Dieting Doesn't Work
When I go to work this time of year, I can see countless numbers of people wanting to lose a few pounds of flab around their mid-section, in time for the summer beach season.
Some will follow a well-balanced, high protein, medium carbohydrate, low fat diet year round, eating every 2-3 3 hours. They are educated enough to know that to build and keep muscle, they must feed their bodies frequently and protein and caloric intake must be sufficient enough to sustain muscle growth.
The problem is that they probably consumed a few too many calories and are is showing some signs of excess fat in places that will prohibit them from feeling confident and comfortable in their bathing suits.
There is only a few weeks before people start scheduling their vacations. With such urgency what most people do whenever they want to lose a few pounds is cut calories severely, and also the number of meals. This throws all science and knowledge of nutrition out the window.
Most of you have been programmed to think that whenever you need to lose weight, all we have to do is cut back on food. Sure seems logical. Drop food out of your diet, and you will lose weight. Eat more food, and you will gain weight. Simple enough, right?
When you start restricting calories in your diet, you are sure to lose weight. But the weight loss is not always good. This "weight loss" should not be confused with "fat loss." Most of you are really not concerned with your weight (you just have been programmed to think that), you are really concerned with your fat. If you seperated your body into it's simplest parts, your body is composed of lean muscle tissue (or lean body mass, which includes bone), water, and fat.
When you want to be successful in reducing your fat, you need to hang on to as much lean muscle tissue as possible. Your metabolism is determined, to a great degree, by the amount of lean muscle tissue that you carry.
Your metabolism (or metabolic rate) is the number of calories required to sustain your body daily. When you lose muscle tissue, your metabolism suffers. In other words, your metabolism slows down, leaving you in a position where you burn even fewer calories.
And so, a vicious cycle ensues. You diet hard; you burn muscle tissue. You burn muscle tissue; your metabolism slows down. Your metabolism slows down; you gain fat back faster and easier. With more fat, you have to diet harder. And so on...
That initial cutback of calories that I referred to results in a loss of muscle tissue along with body fat and water. Sure, you will weigh less on the scale, but you may not look much better.
Let's go back to the people in my gym. I see it year after year. They begin by cutting their caloric intake practically in half, reducing the vital calories that his body needs to sustain that lean muscle tissue. At first, they lose weight relatively easy.
Because they usually cut carbohydrate calories back so drastically, they burn up the existing glycogen (stored glucose calories) in the liver and muscles. Now, in case you don't already know this, a gram of glycogen holds approximately three grams of water in a muscle. Burn the glycogen off and you lose a lot of water weight. But you also lose a lot of muscle size!
So, they end up looking a little smoother and a little smaller, yet the persistent layer of fat around their mid-section is still there. Next, they cut out a meal or two, robbing their muscles of the protein they require every three to four hours for growth.
It does not take their bodies very long to realize that it's being thrown into a starvation mode. The body's survival mechanism kicked in. Thyroid function slows down. Their bodies begin secreting more fat-storing enzymes.
What's worse, they begin releasing catabolic hormones that break down muscle tissue for energy. The human body couldn't care less about what it looked like at the beach or on vacation. It does, however, care very much about surviving. It's as if the body would rather cling on to the fat and burn off the muscle.
A normal person, having undergone the first phase of a restricted calorie diet, would more than likely feel self-satisfied when he or she stepped on the scale and saw that they were getting lighter.
However, any health and fitness minded individual being body-conscious, will start to dislike the way they look in the mirror: smoother and smaller. The diet then seems like a very bad idea.
People like this are not just in my gym, they are all around. The fact is, diets which are severely restricted in calories don't work. We've seen that cutting back the calories is not the way to lose fat and keep it off. So, what is? Here are some things that should be done:
- Keep the same number of meals in your nutrition program.
- Keep the same amount of protein consumption spaced out over those five or six meals.
- Cut back on fat and simple sugar calories.
- Eliminate all junk foods and processed foods from the diet. Instead, opting for unprocessed natural foods.
- Increase the consumption of fibrous vegetables.
- Add 20-30 minutes of aerobic activity, three to four times per week to training regimen.
- Typically, you will only be able to reduce body fat by two pounds per week at best, without losing muscle tissue. So start your diet with ample time to reach your goal.
The last thing that you should do when trying to reduce unwanted body fat is to cut meals or to cut calories indiscriminately. Instead, a well thought-out nutritional program incorporating the reduction of fat and sugar calories, increased aerobic activity, and careful planning and use of food and supplements will speed your progress.
