Fat loss isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s an all out war

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Fight it with everything you’ve got. 

Deciding what to eat is a choice you have to make over and over again every single day.  It’s a choice that has a direct impact on how good you feel, how good you look and how healthy you are, so it’s up there amongst the most important choices you ever make.  So let’s give it the priority that it deserves and really think about you eat, when you eat it, in what quantities and how often.  That’s what this e-book is about. 

It can be pretty hard to navigate your way through the vast mountains of information about what to eat, and it can seem easier to give up and rely on your tastebuds to guide you.  But while this may be easier, unfortunately it’s also a rubbish system.  Tastebuds have often been corrupted by high sugar, high salt and high fat foods.  They are easily seduced and not overly discerning.  Pretty much, tastebuds are tarts!  In which case I’m going to show you some ways to help you eat with your brain (I know that sounds gross, but I think you know what I mean...).  When you eat like that, you’ll find your tastebuds will happily follow you anywhere. 

Right then – let’s get down to it and give you some ways in which you can take good care of this body of yours.  The first point, and it is one you’ll have heard before, is that at the basic level, it’s all about calories in vs calories out.  Not much of a secret I grant you, but it is the cornerstone of all that which follows. 

Calories in vs calories out is the fundamental concept behind being the weight and shape you want to be.  Calories in must be less than calories out if you want to lose weight – 3500 calories is the size of the deficit you need to lose one pound.  Over the course of 7 days, this works out at 500 calories a day.  Burn 500 calories a day more than you eat, and you’ll lose 1 pound a week.

How can you know how many calories to cut?  There’s a couple of ways – either calculating what you burn or working out how much you eat. 

I find it’s actually pretty hard to calculate how many calories you burn during the day because it’s based on so many factors – body composition, metabolism, frequency, intensity and duration of activity, lots of things.  The best way I think – which is far more do-able – is to work out how many calories you are eating.  All you need to do is spend a few days becoming familiar with what you eat, how many calories each item is worth and add it up each day.  Do this over 7 days and you’ll get a great idea of your calorie intake.  Then you have a baseline from which you can calculate a deficit, and you’ll know your diet well enough to have ideas on where those cuts can be made.

Personally I reckon this is a fantastic thing to do because it’ll also teach you more about the relative calorie contents of your favourite foods.  If you’re going to stick at a healthy weight for the rest of your life you need to know what you are eating – if you have no idea how many calories are in a chicken stirfry, homemade lasagne or a double pepperoni pizza, how are you going to choose between them?  And tastebuds don’t count, they are too easily led remember?  You really aren’t going to thank them the morning after, believe me...

Before we get cracking on some of the insights, let’s get one of the fundamental points sorted.  Losing weight is not the same thing as losing fat!

You can lose fat without losing weight.  You can also lose a lot of weight but only a little fat.  How’s that possible?  Basically, because along with fat you can also lose energy stores, water weight and muscle.  Rapid weight loss is often the product of eating a freaky diet which cuts out food groups and encourages your body to get rid of lots of things that you need – so you get lighter, but also weaker, less healthy and more likely to store fat in the future.  This approach won’t make you look great either – it tends to promote an untoned, “skinny fat” look, where you are thinner but holding onto fat in all your problem places.  If you want the sexy body that you are proud to take to the beach with you, you need fat loss. 

Have you ever worked out hard, eaten really well and not lost as much weight as you expected?  If you have, I’m going to bet that you found it irritating at best and completely demoralising at worst.  I want you to think about it with this new perception.  If you were lifting weights regularly as part of your workout, is it possible that as you lost fat you also gained some muscle?  And wouldn’t this have offset some of the weight of the fat you lost?  Yep!  So you can lose 2lb of fat without losing 2lb of weight, see?

Muscle weighs in heavier than fat – it’s a denser material.  What’s fantastic about it is that a pound of muscle takes up less space on your body than a pound of fat.  It looks good – toned and tighter – and you end up wearing smaller clothes!  That’s what you’re after, right?  So who cares what the scales say?  You will lose weight, but if you have the right training plan, i.e. one which involves weight training – you may not lose it as fast as you may originally have thought.  The weight of the fat you lose will be partially offset by the muscle, or lean body mass, you gain.

 
In a nutshell, if you want to have a gorgeous body that looks fantastic, you need to be focused on losing fat.  Forget about the scales.  Get the tape measure out instead. 

Back to calories then, and another not-very-secret but rather crucial observation is this - you are burning calories even while you sleep.  Now, that probably sounds obvious, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to state the obvious!  There’s so much talk about how exercise burns calories that you can end up with the impression that you only burn calories when you jog, cycle or do something energetic.  What is true is that activity burns calories.  And the body is active all the time, just at varying degrees.  The lowest level is while you are asleep, when your body is using calories to keep your heart beating and your lungs breathing.  The highest level is intense exercise, when a lot of calories are used to contract your muscles, accelerate your heart rate, activate your energy systems and all that stuff.  So - the more you move, the more calories you burn.  Simple.  But that’s not the whole story when it comes to calorie burn.  There’s another magic bodily function you can turn to your advantage – your metabolism.

Metabolism is the king of fat loss.  Wrap your brain round this point and you’ll have the ability to make your body a fat burning powerhouse.  If you can speed up your metabolism to turbo charged levels, it’s one of the real fat loss weapons in your arsenal, because you’ll burn more calories whatever you are doing, even during sleep.  So if you want to lose fat while you sleep (how appealing is that?!), rev up your metabolism. 

Contrary to what a lot of people think, the speed of your metabolism is in your hands.  “I can’t lose weight, I’ve got a slow metabolism” is a load of crap – sorry, but it is!  It’s just an excuse.  You can speed up your metabolism and there are various ways of doing just that.  One of the most powerful is exercise – when you exercise your metabolism goes up, and if you do the right kind of exercise at the right intensity, you can keep your metabolism elevated for hours, so you’d still be burning more calories long after you’ve finished your workout.  That’s a different e-book though (coming soon!).  The nutritional way of doing it is this...

First – eat breakfast, always.  Not eating breakfast can slow your metabolism by up to 10%, so EAT BREAKFAST, ALWAYS!  Deal?   

Second thing – you’ve got to eat enough!  A lot of people take the concept of “calories in must be less than calories out” to the extreme, thinking that if they drop loads of calories from their diet they’ll lose more weight more quickly, and they end up eating like a sparrow – i.e. a tiny, tiny amount.   

It is a logical assumption to make.  Want to know why it doesn’t work?  Ok.  We go back to the amazing ability of your body to do what it needs to do, and in this case it sets off the survival instinct.  At the most basic level, you need food, water, sleep and activity and your body knows that.  When you restrict your food intake too much, your body thinks it’s entered a time of famine, fires up “starvation mode” and starts storing calories as body fat to get you through the shortage.  It does this by slowing down your metabolism so whatever you do, you don’t burn anything like as many calories as you normally would.  How rubbish is that for fat loss?  You’re now set up in opposition to your body with you desperately trying your hardest to lose fat and your body not only trying to hang on to it but increase it!  So eat enough.  You are not a sparrow; you are not meant to eat like one. 

The other scary thing about starvation mode is the fact that your body starts breaking down your muscle.  This is pretty horrible in itself, but it has yet more implications for your poor old metabolism... 

The reason why?  Muscle is metabolically active – it burns 25 times more calories than fat does, just by being there in your body.  That means that if you can swop a pound of fat for a pound of muscle, you’ve just increased your ability to burn more calories while you’re sitting around doing nothing! 

If you are starving your body, it’s going to want to get rid of this muscle because it’s taking up calories that your body doesn’t think it can afford to expend.  So it gets offloaded and you make yourself less capable of burning fat and more likely to store it in the future.

 
That’s why diets like the Atkins diet are one of the biggest lies of all.  You lose weight quickly, but what’s actually happening in your body is far from positive.  Some of the quick weight loss comes from losing your energy stores which are not replenished once you’ve used them up because you aren’t eating carbohydrates.  Some comes from water that is stored with this energy.  And some comes from muscle which your body starts to break down for energy when it finds its preferred source – carbs – have been cut off. 

Both of these methods for weight loss couldn’t be more at odds with a great program for fat loss, because muscle is pretty much your best friend in the world of fat loss.  I’m not talking about big, bulky bodybuilder muscles – long, toned, slender muscles work just as well; it’s purely about increasing your lean body mass.  It’s like having a high interest savings account where the same amount of your money makes a load more interest – with a higher ratio of lean body mass, your body can increase the value of your exercise and your rest time by making it burn the most calories it possibly can. 

If metabolism is king of fat loss, keeping a balanced blood sugar is queen.  Most people think that eating fat is the biggest no-no of all in a fat loss programme, but guess what – it’s not!  Sugar is the real enemy, in all its various forms, so anything that causes a rapid rise in blood sugar.  Keeping an even blood sugar level is probably the most important thing in maintaining a healthy weight. 

The reason why it’s crucial is that clever bod of yours again.  When your blood sugar level gets too high, the excess sugar is turned into fat and stored away to protect you from having it floating around in your blood stream.  When it’s too low, you feel lethargic and experience cravings for sugary foods, tempting you to eat something which will push it high again.  In addition, when it peaks quickly, it drops quickly so you’re always either up or down, stuck on this cycle.  We need a way to get off.  The way to do it is to be really, and I mean really, picky about the kind of carbohydrate you eat, and the quantities in which you eat it.

 
To keep a balanced blood sugar, you need to be clued up on the Glycaemic Load (GL) of various carbohydrate foods.  You may have come across this concept, or that of Glycaemic Index (GI), before.  This is how it works.  The GI of a food tells you whether the carbohydrate in that food is slow or fast releasing and therefore whether it will cause a rapid rise in blood sugar or not.  The GL of a food adds that information to how much carbohydrate is in a particular portion and then calculates whether that makes it a fast or slow releasing food overall.   Basically, whereas GI tells you about the food generally, the GL tells you the impact on your blood sugar of an average portion of that food which is much more useful.  For example, watermelon has a high GI but you’d have to eat a massive amount of it to get a serious rise in blood sugar, so it has a low GL.

To maintain an even blood sugar, eat low GL carbohydrates.  These will give you a slow, sustained energy release and prevent unwanted fat storage from excess sugar.  Add a lean protein and a little good fat to your low GL carbohydrates and you’ll stabilise your blood sugar further, as neither fat nor protein have any appreciable effect on blood sugar.

If you need more convincing as to the power of GL in fat loss, here’s a study for you.  2 groups were given a diet with the exact same amount of calories and an identical balance of protein, fat and carbohydrate.  The only difference was the type of carbohydrate: one had low GL, the other had high.  The high GL group gained weight, whereas the low GL group lost it.  So although the same amount of calories were taken in, the results were completely different. 

The best resource I have found for easily identifying and quantifying the amount of carbohydrate to eat in relation to low GL is: http://www.gl.patrickholford.interactiveprofiling.com/ - well worth a look. 

By now, if you apply all the principles in this book so far, your diet is on the way to being a powerhouse of fat loss which will have you eating your way to looking gorgeous.  Next principle - and one which is hugely important for eating great – eat little and often!  You’ve probably heard that a million times before but has anyone ever explained the reasons behind it?  Probably not, right?  Well, here they are - the reason to eat little, and the reason to eat often. 

Here’s the “little” part of the equation.  When you eat more calories at one sitting than your body needs at that point, it can’t use them all.  So, and this is especially true if the meal is one which pushes up your blood sugar quickly, whatever it can’t use is going to be stored as fat.  When you eat little and often, by contrast, you only give the body what it needs and can use at each sitting. 

The reason for “often” is two-fold.  When you leave longer than 3 hours between eating, two things happen:

• Your body drops into mini starvation mode.  Survival instinct takes over and slows your metabolism in order to store fat and this inhibits your fat loss.
• Your blood sugar drops and leaves you vulnerable to sugar cravings, tempted to eat junk or whatever is to hand.  Not only do you then usually end up eating more calories than you need, but if those are sugary calories you know those are an absolute killer to fat loss. 

So there it is.  Eat little and often – in practice this means 3 meals and 2/3 snacks, all roughly the same size.  The easiest way to do it is to take your daily calorie allowance, divide that between 5 or 6, then repackage those little calorie bundles into breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, mid afternoon snack, dinner and post dinner.  It helps to remember that breakfast, lunch and dinner are just social concepts – there isn’t an unwritten law that says certain foods can only be eaten at certain times.   You can have turkey breast for breakfast if you want, you can have porridge for dinner and if it fits better to split your lunchtime sandwich into two – one for lunch, one for your mid afternoon snack – do it! 

There’s an added bonus too.  Eating low GL, little and often, will give you constant energy.  You know those post lunch slumps, where you feel all sleepy and lacking in energy?  Well, they’re not meant to happen.  They occur when you’re on the blood sugar “spike-drop-spike-drop” cycle.   Eat low GL and little and often and you’ll be firing on all cylinders all day.

Now you know what kind of carbohydrate to eat, here’s the perfect mixer – protein, which is completely essential in fat loss for three big reasons.

1. Protein helps stabilise your blood sugar even further by slowing down the digestion of carbohydrate, when eaten together
2. Protein supports your efforts to get a speedy metabolism by underpinning your weight training through providing the building material to increase your lean body mass.
3. Protein helps to keep your serotonin levels high –but only when paired up with carbohydrate.  Yet another reason never to wander off down the low/no carb diet path!  Serotonin controls your appetite – so the more you have, the less you eat – and keeps you feeling happy – so the more you have, the less you eat.  Pretty useful in fat loss!  Here’s the science.  For a lot of people, when they try to lose weight they end up lacking in tryptophan – an essential amino acid found in protein foods.  This means they will have low levels of 5HTP – which produces serotonin – and therefore low levels of serotonin itself.

When you eat a high protein, low/no carb diet, you make it near impossible for your body to have high enough levels of tryptophan.  I know that sounds backward, because it’s found in protein foods, but it’s actually insulin – produced as a result of eating carbohydrate – that drives the tryptophan into your brain.  Without insulin, tryptophan just floats around in your bloodstream, meaning that serotonin is not produced.  Make sense?  In a nutshell, you need serotonin to control your appetite and your mood, and to get this you need protein and carbohydrate.

So there you go – the most important nutrition principles to promote fat loss, in my experience.  I have applied all these principles to my diet and found them all to be brilliant in helping me to achieve the body I want.  I’ve also applied all the opposites to these principles – eaten high GI, eaten very high protein and very low carb, eaten big and infrequent – and so can say from experience also that these promote fat gain! 
In the meantime, happy eating!

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