Permalink
Before I actually start writing this post, let me make one thing clear. I hope I make you uncomfortable. I actually hope I make you really uncomfortable. If I’ve learned anything in life, whether in the gym, in the kitchen, or just every day in general, it’s that progress comes only with discomfort. If you want to move forward, whether it’s with your body, your relationships, or your career, you will have to get uncomfortable. You might even experience some pain. Heck, you might even get hurt once in a while. But as Derek Poundstone, a world class powerlifter, and generally considered the world’s strongest man, once said, “Isn’t pain, and the occasional injury, a far better route than the chronic disappointment of never really getting anywhere?” With that in mind, on we go.
With this post, I’m hoping to address something I see day in and day out, but most often in the current season of summer preparation: Summer diets. There are few other topics that are so interesting to such a wide array of people, that are generally accompanied with such a vast amount of misinformation. Specifically what I want to address regarding summer diets, are the hordes of fad and crash diets that always seem to be sprouting up and sweeping through the general public. Atkins, South Beach, Master Cleanses, blah, blah, blah. It seems like just about every week you can fill in the blank with something new. “Hey! Have you heard about the ——- diet?!?” I recently heard about some friends that were on some kind of crash diet that had them “guaranteed to get skinny in six weeks!!” and had these poor girls eating only 500 calories per day. 500 CALORIES PER DAY. “It’s ok,” they tell me, “because of the various things you eat, you don’t feel hungry at all!” Great. Tricking your body into suppressing the hormones that signal hunger because it needs nutrients to function sounds like a great way to lose weight! (SARCASM)
While I have several complaints, and a very focused amount of anger regarding these types of diets and programs, I’ll try and make my arguments as concise as I possibly can. I’ll try and keep my statements more generalized, but if you’d like me to go into more detail about anything, and provide you with an actual scientific explanation of what I’m saying, please feel free to email me.
I will start by saying that virtually none of these diets have any basis in science, and the ones that do are loosely affiliated with credible scientific information, at best. In fact, it’s very likely that in order to even follow these diets, you had to buy something. A book, an E-Book, access to a website, or something of the sort. This is your first sign that you need to be wary of what you’re getting in to. Virtually anyone, with no sort of credible background, can write and publish a book on these subjects, and no publisher cares how accurate or how dangerous these diets are. Why? Because they’re out to make a profit. Plain and simple. And these publishers know that the more obesity and weight issues soar out of control in this country, the more people will be willing to shell out their money for something that offers them any type of hope.
However, it’s the advertising that draws everyone in. “Lose X amount of pounds in X amount of time! All you have to do is follow this simple diet!” Now let me say, of course it’s possible for you to lose weight on any number of these diets. The reason they get popular enough to become fad diets in the first place, is that there are results. You might try one of these major calorie cutting crash diets and look exactly the way you want for the summer. The main problem I have with these type of diets, is that they do nothing to effect any type of long-term, positive change in any of the users. It’s all about results, NOW!! There’s no type of thought towards the future. So you go through all this crazy hoopla and calorie cutting, and maybe you lose the weight. But since you’re only on the diet for a certain amount of time, only looking for certain results at the end of it, the bad habits that got you overweight in the first place are still with you. You’re so focused on one goal, that once you reach it, most likely you’ll end up overindulging or bingeing when you reach the end.
This is especially true if you’re on a ridiculous calorie restriction diet, like the one I talked about before, with my friends eating 500 calories a day. Scientifically, what happens on these kind of diets, is that your body realizes that it’s not getting enough nutrients to function properly, and so it goes into a sort of starvation mode, where it’s expecting to be starved and deprived of what it needs to function. While your body will burn through some fat stores in these scenarios, what will happen more and more, especially the longer you’re on the diet, is that your body will start to break down muscle and organ tissue in order to get the amino acids it needs to carry out basic cellular function. This is what ended up happening to “Dr.” Atkins, creator of the Atkins diet. His body became so deprived of energy sources, that it began breaking down muscle tissue to help facilitate proper function. The problem is that, at a certain point, his body recognized that the heart is made of a very strong type of muscle fiber, and began breaking that down. He died of cardiac disease induced by his own diet (seriously, look it up). So with your body in this starvation mode, once the diet is over and you start eating normally again, your body’s natural response will be to store everything that comes in as fat, in case it has to go back into starvation mode. So after the diet ends, and you went through all that work, you’re just going to start putting on weight again. Fast.
In fact, it’s estimated that of participants in popular diets who lose weight, over 80% of them will put the weight they lost back on in the next two years. Like I said, it’s because they haven’t focused on changing their habits. It’s those habits that derail your diet, and keep you from achieving the results you want in a long-term setting. Let me break something down for you. One pound of fat consists of 3500 calories. Anyone who knows anything about nutrition and dieting (in an actual scientific manner), will tell you that with a healthy diet plan in place, you can expect to lose 1-2 pounds a week. So put that into context: If you’re losing 1-2 pounds of fat a week, and a pound of fat is 3500 calories, that means you need to come in 3500-7000 calories under your base calorie needs for a week. That’s between 500 and 1000 calories per day under your base calorie needs for your body to maintain it’s current weight. This number differs for every single person, and is known as a BMR, or a Basal Metabolic Rate. There are a few different calculations required to figure this number out, but any trained professional at a local fitness club should be able to help you figure this number out. Once you know that number, you can start trying to employ a healthy calorie deficit in your diet.
Now I know this isn’t what you want to hear, because you’re tired of all that unsightly weight, and you want to get rid of it now. However, I’d be willing to bet that you didn’t get fat in six weeks. To expect to get skinny in that amount of time is completely ridiculous. In actuality, it probably took you a few years to put on all the extra weight you’re carrying. The truth is, when sticking to a solid and healthy weight loss plan, and losing that 1-2 pounds a week, sure it might take you an entire year to lose that 50-100 pounds you want to lose (if you’re really overweight), it might even take you a couple years, or more, but you’ll also be spending that time developing habits that will stick with you the rest of your life, and that will help you keep the weight off for the rest of your life.
One thing that makes me sadder than anything, is hearing of a friend going to start a workout routine, and then bingeing afterward on fast food or high calorie restaurant meals or drinks, or any combination thereof. They always say, “I worked out today, I deserve this.” Really? You deserve to take all the hard work you just did and throw it all away on a high calorie meal that negates any progress you might have made? With an hour of intense weight lifting and an hour of cardio, an intense 2 hour workout, you can expect to burn somewhere around 800 calories. A splurge meal at McDonalds of a Big Mac, with a large fries and Coke clocks in at over 1300 calories. So if this is how you’re treating yourself after your workouts, no wonder you’re not making any progress and not sticking to a solid program! If no one else is saying this to you, let me be the first. You deserve better. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should never splurge or never treat yourself, there is a time and a place for those things. But if you finish your first workout in a few weeks and your first reaction is to get in your car and gun it to the drive thru, you’re cheating yourself out of the results you want and deserve!
To put it plainly, if you really want to see weight loss results, there are two things you need to focus on. Diet and exercise. Sure you’ve heard that before, but that’s the hard route. But as we’ve discussed before, these are the habits that help you lose weight, and keep it off, as opposed to being a crash dieter that gains all the weight back in time because your habits haven’t actually changed. The easiest way to describe the relationship of diet and exercise in weight loss, is like the two wheels of a bicycle. If one tire on your bike is flat, sure you can still ride it, and you can get places and make forward progress, but it’s going to be a lot harder than if both tires were working properly. When both wheels are working with each other, it’s smooth sailing.
If diet and exercise are something that you struggle with (and truth be told, we all do sometimes! Even those of us who have been active in the fitness lifestyle for years!), the thing that will help you the most is an accountability partner. Someone who is invested in you and your interests, and who pledges to help you start and maintain a healthy lifestyle. If none of your friends are interested in helping you start a new lifestyle, consider a personal trainer or a nutritionist. Yes, there is a monetary investment involved, but if results are something that you’ve desired for a long time, but have always eluded you, sometimes it’s best to get some help from an expert! As fitness professionals, these people are invested in you and in your success.
I know that with my clients, I always want to try and provide the best accountability I can. I’m going to ask you if you’ve worked out since the last time I saw you. I’m going to ask you how your diet is going, ask you if you’ve been cheating on it (and trust me, I know when you’re lying). So consider hiring some outside help if you can’t count on anyone in your life to help you out. I guarantee that once you start and stick to a program, and start seeing some positive results, your friends will shut up if they’ve been berating you about it.
If you’re totally lost about the idea of what’s a healthy diet and what’s not, you are not alone. As a certified fitness trainer and (soon to be) certified fitness nutritionist, I can help! I offer one on one nutrition counseling sessions, and we can do them via email and skype if we need to! If that’s something you’re interested in, or if you have any questions in general about anything I’ve talked about here, please email me at marcus[at]marcusbaney.com and we can start a discussion! I hope this was helpful and informative, and I hope that the next time someone asks you if you’ve heard of the hottest new diet craze, you can point them in the right direction, an actual nutrition expert!
thoughts on life, love, photography, and lifting.
