

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could compare different diets to see which one works best for you?

Sure would. But there is a problem.

Not every diet will work for you.

Some will not work at all, some will work okay and some diets will work wonders for you.

But, how do you know which ones will work best for you? Ah, that is the hard part.

And the truth is you won’t know which diet will work the best for you until you try it. And give it a chance to work.

Trying a diet for a few days won’t give you the information you need to evaluate it. Unless, you feel an immediate lack of energy or get sick because of the diet.

I have tried some of those fasting diets and those just kill me. I have absolutely no energy and my immune system is adversly affected.

Every single fasting diet has made me sick. So I – finally – learned not to do them anymore.

But, that is me. Fasting diets are just starting to become a fad again. If it appeals to you, then give it a try.

Just make sure you monitor yourself very closely. This means recording what you do eat, what days you actually fast, how much you drink and how you feel.

Get yourself a small notebook and write down everything about the diet.

No matter what diet you go on, try to stay on it for at least 6 weeks. Make sure you record your weight, body fat levels, how you feel, how strong you feel, what your workouts were and so on.

By writing all of this information down, you will be able to evaluate it with real numbers.

When you do the same with the 2nd diet or 3rd diet you go on, now you will easily be able to compare the numbers.

The reason you are comparing so many things, is because the first diet – if this is your first time going on a diet – will ususally give you a quicker and better weight loss.

This is because you body hasn’t reacted yet to the diet and you will also be losing more water weight in the first couple of weeks of your diet.

And actually a better comparison might be to not count the first week of your diet and start recording the results after week one is over.

Keeping track of your dieting will help you compare different diets and make intelligent choices about what works best for you in the future.

Good Luck.

diet boredom

You probably know there are hundreds of different types of diets. But, which type of diet works best?

That is what some researchers tried to figure out in a study published in 2009 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Four types of diets were studied to see which one would have the best weight loss.

All the diets were approximately 1200 calories and included 90 minutes of exercise a day. Everyone also had counseling sessions for the duration of the 2 year study.

The four types of diets were low fat/low protein – low fat/medium protein – high fat/medium protein – high fat/high protein.

Now I see one major flaw here right away. What about the carbs? My initial guess was that there wouldn’t be any major difference in any of the diets because there wasn’t any control over the carbs.

And turns out I was pretty accurate. Every group lost the same amount of weight for the first year. This was about 13 pounds or 1 pound a month.

That is not a lot and this was with 90 minutes of exercise a day.

It gets worse. By the end of 2 years the average weight loss for each group was 9 pounds.

This was not 9 pounds more. It was a total loss of 9 pounds over the 24 months. In other words each group gained 4 pounds over the 2nd year.

Again this was with 90 minutes of exercise every day.

Okay, so basically the average person didn’t even lose 1/2 pound a month over the 2 years.

Those are not good results. It does show two things however. Manipulating your fat and protein doesn’t really do much for you. It would have been a much better study if they had manipulated the carbs also.

2nd, it shows that low intensity (what else could it be) exercise for 90 minutes a day does not really help with weight loss.

As you have learned from the previous posts, it is the short duration, high intensity exercise sessions that will have your burning fat after the exercise session is over.

This never happens with low intensity exercise.

So what type of diet works best? You won’t find out from this study.