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The ‘Lazy’ Person’s Guide to Becoming a Better Fat Burner

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I’ll get into the secrets of becoming a better fat burner in a moment, but first, some perspective. Humans evolved to be lazy. We don’t like to admit that in this modern era, where our culture values doing and being ‘more,’ but the truth is, you wouldn’t be here today without lazy ancestors.

Back then food was harder to come by and you had to do more work to get it. It wasn’t as convenient as the drive-thru or even rolling your cart through aisles and aisles of caloric-offerings. Most hunter-gathers walked an average of 8-10 miles a day just to gather water, food, and medicines, so whenever they could, they took advantage of surpluses by lazing around. Visiting with community members, making art or crafts, even getting drunk or stoned. By reducing their activity, they reduced caloric expenditure and saved it for time when they might need it instead to save their lives. So if you have a hard time coming up with the willpower to go to the gym regularly- it’s not that you are lazy, its that you have your ancestor’s lazy genes.

Of course, this presents a problem in a modern age where we have ready access to whatever calories we want- without having to do any work to get them. Our bodies do what evolution shaped them to do- save those excess calories for leaner times to ensure our survival- but those leaner times never come, not really. So they keep saving and keep saving. We call this saving phenomenon ‘obesity’ and blame the individual for being ‘lazy’ instead of blaming our environment/society for capitalizing off of this adaptation.

So instead of trying to fight an uphill battle against your biology, how can you work with it to become a better fat burner and achieve a lean, fit physique healthfully and sustainably? Glad you asked!!! Here’s my simple, effective ‘Lazy’ Person’s Guide to Better Fat Burning.

  1.  Sleep more. Research shows that if you are sleep deprived one night, you are more likely to crave and indulge in higher calorie, carbohydrate-dense foods the next day. Don’t know how to curb late night food cravings? Simple- GO TO BED earlier! You need the sleep to repair and restore your body anyway. Turn off the TV, put the phone down, and just go to sleep. Simple.
  2. Fast. Do you find it difficult to cook healthy food for your meals, especially on certain busy days of the week? Tempted to get take out or grab-and-go junk food on days like this? Here’s a simple solution: don’t eat on those days. I know it sounds crazy at first, but stay with me. If you go 12-16 hours without any calories, it stimulates a process called autophagy, where your cells will put their energy into cleaning up debris and repairing or replacing worn out proteins instead of digesting and assimilating nutrients from food. Periodic fasting of this nature has been associated with lower rates of cancer and dementia, most likely because of this very mechanism. Drink plenty of water on the day you fast, but consume no calories and no fake sugar beverages like diet drinks. Just water or herbal tea. The hunger is more mental than it is physical. This strategy works best if you eat a higher fat, lower carb diet on non-fasting days, so you may want to start there if you’re don’t eat that way already. Doing so helps your body become more adapted at utilizing fat stores for energy. That way when you fast, you dip into those excess fat stores for energy. Over time, fasting 1-2 days a week, you wittle down your fat stores and your pants size at the same time, all while letting your body to do the decluttering it needs. (Note: if you have reactive hypoglycemia or take certain medications like insulin, you need to be careful with this approach. Please work with a qualified health care professional who understand how to do this and can help you monitor your meds/blood sugar.)
  3. Slow down your exercise. Some where along the line, we adopted this misguided “no pain, no gain” philosophy of exercise, where if you aren’t leaving sweat angels on the floor beneath you it doesn’t ‘count’ somehow. The irony here is that your body is very bad at utilizing fat to fuel muscle work during intense exercise like this. You actually increase your percentage of fat utilization at lower, aerobic intensities- 55%-65% of your max heart rate. For most people, this is achievable by simply walking. The problem is, it takes time to walk  as much as you need to in a day to starting seeing the benefit on a scale. (Remember the 8-10 miles a day your ancestor’s walked?) Because higher intensity exercise is anaerobic and relies on glycogen for fuel, it’s not the same thing to do a harder effort in less time. Certainly not if you’re goal is fat burning. Slow down your effort to a pace where you can comfortably and quietly breath through your nose to increase fat utilization.
  4. Move more throughout the day. So how does a modern human move the equivalent of 8-10 miles a day at a slow, aerobic, fat-burning pace? Well, you’re going to have find more ways throughout the day. Instead of coffee dates or meetings, have walking meetings. Use headphones to walk while on a conference call or other phone call. Park a few blocks from the playground or soccer fields and walk the rest of the way. Rely less on machines or tech for food processing and do more by hand. Functional movements like these don’t seem like they would fit a ‘lazy’ person’s guide to becoming a better fat burner, but given a choice, would you rather walk more throughout that day or face a beat-down, sweat session each day that in the end isn’t getting you closer to goal anyway?
  5. Natural movement training. Practicing a system of natural movement like MovNat is fun way to get more strength, more mobility and improve your physique without feeling worn out, beat down or injured all the time. The low intensity, constant movement favors fat oxidation for fueling. Building lean muscle mass through bodyweight exercises increases your metabolism at rest without getting too big/bulky/imbalanced. Best of all, these movements are directly transferrable to every day life.

And there you have it, folks. The Lazy Person’s Guide to Becoming a Better Fat Burner. Sleep more, fast occasionally, and move slower with more emphasis on function than just calorie burn.  Now go be lazy, be lean and be well.

 

Low carb: the solution for lasting weight loss & better health

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low carbLow carb diets seem to carry some sort of undeserved apprehension lately, so it was really great to see this article making the rounds on social media this week. Of course, this probably has to do with the fact that “low-carb” and Atkins have unfortunately become synonymous- like using a “Kleenex” instead of a tissue and “Chapstick” as opposed to lip balm. Let’s clear that up right here and now- Atkin’s is a type of low carb diet, but not all low carb diets are Atkin’s. My theory is that the apprehension comes about because most of us know someone who lost a ton of weight on Atkin’s- then gained it all back when they resumed eating “normally” again. The implied assumption then, is that Atkin’s (and by extension all low-carb diets) doesn’t work. This is a logical fallacy and is just plain wrong.

Let’s turn it around for a moment and make the opposite assumption. If eating “normally” is what caused a person to gain excess weight in the first place, doesn’t it make more sense that their return to “normal” eating after a low carb diet is a much better reason for why they gained that weight again?

Obesity rates decline with adoption of high fat, low carb diets

Emerging research is corroborating this assumption. The meteoric rise in obesity rates seems to originate in the late 70s- right around the time that policy recommendations were being implemented that vilified cholesterol, saturated foods and animal products. The 80s were the heyday of the low-fat craze, with new “fat-free” Frankenfoods being developed at an unprecedented rate. Obesity has continued to skyrocket despite our adoption of these policies and low-fat foods. Yet, in Sweden, up to 23% of the population embraces a high fat, low carb diet. And while obesity rates continue to climb steadily elsewhere in the world, Sweden is actual seeing a decline in their obesity rate.

High fat, low carb diets produce less insulin; body fat storage

What we know about the biochemical mechanism underlying this phenomenon also reinforces low carb diets as the answer to lasting weight loss and better overall health. Insulin is a hormone that is released in the presence of carbohydrate and to a lesser extent, protein. (Notice that fat does not provoke an insulin release.) Insulin’s job is to lower blood sugar. It does this in two ways. First, by triggering uptake of digested carbohydrates (glucose) into the cells to be made into energy to fuel them. But it also acts as a storage hormone, causing any excess sugars to be cleared from the blood and stored in the fat tissue as triglycerides for later use. This where many folks run into problems losing weight. They overeat carbohydrates, keeping insulin high and promoting storage of any excess carbohydrates and even calories, as fat. A high fat, low carb diet by contrast reduces the need for insulin. In the short term, this means less excess insulin to promote fat storage. Long-term, less insulin means less stimulus for the development of insulin resistance & type 2 diabetes.

Fat does not cause clogged arteries

The reputation of low carb diets also suffers from mistakenly assuming that saturated fats and cholesterol clog arteries. While it’s true that cholesterol is the main constituent of the arterial plaques, that doesn’t meant cholesterol causes the plaque. The analogy I use is of spackle. You don’t blame the hole in the wall on the spackle just because it is there plugging the hole. The same goes for cholesterol, which did not cause the “hole” in the artery. This damage is more likely to come from elevated blood sugar, elevated insulin or even turbulent blood flow in an area due to poor mobility and a sedentary lifestyle.

Low carb diets can be sustainable & healthy

We are left with the real culprit- the return to so-called “normal eating.” If people return to anything that approximates the Standard American Diet- they are likely returning to a diet full of bread, pasta, and other processed foods. I’ve worked with many patients who think they ‘eat healthy.’ When I investigate this further, they eat oatmeal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and often pasta for dinner. They’ve assumed that because their meals were “low-fat” they were healthy. Meanwhile, what they actually ate were carbs, carbs and more carbs. No vegetables, certainly nothing with much color, and they’ve insured that insulin level spiked several times throughout that day (with resultant plunges as well). The S.A.D. averages over 300g of carbohydrate per day. The health benefits of “low-carb” can start with carbohydrate levels as high as 100-150g/day. Atkin’s and ketogenic diets, also known as ‘very low carb’ are often under 75g of carbohydrate/day. If one’s primary carbohydrate sources are from vegetables instead of processed grain products, it can be very easy to sustain a healthy diet of 100-150g/day of carbohydrate. Some can even get by on less by including increased levels of high quality fats in their diet. By finding a healthy level of carbohydrates that works for you, you can achieve lasting weight loss while improving your health!

Fat Loss Simplified!

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fat loss simplified

This time of year, many people aspire to lose weight and get in shape in the coming year. When they say “lose weight,” almost all of us mean fat loss. Unfortunately, there is so much conflicting and just plain wrong information out there, that most people will start a program, see little if any results, and give up before February rolls around. So how do you break the cycle and find a leaner, fitter you?

  1. Fat loss is 80% diet. If you’re killing yourself with an hour a day on the treadmill or elliptical, then coming home and diving into pile of junk food because ‘you earned it,’ then the point is being missed. You’ve probably seen the popular meme “you can’t out run a bad diet.” It’s true. You can drop 10 or 15 pounds and still have terrible blood lipid or sugar numbers because of what you are eating. Isn’t the whole point of doing all that exercise in the first place to be healthier?
  2. Instead of calories in, think about calories stored. This is a concept Mark Sisson talks about on his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple. Part of the problem with trying to increase your caloric expenditure (exercising) while simultaneously decreasing your caloric intake (dieting) is that this sends signals to the body that it is in danger. In the interest of your survival, several hormonal mechanisms are activated. First, cortisol is raised to increase your blood sugar levels. If you don’t immediately use this sugar for energy, it’s then stored as fat, under the influence of insulin. The hypothalamus, a control center in your brain, will send out signals to down-regulate (decrease) your metabolism, while simultaneously increasing your appetite in order to save energy and ensure your continued survival. So instead of trying to decrease your calories, to optimize for fat loss, focus on feeding your body high quality, nutrient dense foods like meat, fish, fowl, eggs, plenty of vegetables, a few fruits, nuts and seeds. (They contain fewer calories then processed foods anyway.) Also, make sure you get plenty of high quality fat in your diet. Fat DOES NOT make you fat! Repeat after me: FAT DOES NOT MAKE YOU FAT! Fat is the only macronutrient that does not provoke an insulin release when digested. Carbohydrates do (and proteins to a lesser extent) and the more processed the carbohydrates, the more insulin is secreted. Under the influence of insulin, any excess carbohydrates in the body are stored for later use as fat. This was a very handy adaptation when our species was evolving and living as hunter-gatherers. It helped us survive in times of famine and food scarcity. Unfortunately, these days, with food always being plentiful, we just keep eating- particularly carbs and processed foods- and never signal to our bodies to dip into those stored fats. So, if you are currently overweight and trying to lose fat, you will have better success by limiting carbohydrate intake to just vegetables and increasing your intake of high-quality dietary fats in order to encourage your body to use fat as its primary fuel source. (High quality fats include coconut oil, grass-fed butter and ghee, animal fats from pastured & grassfed animals, occasional use of pure extra virgin olive oil, avocado or walnut oils. Do NOT increase consumption of processed trans and polyunsaturated fats like corn, soybean, canola or vegetable oils. These introduce dangerous free radicals into the body that actually make atherosclerosis worse! Eliminate them at all costs!)
  3. Focus on aerobic exercise. During aerobic exercise, we are able to take in enough oxygen to preferentially burn fat for fuel, the holy grail for fat loss. This discovery is what lead to the ‘aerobics’ craze in the 80s. (Remember Jane Fonda and all that Lyrca?) The thing is, we’ve gotten so focused now on “burning off” all those offending calories that we’ve missed what constitutes ‘aerobic exercise.’ We think “no pain, no gain” (another terrible T-shirt from the 80s) and work harder. Except once you’re working at pace where you can no longer breath through your nose easily, you’ve exceeded this aerobic threshold. Said another way, you are no longer burning fat. Regular old walking is great aerobic exercise for fat loss. If you’re an endurance athlete, get a heart rate monitor and use the Maffetone method to calculate your aerobic threshold and then train only below that heart rate until you see fat loss.
  4. Strength train. The rate of your metabolism is primarily determined by the amount of lean muscle mass you have. More lean muscle tissue = a speeder metabolism. Also, we have some good data that shows that strength training and building muscle helps ‘partition’ your weight loss to make sure that it comes preferentially from fat tissue instead of muscle tissue. If you’ve experienced the pain of yo-yo dieting- where you lost the weight only to gain it back and again (and then some) this is your best strategy to prevent this from ever happening again! By strength training, you will keep your lean muscle tissue and therefore keep your metabolism revved up while getting rid of excess fat tissue. The best strength training to do is to lift heavy a couple of times a week in the big compound lifts like the squat, deadlift, press and pull-up. If you don’t know how to do these lifts safely, please seek qualified instruction from a certified and credential trainer or strength coach. For women, please do not worry about getting bulky from lifting heavy. If you lift heavy, for a short set of 4-6 reps and then give yourself a rest of 3-5 minutes between sets, you will signal increased strength without increased bulk (hypertrophy). Conversely, the best way to increase the size of the muscle is to do light weight and high reps. Also for the ladies, it is so empowering to lift heavy and see how strong and capable your body is! Strength training is a veritable fountain of youth for both men and women as its keeps joints strong and healthy while keeping metabolism high so as to prevent those extra pounds from creeping on each year.
  5. Exercise really hard on occasion. Once you’ve got all that down- eating an appropriate diet, walking or slow running (or whatever exercise method floats your boat) and strength training, then its time to add in a few bouts of sprinting. This only needs to be and should only be done 1-2 times a week and doesn’t have to be very long. One study found that women who sprinted hard on a bicycle for 8 seconds, followed by 12 seconds of rest for a total of 20 minutes, over 15 weeks, had lost 3 times as much body fat as their counterparts who cycled at a steady pace for 40 minutes. (Most of this fat was from their thighs and buttocks too!) Research shows that high intensity interval training has the ability to decrease insulin signaling (decrease fat storage), decrease blood glucose and increase fat oxidation- all in way less time than steady-state cardio. And it doesn’t take much. One or two, short high-intensity session as week is all you need.

So there you have it- 5 simple steps toward obtainable and sustainable fat loss that will also help you become healthier in the process. Sure, there are other ways to lose fat- like crash dieting or becoming a cardio junkie, but those methods ruin your hormone balance and/or increase your level of inflammation and chronic disease risk.  And if you’re just going to ruin your health in the end, what’s the point of doing all that hard work in the first place?

If you’d like to start a journey towards losing fat and getting healthier in the coming year, but are unsure about how to start or need help staying on track, you may want to check out the New Year, New You! whole-food based cleanse that I am offering starting in January. You can learn more about the program here. 

7 Paleo diet weight loss mistakes

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weight loss through healthy eating

Did you start a Paleo diet this year hoping to lose weight? Have you seen all the buzz about other people who have lost weight on a Paleo diet without counting calories, all while eating bacon and butter to their heart’s content? Are you becoming frustrated that you aren’t seeing the same results???

You aren’t alone!!! If you aren’t losing the weight that you want to, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is something wrong with you or that “Paleo doesn’t work.” There are several common mistakes that newbies and seasoned veterans alike make when it comes to Paleo eating for weight loss. I’ve made a few myself. In this post, I’d like to share with you 7 of the most common reasons people don’t realize their weight loss goals on a Paleo diet.

  1. You’re eating too much. At some point, calories do matter! I wrote more about this here, but the ‘unweighed, unmeasured’ ideal of Paleo works best for people who have a lot of weight to lose, who are making the switch away from a really poor diet to begin with or who already have good appetite control. If you only have 10-20 pounds to lose, already eat a decent diet, or tend to struggle with strong cravings or emotional eating, you really need to do some tracking of your caloric intake for a few days. You don’t need to to obsess about it, but you may find that you are eating 800 calories just in nuts. Or maybe you’ve been a little too liberal with the grass fed butter. Healthy fats are good for you and essential to a healthy diet, but remember that they do have more then twice the number of calories per gram as protein or carbs, so they are easy to overeat.
  2. You are too inflamed to lose weight right now. Whenever there is chronic inflammation in the body, cortisol is secreted in order to control and suppress the inflammatory response. It acts like the brake on the whole thing. Cortisol will also affect blood sugar regulation and under the influence of the cortisol, we tend to store more adipose (fat) tissue, particularly in the abdominal region. If you have unaddressed food allergies/intolerances, autoimmune disease or hormone imbalances, your cortisol is going to be too high and this will make weight loss more difficult. In this case, the first and primary focus should be calming down the inflammation. Once that is addressed you can begin to eat and exercise in a manner that will support your weight loss goals.
  3. You aren’t sleeping enough. Yes! You can sleep your way to a skinnier you! Sleep deprivation increases cortisol levels. Also during sleep, the body produces growth hormone, which helps build & repair muscle and burn fat. It has also been shown that a lack of sleep can lead to increased cravings and less ability to resist those cravings. If you aren’t getting enough sleep or aren’t sleeping well, you’re not going to be able to reap the full benefit from any exercise that you are doing or from the diet changes that you have made. Eight hours of sleep a night needs to be the minimum. Sleep in a dark room with as little noise as possible. Remove electronic devices from your bedroom. You can read more about good sleep hygiene here.
  4. You are over or under exercising. Exercise is a stress to the body. It works by actually tearing the muscles a bit or putting stress on the bones, and when the damage is repaired, our bodies make the tissue a little bit stronger in order to be better prepared for future stresses. This means that adaptation and the benefit from exercise technically comes from the REST period AFTER the actual physical exercise! So if you are doing hard workouts 5-6 days a week, going for broke every time, you are probably over training and causing too much stress and damage while not giving the body a chance to repair and adapt to the stress. At the same time, if you aren’t doing any sort of physical activity and you have a pretty sedentary job or sedentary hobbies, you may not be giving your body enough of a stimulus to lose weight. At the end of day, fat loss depends on a calorie deficit. The most fun and beneficial way to do this is to eat a nourishing, whole foods Paleo diet while increasing your activity a bit. You don’t have to be an exercise junkie or have a gym membership, just try incorporating more walking into your day, riding a bike to do errands in town, etc. You can also find plenty of quick, bodyweight exercise routines you can do from home on the internet. Jump squats, push-ups, pull-ups, planks, burpees are all great full-body exercises that can be done in various combinations and sets to get a short HIIT workout in without even leaving your house.
  5. You aren’t eating enough protein. Protein helps repair muscles and tissue and also provides satiety from a meal. A minimum standard for protein is 0.8 grams per pound of body weight. If you are trying to lose weight and especially if you are exercising more, I recommend people aim for 1 gram per pound of body weight in protein a day. (Also, the math is WAY easier!) So a 150-pound person should aim for 150 grams of protein a day. A large egg contains approximately 7 grams of protein. So if you are only eating 1-2 eggs in the morning, you might need to add a denser source of protein to your breakfast. Try adding some leftover chicken, pork or beef from dinner the night before. I also like to add a tablespoons of grass fed beef gelatin to my coffee for additional 12 grams or so of high quality protein.
  6. You are eating too much or too little carbs. If you followed the USDA food pyramid guidelines, you’d be eating 300g or more of carbs a day. Processed foods, because they often contain a lot of hidden sugar, are also really high in carbohydrates. Carbs in and of themselves are not bad, but carbohydrate intake has to be matched to activity level. If you sit at a desk all day and don’t exercise regularly, eating lots of sweet potatoes and bananas is probably going to stymy your weight loss efforts. Conversely, if you are doing Crossfit 4 days a week and eating 50g of carb a day, you may find that your performance is suffering. Also, you may find your carb carving increase to the point where you can’t resist gorging on non-Paleo dense carbs, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to eating healthier in the first place. A  good range for most people to start is 100-150g of carb a day. After a month or so, see how you look and feel. If you are leaning out, but still have energy and aren’t craving sweets all the time, you’ve hit the sweet spot with carbs. (Bad pun definitely intended.)
  7. You are eating to many nuts/snacks/treats. I find a lot of people are addicted to snacking. A question I hear often, is “what can I eat for snacks?” Ideally, you shouldn’t need snacks. If you have to pound two fistfuls of almonds between breakfast and lunch or you become a hunger monster, then you aren’t eating enough protein and/or fat at breakfast. Nuts are great and certainly worth eating, but because of their portability and Paleo-friendliness, a lot of folks new to Paleo over-do them at first. I also see people go over board on the Paleo ‘treats’- muffins, cookies and breads made with almond or coconut flour instead of regular white flour. These can pack an even greater caloric punch without having the same feedback mechanism that tells the brain, ‘stop, I’ve had enough’ as the whole food. Treats should be just that- occasional treats, not everyday food items. The same goes for snacks. Nuts can be great to carry around and have when you’re in a pinch, but if you are trying to lose weight, don’t rely on having them everyday as a ‘snack.’ Before having a snack, check in with yourself to make sure you are legitimately hungry. A lot of people snack for reasons other then hunger- they are bored, stressed, tired or even just because its a certain time of the day. If you aren’t hungry, then find something else to do to break the habit. Drink water, stand up & stretch or even just do a mini-meditation session where you take 10 deep breaths, and just focus on the breathing. If you, however, legitimately hungry then have your snack and try to make tweaks to your next meal to make it more satisfying for longer.

 

Have you been making any of these common mistakes? Feel free to share your experience in the comments below!

When calories count and when to count your calories…

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In my last post, I explained why the simple “eat less, exercise more” approach doesn’t work for everyone. I laid out how several different hormonal systems of the body regulate and control metabolism and appetite. Severe calorie restriction diets often don’t work, certainly not for the long term, because these hormone systems are designed by nature to decrease our metabolism and to store fat as a way to survive if the amount of food going into our bodies is too low. Many of the patients I work with in my practice have metabolic dysfunction. Their hormones and endocrine system are all over the place from years of stress and chronic illness. Because of this, I encourage them eat freely of a healthy, Paleo-type diet, the type of diet that will allow them to begin healing the metabolic dysfunction by stacking their diet with the most nutrient dense foods available. Their first priority is to heal the metabolic dysfunction.

But what about the healthy person who just wants to get fit, lean out and maybe drop a few extra pounds of fat? Or what about the person who has been following a Paleo diet for a while, but would like to make some progress on some aesthetic goals? For people with this sort of goal, monitoring calorie intake and maintaining a calorie deficit is what they will probably need to reach their goals.

It’s OK, and even useful to count calories if:

  1. You are generally active and healthy and just want to drop a few extra pounds of fat.
  2. You have been following a regime of healthy, whole food eating for some time (I would say at least a year.)
  3. You have a history of disordered eating and have not learned to eat according to actual physical hunger.

The key to making a calorie restricted diet effective for the long term is to keep the calorie deficit mild. If you are say, a moderately active 140 pound woman with TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) of approximately 2,100 kCal a day, suddenly dropping calories to 1,200 calories/day may trigger some of these hormonal mechanisms that will slow your metabolism and make weight loss difficult. It also means that when you return to “normal” eating you are more likely to gain back all of the weight you lost. So if you are going to go to the trouble of counting and monitoring caloric intake, use the following strategies to insure that your hard work and effort pays off and that you can maintain your new, HEALTHY body for the long term.

  • Gradually increase your caloric deficit. If you are aiming for a 500 calorie/day deficit, start with 100 calories one day, then 200 calories the net and so on. This is less likely to flip off the “warning bell” systems in the brain.
  • Consider keeping calories from food constant and burning more through exercise. An extra 10 minutes of cardio at the gym, doing errands on bike or by foot where possible, and playing outdoors more are all ways to increase your calorie a burn a bit more each day without feeling like you need to ‘refuel’ more to keep your energy up.
  • Lift weights. When people say they want to lose weight, they usually mean they want to lose fat. When dieting alone, the body will burn fat, but it will also burn some lean muscle tissue as well. Lean muscle tissue is very metabolically active and the more lean body mass we have, the more calories we burn at rest, so its important to preserve as much of it as possible. The research is clear. When restricting calories, people who lift weights while dieting lost less lean muscle tissue then those who simply restricted their calories. Since the amount of weight each group lost was similar, this means the group that lifted weights lost more fat tissue then those who did not. The other bonus to lifting weights and maintaining your lean body mass is that when you return to ‘normal’ eating, your BMR (basal metabolic rate, or the rate of your metabolism at rest) while be higher, meaning you’ll burn more calories at rest then if you had lost lean muscle tissue. This helps to prevent the rebound or ‘yo-yo’ effect of dieting.
  • Get some sleep. Several studies have shown that when people are deprived of sleep, they eat more calories and make poorer food choices the next day. This seems to be related to cortisol and stress mechanisms that protect the brain. Getting enough sleep also helps you recover from exercise and may increase you metabolism by boosting levels of growth hormone and testosterone release, both of which help to boost your metabolism.

One of the reasons that the Paleo diet helps so many people lose weight is that they decrease inflammation and subconsciously decrease their caloric intake as well (usually). Whole foods are nutrient-dense, but not as calorically-dense as processed foods. In many cases, this creates enough of a calorie deficit that many people will lose weight, especially if they increase their activity level a bit. However, if you are eating a whole-foods diet, have cut out all the junk and are still having trouble losing weight, it may be time to go over your diet with a fine tooth comb, count up the calories and see where you might be “leaking energy” or unconsciously taking in more calories then you need. I did this recently and discovered I was probably taking in way more healthy fats then I needed to be. With this awareness and a little work to maintain the calorie deficit, you can be on your way to reaching your aesthetic goals in a healthy, effective manner.

Why you should ditch your diet

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It’s January 8, 2014 already. Are you still on the straight and narrow, following your resolutions to get leaner and meaner this year? Or have you given up and gone back to your old habits already?

If you resolved to eat better this year, what happened? Wait, wait don’t tell me. You got too hungry. At some point your stomach was growling, your blood sugar was dropping and you said, ‘to heck with it, I need to eat, now!’

And that is exactly why diets don’t work.

I’m here to tell you, you’ve been sold a wrong bill of goods. If you’ve been told you just need to “eat less and exercise more,” and have done just that, to no avail, it’s not you, it’s them. You are not lazy, you are not gluttonous, you are not weak, but you are metabolically broken.

See, calories in = calories out is a math equation. It even has some basis in physics. It works on paper. It doesn’t work in real-live human beings. Here’s why:

HORMONES.

Think about it. Long ago, the amount of fat tissue we carried was crucial. Fat is very energy dense and is our stored reserves of energy. We needed a certain amount of it in order to survive, especially if food became scarce. If you’re female, you definitely needed a certain amount of fat in order to support a pregnancy, which is why females have a higher body fat percentage then males and why they will stop menstruating if their body fat percentage gets too low. Too much fat tissue isn’t ideal either. Back when we lived on the savannas, too much fat tissue would have made it more difficult to escape predators. It’s just like Goldilocks, we need the amount to be “just right.”

Ever notice how some people seem to have no problem maintaining a certain weight, despite their eating habits, while others just look at food and seem to gain weight? Well, there is a reason for it. Several actually, but its a complex topic so I’m only going to address a small part of it here. Researchers who study this sort of thing have proposed a ‘set-point’ hypothesis of weight regulation. What that comes down to is this… the brain has a set point, or weight, that it would like to maintain. It then does everything it can to maintain this weight.

This means that when we eat LESS, our brains DECREASE our metabolism and INCREASE our appetite, to make sure we take in and hold on to enough calories to maintain that set-point weight. Conversely, if we are eating too much our brains should be telling our bodies to INCREASE our metabolism and DECREASE our appetite in over to burn off the excess energy.

Ever notice that animals in the wild don’t get fat? They can get big… there’s enough food out there to make an animal as big as an elephant or as small as a mouse, but they don’t get obese out there. Part of the reason for this is the set-point theory.

Now, how does that come back to hormones? Well, hormones are how your body talks to your brain- and vise versa- about regulation of energy. The thyroid gland, for instance. Normally, if your thyroid gland is humming along and putting enough thyroid hormone out there, the brain is happy and doesn’t need to ramp it up by secreting TSH, thyroid-stimulating hormone. But if thyroid hormone production gets too low and metabolism drops, normally the brain will increase the amount of TSH in order to stimulate the thyroid gland to make more thyroid hormone. Normally. In the case of hypothyroidism, the brain may be telling the thyroid gland to make more thyroid hormone, but the gland can’t for some reason or other. Or maybe it can, but it can’t get delivered to the cells where it will increase metabolism for one reason or another. The result is that metabolism is slowed, while appetite stays the same or increases and the net result being weight gain. Is this person lazy? Are they a pig? Are they lacking self-control with food? NO! Their endocrine system is out of whack and foiling their efforts! (Having hypothyroidism is a not a get out of jail free card here. You still need to watch your diet and exercise, but just know that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this to get results, and if you are going with the old ‘calories in= calories out’ model, this is definitely the WRONG way to get the results you want.)

Another hormone that plays a key role in weight regulation is leptin. Leptin is actually secreted from the fat cells. It then talks to the brain about how much energy we have stored in the fat. The more fat tissue we have, the more leptin we make and vise versa. In normal, metabolically healthy individuals, more leptin signals from the body, especially if we are already at or slightly above our set point, means that our brain tells our body to increase metabolism and reduce appetite to burn off some of extra stored fat tissue that we don’t need. Less leptin signals do the opposite- decrease metabolism and increase appetite. Here’s the problem though, most obese individuals have what’s known as leptin resistance. The fat tissue is making  plenty of leptin, but it has been doing so for so long that the brain doesn’t respond to it anymore. Imagine if someone is yelling at you all the time, so you start wearing ear plugs all the time. The ear plugs protect your ears from the yelling, but if that person decides to start whispering, you can’t hear a thing. It’s the same idea with leptin resistance and the only way to get more leptin to get through to the brain is to make more fat tissue.

(Breathe. Most of the science stuff is over. :-))

So if we have an obese individual with leptin resistance, what do you think happens when they try to eat less and exercise more??? That’s right, their body is now afraid that it is in danger of starving to death. It then sends out the message to DECREASE metabolism and INCREASE appetite, the  LAST two things you want to have your body do if you are trying to lose weight.

Now, how do we start getting back on track and healing our metabolism? Well, first of all EAT. Think of your metabolism like a fire- if you don’t put a piece of wood on the fire every so often, it goes out. So don’t starve yourself and make sure you eat meals at regular intervals. Some people find that eating SMALL meals every 2-3 hours is really successful for them for this reason. It keeps their metabolic fire stoked. Second, pay attention to what you do eat. Calories in=calories out became popular for a reason- because there is a certain amount of evidence that at some point, the amount of calories you do or do not take in matters. Your best bet is to eat lots of nutrient dense, WHOLE foods. Animal proteins with their accompanying fat will help keep you satisfied by preventing wild swings in your blood sugar levels. Eat most of your carbs as veggies- they have more vitamins and minerals and fewer calories then processed wheat and grain products. By getting the nutrients you need, your body doesn’t need to increase your hunger to get them. And since they are lower in calories, you can eat more while feeling fuller, sooner and longer with fewer calories. Bonus: this method of weight loss doesn’t trigger the brain to defend the set-point weight in the same way as simply forcing a drastic calorie reduction on the body.

In time, when your body learns and begins to trust that it will be fed enough food on a regular basis and it will be fed nutrient dense foods with all the vitamins and minerals it needs to be healthy, it can heal the metabolism and begin to let go of the excess energy it was holding on to, thinking a famine was imminent. Losing weight this way is more natural, requires less discipline and lasts much longer then ‘crash diets’ with drastic calorie restrictions.

So ditch your diet. Eat real, whole foods exclusively. If it has a label with a calorie count on it, it’s probably a good idea to put it back on the shelf. Steer your cart over to the produce aisle and the meat case, where the food requires no labels, because its just food.

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