The first piece of information you will need is a new vocabulary. This is not about losing weight. What you want to lose is fat. If you are a woman and you start at 150 pounds with 35 percent body fat and 12 weeks later you weigh 140 pounds at 25 percent body fat, you will have made incredible progress. The scale might only show a ten-pound difference, but you will have lost 17.5 pounds of fat and gained 7.5 pounds of muscle. Those are impressive numbers for anyone. Ignore the temptation to get on the scale every day – what matters is how your clothes fit and how you look in the mirror.
Part of redefining the idea of fat loss entails redefining what constitutes a healthy body. One of the highest rated television events each year is the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Not a single one of those women has a healthy looking body. Our culture’s ideals of what is attractive are perverse at best, and crippling at worst. A 5’8” woman should not weigh 110 pounds. A woman of that height can carry as much 160 pounds and be healthy, as long as her body fat is around 25 percent or less. Look at Venus and Serena Williams, any of the women on the U.S. National Soccer Team, most of the women in the WNBA or just about any other sport. A fit, healthy body isn’t rail thin and devoid of muscle.
A pound of muscle and a pound of fat weigh exactly the same. The difference is density. A pound of muscle takes up much less space than a pound of fat. Muscle is sleek and sexy, while fat is spongy and lumpy. In the quest to lose fat, muscle is your friend. Each pound of muscle burns as many as 30 calories a day, even at rest. It takes almost no calories to maintain fat stores.
The way to lose fat and keep or increase muscle is weight training. It doesn’t require a lot of work. As little as thirty minutes twice a week, combined with a sensible aerobics plan, can help build muscle. Focus on the “big” exercises, the ones that recruit multiple muscles: squats, deadlifts, lunges, bench press, overhead presses, push ups, pull ups, and rows. Nearly all gym memberships come with at least one free training session – take advantage of that session to learn a few basic movements like the ones above. Tell the trainer what you want to know, rather than letting him/her waste that session trying to sell you other services. Using the compound exercises I’ve listed above will build more muscle and burn more fat than doing “isolation” movements, such as bicep curls, leg extensions, and so on, that focus on a single muscle.
As much as exercise is important in the equation, diet is where it all begins and ends. Before doing anything else, determine where you are. Keeping a detailed food log is the best thing you will ever do for your diet. Record what you eat and drink (calories, fat [including saturated fat], protein, carbohydrates [including sugars], and fiber), when you eat it, why you eat it, any emotional stuff that might have impacted your food choice, and any side effects of what you eat (sleepiness, energy, nausea, bloating, and so on). Do this strictly for a week.
After that week you will have a sense of how many calories you eat each day, how much protein you’re getting, how much sugar you’re consuming, and why you make some of your food choices. Continue to keep the log until eating healthy is a habit, and note any changes you make along the way and how well they worked. From there, you can implement the following suggestions.
• Eliminate simple sugars as much as possible (except post-workout – after your weight workout you need some sugars and some whey protein to kick-start recovery). If you have a lot of weight to lose, only drink whey protein after your workouts until your body fat is lower. Sugar is the enemy because it raises insulin, which stores triglycerides in fat cells.
• Eat more protein -- as much as a gram per pound of body weight or more per day. It takes twice as much energy to digest protein as it does fat or carbs. Protein is also more filling. Most importantly, you need adequate protein to build the muscle you are working toward with your weight training sessions.
• Eat five to six times a day, in smaller meals, each containing at least 15-20 grams of protein. This will keep your metabolism revved up and burning calories, and it will prevent you from having insatiable cravings to eat everything in the kitchen.
• Drink water -- all day, every day. It fills you up so you eat less, it keeps toxins from building up in the body, and it's just plain healthier than diet soda. Plus, it has no calories.
• Eliminate alcohol until you reach your target weight. Alcohol has seven calories per gram, as opposed to protein and carbs that have only four per gram. More importantly, alcohol becomes sugar in the body and generally gets stored as fat.
• Don’t starve yourself. Go to a Web site like www.fitday.com, find out how many calories you burn on an average day, and reduce your intake by 500 from that number. (One pound a week of fat loss equals 3,500 fewer calories ingested.) If you go very long without food, your body (which doesn't know food is easier to get now than it was 50,000 years ago) will store any calories you take in as fat.
• Set realistic goals. Don’t expect to lose more than a pound or two per week. Losing more than that will mean you are burning muscle, and that’s the last thing you want to do when trying to lose fat.
• Eat your vegetables. Not only are vegetables filled with nutrients that can prevent cancer, strengthen your immune system, and maintain general health, but they are also full of fiber. Fiber is one nutrient definitely lacking in the diets of most Americans.
• In fact, eat as much fiber as you can. Fiber slows digestion which reduces the speed at which carbs become glucose in the body, it fills you up so you eat less, it lowers your cholesterol, and it may reduce the risk of certain cancers.
• Eat breakfast. This is, as your mother taught you, the most important meal of the day. A healthy breakfast sets the tone for your whole day in terms of energy and avoiding sugar cravings in the evening.
• Reduce saturated fats, and include flax oil and fish oils in your diet. Saturated fats raise cholesterol and tend to be stored more readily in fat cells -- you need some saturated fat to be healthy, but most people get way too much. Instead, add omega-3 fatty acids to make your body more sensitive to insulin, which means less fat storage and better glucose disposal. Omega-3 fats, which can also be found in walnuts and pumpkin seeds, can also improve the symptoms of depression, lower your cholesterol, and prevent age-related mental decline.
• This might seem rather obvious, but get up and exercise. Too many people try to change body composition without including exercise and then wonder why they failed. If a person is seriously obese, initial efforts should be focused on reducing calories and changing nutrient intake patterns to healthier ones. But even in this case, exercise is essential in attaining a healthy weight, even if it is only brief bouts of walking.
Psychological factors should also be considered in fat loss. From your food log, you should have gained a little perspective on emotional eating (and/or drinking). Nearly everyone eats emotionally at times. Many people use food as a reward, as comfort, as a way to fill emptiness, as a way to bury emotions, as a way to get high (on brain chemicals like serotonin), because we are bored; or we drink to escape, feel brave, and so on. Becoming aware of these patterns is the only way to change them. My guess is that emotional eating is the biggest reason most people fail at healthy eating.
As part of our changing vocabulary, let’s drop the word “diet” as a definition of how we eat. What we are going to do is not a diet in the usual sense of the word. Eating healthy is a way of life. You won’t stop eating healthy when you’ve lost the fat you intend to lose – you will simply adjust your calories to maintain the muscle you have built.
Here’s the last secret you need to know: you can still eat the foods you love. While losing the fat, limit your “cheat meals” to one per week as long as you’ve stayed on track for that week. Make your cheat meal a morning meal, when metabolism is high, to limit any possible negative consequences. When you’ve lost the fat, you can eat the things you like, in moderation, more often, but in controlled portions.
That should be more than enough to plan a sensible program of fat loss. Remember to visualize your goals. Seeing in your mind the body you want to have is a good way to stay motivated. Create a collage if that will help you, pictures of the kinds of healthy bodies to which you aspire. Don’t get discouraged if it isn’t easy, or if there are slips into old patterns. Just pick up where you left off and continue on your journey. It isn’t a race – it’s your life
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