So while you may have weighed a fairly lean in college, when you were active and too poor to afford a lot of food, you stayed around that level of weight. Anyhow, the issue of set vs. Towards this goal, the body can, in premise anyhow, adjust metabolic rate, appetite and a whole host of other systems up or down to try and defend against changes in bodyfat or bodyweight. Your body senses this and should decrease metabolic rate, increase appetite, decrease activity levels and make fat mobilization and loss more difficult in response.
This would make it progressively more difficult to lose weight and easier to regain the lost weight once it was lost. Depending on a host of circumstances, including gender, genetics, and starting bodyfat percentage with some others , the body does this pretty well.
This all serves to make regaining fat after the diet that much easier, something anyone who has fallen off their diet knows all too well: the fat comes on much more rapidly then it came off. I should mention there that this is part of the reason that exercise has been shown to have a greater effect at helping to maintain weight loss than to increase weight or fat loss on a diet: exercise helps to offset some of the negative adaptations that occur after weight loss.
In the reverse direction, the body should increase metabolic rate, decrease appetite, increase activity and make fat mobilization easier when you gain weight. However, for reasons discussed in detail in my Bromocriptine book, the system is asymmetrical and most people find it far far easier to gain weight than to lose it. In general, we gain weight pretty easily as the rapid increase in obesity in the modern world demonstrates and lose it with more difficulty.
I should mention that a lucky few appear to resist weight gain, their bodies tend to radically increase caloric expenditure and decrease appetite when they start to overeat or gain weight.
However, they are in the minority. There is also a group of people who seem to lose weight and fat fairly easily, they too are in the minority. Depressingly enough, the same people whose bodies resist weight gain the most tend to lose weight the most easily and vice versa: people who find weight loss the most difficult find weight gain relatively easier.
Researchers refer to these as spendthrift lose weight easily, gain weight with difficulty and thrifty lose weight with difficulty, gain weight easily metabolisms and are busily trying to determine the mechanisms behind the spendthrift metabolism so they can figure out ways to help the thrifty metabolism people.
Until the mechanisms behind the different types of metabolism are determined and solutions which will either require long-term drug intervention or gene therapy are developed, dieters simply have to accept that some people will have a harder time than others.
How does this work? Rather, I want to sketch the basics since it will be important later in the booklet. And, of course, the output then affects the input, forming a loop. The equivalent of the thermostat in the temperature example above is a part of the brain called the hypothalamus.
Sort of tangentially, how the setpoint is set is still being researched. Some of it is assuredly genetic, some people are simply born with a higher setpoint than others. There also appear to be critical periods in development, while you were a fetus, immediately after birth, puberty and pregnancy are a few places where the setpoint can change almost always going up based on the environment mainly nutrition and food intake.
There is also some evidence that becoming and staying fat can almost permanently raise the setpoint. There is almost no data indicating that the setpoint can ever be brought back down, at least not within any reasonable time span.
Studies of both animals and humans who have maintained weight loss for several years shows no spontaneous recovery of metabolism, it remains slightly depressed. My best guess: if the setpoint ever comes back down, it does so after years and years and years of maintaining a lower weight.
In that most people will regain the weight within a few years, this is the same as saying that it never happens. For years, this was the primary question, what was the signal that told the brain what was going on.
Well, metabolic rate can be adjusted upwards or downwards due to changes in nervous system output and levels of thyroid hormone. Appetite and hunger can change, sometimes drastically.
Spontaneous activity can go up or down which is part of why people tend to get lethargic when they diet. Levels of other hormones such as testosterone, estrogen and progesterone can be affected. This is shown schematically vastly simplified in figure 2 below. Hormones, activity Bodyweight Food intake Basically, the brain more or less adjusts the function of the entire body in terms of metabolism, appetite, activity, and hormones when you either undereat or overeat.
In general, the response to overeating is the opposite of what happens with undereating: metabolism increases, appetite goes down, spontaneous activity increases, hormonal status improves. But, as I mentioned above, the system is not symmetrical and the body is far better at defending against weight loss than weight gain for most people.
As well, women tend to better defend against weight loss than men for some rather clear evolutionary reasons discussed, again, in the Bromocriptine booklet ; their bodies fight back harder against diet and exercise programs. But, this is an incorrect interpretation of the data. However, put them in the modern Western environment, with easy access to inexpensive, tasty, high calorie food and low daily activity requirements and they will get fat.
A good and heavily researched example of this is the Pima indians, a group that is divided into roughly two different environments but which share identical genetics.
One group of Pima is living the standard Western lifestyle with rather minimal daily activity and easy access to tasty, high-calorie foods; the other is living a much more traditional lifestyle with high levels of daily activity and a more traditional diet. The first group shows a much more extreme prevalence of obesity and Type II diabetes than the second.
Human biology works through tendencies and people seem to show varying abilities to resist or act against those tendencies. That is, people clearly do lose weight and successfully keep it off. Are they hungry? Are their bodies slowing metabolism? But they simply ignore those signals and control their food intake and increase activity to compensate. Basically, they lose weight and keep it off regardless of the biology that is trying to pull them back to their previous weight.
How do they do it? They do it by changing their behavior fairly permanently. Which is basically just a rather long winded way for me to introduce the next few chapters.
Do diets fail dieters or do dieters fail diets? This is only true inasmuch as it ties into the other issues I want to discuss in the following chapters as well as what I discussed last chapter. Who you ask determines the answer you get. They turn it into a discipline or a laziness issue. The idea that maybe the diet or their overall dieting paradigm is inherently flawed is not even considered. On the other side, dieters tend to blame the failure on the diet, for a variety of different reasons.
Of course, there is some truth to both of the positions and I want to look at both sides of the issue in the next two chapters. These two ways are being too absolute and expecting perfection and by thinking only in the short-term. So there. Which is altogether fine as long as they stay on the diet.
The problem is that any slip, no matter how small, is taken as complete and utter failure. The diet is abandoned and the post-diet food binge begins. We have all either known or been the following person: one cookie eaten in a moment of weakness or distraction, the guilt sets in, and the rest of the bag is GONE perhaps inhaled is the proper word. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, right? As a side note, you can oftentimes see the same attitude with people starting an exercise program.
The first few weeks go great, workouts are going well, then a single workout is missed. The person figures that any benefits are lost because of missing that one workout and they never go back to the gym.
My main point out that there are times most of them when obsessive dedication or the expectation of perfection becomes a very real source of failure. Sure, if it drives you towards better and better results, such an attitude will work. But only until you finally slip. Athletes who have a short time to get to a certain level of bodyfat or muscle mass, for whom victory or defeat may hinge on their ability to suffer for long enough are one.
I mentioned some others in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, situations where individuals need or want to reach some drastic goal in a very short period of time; even there I included some deliberate breaks for both psychological and physiological reasons. Not unless you make it one. For everyone else, seeking perfection means seeking failure. Focusing only on the short-term The second primary way that dieters fail diets is focusing only on the short-term and this applies in a couple of different ways.
The first is a reality issue. For someone with a large amount of fat to lose, 50 or pounds, this may mean one-half to a full year of dieting. Consider the reality of that, you may have to alter eating and exercise habits for nearly a year just to reach your goal. Do you really expect to be hungry and deprived for that entire period?
I thought not. As a second issue: a lot of dieters seem to think that once they have lost the weight with one diet or another, they can revert to their old habits and keep the weight off. So they change their eating habits drastically, drop the weight and then go right back to the way of eating that made them fat. And, to their apparent surprise, they get fat again. This actually makes a profound argument for making small, livable changes to your eating and activity habits and avoiding the type of extreme approach that I described in my last booklet.
Maybe we should just think long-term instead. As I talked about in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, there are situations where an extreme diet can be used initially and used to move into a proper maintenance phase.
If nothing else, you get to eat more when you move back to maintenance, the types of foods you allow yourself may change as well. The body is really good at storing incoming calories as fat after a diet and if you return to old eating habits, you can just watch the pounds come flying back on.
To hopefully cement this point in your mind, studies of successful dieters those who have lost weight and kept it off for some period of time, usually years have shown several very consistent behavior patterns of which this is one: they maintain the dietary and exercise changes they have made in the long-term.
One exception to what I wrote above There is, however, one major exception to the above that I should probably mention and that I discuss in greater detail in my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook.
Or a woman who needs to drop 20 lbs. Even athletes who have to make a weight class sometimes have to do scary stuff to get where they need to be, usually involving fluid restriction and frequently severe dehydration.
But the consequences of not making weight whatever they may be are greater than the extreme approaches that tend to be used. No sane bodybuilder expects to maintain contest shape year-round, and no weight class athlete expects to maintain a severe state of dehydration year round.
They get in shape for their event, and relax to some degree for the rest of the time. So the above sections really are aimed at the person looking to lose fat and keep it off long-term. In that case, where maintenance is just as important as the loss itself, absolute attitudes and focusing only on the short-term hurt far more than they help, and should be avoided as much as possible. First you have to let go of your absolutist attitudes, which can be hard. Second, you need to start taking the long view to both your weight loss and dietary and exercise habits.
In the last chapter, I discussed the two major ways that dieters tend to fail diets, by being too absolute and expecting perfection and by focusing only on the short- term. In this chapter, I want to discuss the ways that diets themselves can be the problem: by causing too much hunger, and by not being matched to the dieter. Too much hunger One of the biggest causes of diet failure is plain old hunger. By decreasing or reducing appetite through chemical means, these types of drugs cause weight loss.
And most will eventually quit working as the body adapts, unless you keep increasing the dosages. Unless they are used along with changes to diet and exercise habits, any weight loss effects are purely short-term anyhow.
By extension, a good long-term diet should do at least some job of controlling appetite. Many diets fail in this regards. Part of the problem is that human appetite is brutally complex and every new piece of research only adds to the complexity of the system the chapter on bodyweight regulation addressed this very briefly.
This is a topic where a book should and could be written. Yeah I know, get on it Lyle. One of these days. Human appetite is regulated by an incredibly complex number of biological systems including but not limited to: the physical stretching of the stomach, the levels of different nutrients in the blood, brain chemistry, and even changes in fat cell size.
Humans are also one of the few animals who eat for purely non-hunger related reasons. Individuals with severe insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia and rebound hypoglycemia low blood sugar may get rebound hunger from even small amounts of carbohydrates in their diet, others may fill up on a slice of bread or two.
Others have no such luck, and overeat because of the high dietary fat content that can occur with such diets. Outside of every other important issue, human appetite and hunger is simply too complex for a single diet to control them in every situation. This gets into the topic of the next section, that the diet must be matched to the dieter.
Even with that said, it would be a rare diet indeed that completely blocked appetite forever. A lot of people bitch a lot about having to restrict their food intake. Those are your choices. Even athletes and bodybuilders, who should be prepared to suffer for their sport, will complain in this respect. And again, that's just physiology. Eventually, you would probably binge on it.
The idea that a diet can be too restrictive or too absolute goes hand in hand with what was discussed in the previous chapter. On top of dieters enforcing ridiculous amounts of food restriction themselves and expecting absolute perfection, many diets go even further in restricting food options. High sugar carbohydrates have to be pretty much restricted on diabetic or ketogenic diets, the PSMF described in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook mandated specific foods as it was trying to minimize caloric intake while ensuring essential nutrient intake.
Additionally, some people seem to have what approaches food addictions regarding certain foods or categories of food , these are sometimes called trigger foods. If those folks eat even a little of their trigger food, they will eat a ton of it.
Clearly, in that situation, complete avoidance or very controlled intake is the only solution. But in most cases, you can generally find happy compromises.
Not matched to the dieter Although there are exceptions, the grand majority of diets out there are fairly simple one-size-fits- all approaches, something I mentioned briefly above. Yes, there may be some slight individualization usually in terms of protein intake or calories but sometimes not even that but for the most part, diet book authors tend to take a one diet for all people approach.
The majority of mainstream nutritionists and RDs take the same attitude. To say that I find this approach absurd is an understatement. Although humans share the same general physiology, there are always subtle differences. Any physician knows that the drug that will work optimally for one person may not work as well for another, even if they suffer from the same disease.
You find the same thing in exercise programs. While there are certainly general principles that apply to just about everyone, there is most also certainly variance in what people respond to. Some individualization is always needed.
Of course, this makes it very difficult to write a diet book since people tend to like having simple answers handed to them on a platter. Of course, it takes less thought on the part of the person giving the diet advice and makes writing diet books much easier.
This type of approach also appeals more to the American public. As necessary, I will make specific comments in the individual chapters on the flexible dieting strategies and how different diets might apply them.
The first is that it has to cause an imbalance between your energy expenditure via daily activity and exercise and your energy intake from food. I do the same, and discussed this topic in more detail in the now, altogether too often mentioned Rapid Fat Loss Handbook as well as in this book.
For example, since fat is calorie dense contains a lot of calories in a little bit of space , low-fat diets tend to cause people to eat less, at least initially. Then they invariably start eating more of the foods that they are allowed and weight loss stops or reverses. Low-carbohydrate diets work, to a great degree, the same way. Of course, they too usually end up eating too much over time, increasing their intake of allowed foods such that weight loss stalls or reverses.
And they all more or less work, at least in the short-term. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them being that protein is the most appetite blunting nutrient; people who eat more protein tend to eat less calories and stay full longer. As well, diets higher in protein tend to cause slightly more fat loss and slightly less LBM loss. Additionally, higher protein intakes stabilize blood glucose compared to higher carbohydrate intakes which helps to stabilize energy levels as well as hunger.
Bottom line, get plenty of protein, preferably from leaner sources like chicken, fish, low-fat meats. Dairy calcium is turning out to have some nice benefits in terms of health and fat loss so a source of dairy protein milk or yogurt for carb based diets, cheeses of varying sorts for low-carb diets is also a good idea. A good diet should also contain plenty of roughage, vegetables and some fruits, noting that fruits can be surprisingly high in calories sometimes which goes a long way in keeping you full.
Additionally, some provision for essential fatty acids the fish oils that the media keeps talking about should be made.
Some studies have found that moderate fat intakes show better adherence, especially compared to very low-fat diets which tend to taste like cardboard. Folks doing more high intensity exercise tend to need more carbohydrates than those who are not. Folks who are insulin resistant seem to do better both from a diet and health perspective when they reduce carbohydrates.
I will say that in general, people who feel great on carb based diets tend to do poorly and and feel horrible on low-carbohydrate diets, they feel lethargic and listless. By the same token, individuals who find that their energy levels crash badly on carbohydrate based diets tend to do well and feel great when they reduce carbohydrates and increase protein, fat and fiber. In both cases, the cause is essentially the same. In both cases, the solution happens to be the same: flexible dieting.
You may already have a reasonable idea from reading the previous chapters but just in case and to pad out the length of this booklet , I want to go into a few more details in this chapter. What is flexible dieting? Now you come up against one of those situations that I mentioned in the foreword. Say you eat that single cookie. So you had calories extra from that cookie.
Now you get a craving for something sweet. Which generates the same, if not more, guilt to boot and you throw your diet out the window. The latter attitude would be consistent with flexible dieting. A birthday, a dinner party, whatever. Of course not. Unless you make it into one. Consider the final example from the foreword, a situation where you have an extended period where following your diet will be more difficult.
There actually a couple of workable approaches to this type of situation. One is to simply do the best you can, damage control if it were. I say cool mainly because of the fact that the scientists failed so miserably in their goal, while making an absolutely wonderful discovery.
Obes Res That is, the researchers wanted to determine what behavioral things happen when people go off of their diet for some period, and why they have trouble going back on. So the subjects were first put on a typical diet meant to cause weight loss. Then the subjects were told to go off the diet for either 2 weeks or 6 weeks so that the researchers could see what happened when people fell off their diet but hard and started regaining weight. So the scientists completely and utterly failed to reach their goal of studying what they wanted to study.
That is, knowing that most people who go off of a diet for even a short period will balloon up, regaining weight rapidly, and fall off their diet, what made this study or these subjects different? The basic issue seemed to come down to that of control.
Suddenly something comes up that is out of your control. A stressful period of life, the aforementioned vacation, whatever. Feeling out of control, you figure your diet is blown and the binge begins.
Does this sound familiar at all? But consider what happened in this study, the subjects were told by the researchers to go off their diet; in essence, the break was part of the diet. I suspect that that was the key difference and why the study failed so miserably: control.
Which brings me to one more word of introduction. This is especially true for rigid dieters who are trying to adopt flexible dieting attitudes. So rather than let your diet breaks fall where they may although there may be situations where this is unavoidable , I think having a bit of control over them, at least at first will be the most useful. With time, you may be able to diet successfully and apply the flexible dieting concepts less rigidly.
Basically, I consider the use of those kinds of testimonials to be a little disingenuous in the first place. My mom, as is the case with most dieters, has ridden the standard diet rollercoaster for quite some time. While certainly not fat, she has carried perhaps 30 pounds of extra weight with most of that coming after menopause.
Diets, for her, were generally an all or nothing affair moving from one extreme of another. One way or another, she started to adopt what turned out to be flexible dieting concepts. Last year for example, she got involved with the Weight Watchers programs one of the few commercial diet programs that I think is worth a crap. At one point in her diet, it turned out that she had a three day trip to New York, a situation similar to what I described in the foreword and above.
Which is exactly what she did. She went to NY and enjoyed herself. As a longer term example similar to the study I described above , every summer for the past many years, mom goes to Europe to play piano. But rather than worry overly about it, she does her best it also helps that she walks everywhere which ends up burning off a lot of the excess calories food wise. When she gets back to the states, she has had no trouble taking off any slight weight that she gained.
And her success at maintaining her weight loss has been much higher this time around. Nothing more and nothing less. So why did I bother to make the distinction? Which you use depends on your goals and what you have access to. Relatively lean individuals, athletes or bodybuilders, should either know what their bodyfat percentage is or have some reasonable method of estimating it. Calipers would be my preferred method.
Another possible method, although fraught with potential problems are the bioelectrical impedance bodyfat scales Tanita is a common brand. The problem is that these devices are drastically affected by hydration, a large glass of water or a big piss can alter the number. Now, what about everybody else? That is, say we have two individuals who are 6 feet tall and weigh lbs..
However, recent research allows us to use BMI to get a rough idea of bodyfat percentage. All you need to know is your height and scale weight. Simply cross- reference your weight and height and find your BMI on the table. If you fall in-between values, just pick the middle value. Putting the number to use In my last booklet, I had readers use their estimated bodyfat percentage to determine their fat mass and lean body mass since I had them using their LBM value to set up the diet in terms of protein intake.
In this booklet, I still want you to go ahead and estimate your bodyfat percentage and estimate LBM as well. Please note that, to a degree, the separation between these categories is arbitrary, it would be more accurate to put them on a continuum. However, for ease of use, I have to make the divisions somewhere and this is where they fall. If not, checking for changes every weeks is generally sufficient.
Now that you have estimated your bodyfat percentage and determined your dieting category and LBM level, I want you to make a rough estimate of your current activity exercise level.
You are in exercise category 1 if you are performing some type of weight training a minimum of times per week for an hour or so. Category 1 also includes endurance athletes such as runners or cyclists who are either doing fairly long workouts hours at a decent intensity or intensive workouts near lactate threshold or above.
Just as it sounds, this is a single meal that breaks your diet. Someone on a low-fat diet might have those french fries or pizza or something greasy. Someone on a Zone type of diet would simply eat without worrying about achieving some specific ratio of nutrients. Dieting nonstop for extended periods on end gets to be a real mental grind.
Also, if you have any sort of a social life family or dating , a free meal gives you the ability to eat with everybody else without being a huge pain in the ass. A free meal is NOT a deliberate attempt to see how much food you can stuff down your gullet in a single meal although this is how it is all too commonly interpreted.
The problem I all too often see is that people fall out of one psychological trap that breaking the diet at all is a huge failure on their part and into another they try to see how much crap they can gorge themselves on during their breaks. Both cause problems. As I said above, if you want those greasy french fries, or that dessert after dinner, go for it. I do, however, want to give you some suggestions on the free meal.
Under most circumstances, I think a free meal is best eaten out of the house, at a restaurant. Also, the going out aspect of the meal gives it more of a reward type of flavor, a special treat for your dieting efforts. The reason for this suggestion has to do with getting back into the swing of the diet. If you make your free meal lunch or breakfast, it can be psychologically difficult to go back to your diet for the rest of the day.
If you make dinner your free meal, by the time you wake up in the morning, you should be ready to get back into your normal dieting rhythm.
As above, it would probably be ideal if you at least kept up some of the parameters of your normal diet and make relatively healthy choices. Just go ahead and have some of the forbidden stuff too.
So try to make sure and get a source of protein and a salad at least, something healthy. To that you can add some of the forbidden stuff. The low-carber might add a baked potato or some bread or dessert , the low-fat dieter might add fries or something greasy, as I mentioned above.
Some previous approaches to the free meal concept for example Protein Power by the Eades have further limited the free meal to one hour in duration. I want to give you one final warning: do not be surprised if your bodyweight spikes a little bit the next morning, especially if you eat a lot of carbohydrates at your free meal this is more true for folks on low-carbohydrate diets.
Avoiding the scale the morning after a free meal may be a good idea, especially if you are the type of person who gets overly concerned about short-term spikes in bodyweight. This includes bodybuilders getting ready for a contest although they may find that structured refeeds discussed next chapter are a little more appropriate.
Taste buds take time to adjust and adding free meals in too early can be a way to prevent you from getting away from the types of foods that made you fat in the first place. But this takes a few weeks at least to occur. At that point, the free meals can be incorporated. Finally, you should generally space out your free meals on nonconsecutive days, rather than having them on two days in a row. So rather than having a free meal on Thursday and again on Friday, have one on Wednesday night and the other on Saturday perhaps as part of some type of social event or special occasion.
Space them out on nonconsecutive days, you are still on a diet. Although a structured refeed has psychological benefits similar to the free meals, it has additional physiological benefits that the free meal lacks. I want to say right away that the structured refeed should be high-carbohydrate and ideally fairly low in fat regardless of the type of diet you are currently following. I should also mention that a structured refeed would take the place of a free meal.
You do not get to add them together and do 2 free meals and the refeed. I also want to point out upfront that even more than the free meal, structured refeeds have a real tendency to spike bodyweight because of the increased storage of carbohydrate in muscles and liver. Every gram of carbohydrate stored stores an addition 3 grams of water and this can add up to a rather considerable amount when a lot of carbs are eaten.
One of these is the refilling of muscle glycogen carbohydrate stored within the muscle which is important for individuals involved in high-intensity exercise such as weight training.
Tangentially: depletion of muscle glycogen is often used as an argument against low-carbohydrate diets for folks who are doing intensive exercise. This becomes more and more important as people get leaner into dieting category 1 and is more important for people who are exercising than those who are not. Done properly, structured refeeds can be used to rebuild muscle that is often lost on a diet.
This is discussed in more detail in my Ultimate Diet 2. Finally, and perhaps most importantly relative to most readers of this booklet, deliberately overeating carbohydrates helps to normalize most, if not all, of the hormones I talked about back in the chapter about bodyweight regulation: leptin, ghrelin, insulin, peptide YY, etc.
Overeating carbohydrates works to normalize all of these hormones. I should mention that it is somewhat debatable whether short refeeds 1 day or less have much of an impact on metabolic rate, appetite or hormone levels.
But first, the obligatory warning and comments on what not to do Just as with the free meals, there are a couple of rather standard abuse patterns that people tend to fall into when they start doing refeeds or cheat days as some sources call them. Along with that is the same pattern with the free meal but on a larger scale: they seem to go out of their way to put the worst kind of crap foods down their gullet during a refeed. Keep in mind that the goal of the structured refeed is to eat a lot of carbohydrates, not a lot of carbohydrates and fat.
There are plenty enough high-carbohydrate, low-fat types of foods out there to keep most people happy. Along with that, people throw out all sense of decent nutrition that they have developed on whatever diet they are currently following. They go from following what it, hopefully, a sane diet and eat the worst crap they can.
To that, they can add some of the high-carbohydrate goodies that are currently forbidden on their diet. Some general guidelines for the structured refeed I mentioned some of the common problems that occur with refeeds above in the warning and I want to reiterate that structured refeeds should not be used as an excuse or rationale to see how much crappy food you can stuff down your gullet. Non-resting energy expenditure includes calories burned through exercise, fidgeting, shivering or standing, as well as the energy your body uses to digest food.
Calculating total daily energy expenditure gives a dieter an idea how many calories they burn in a given day. Most websites that promote flexible dieting recommend calculating your total daily energy expenditure with the Mifflin-St Jeor Equation, as explained below.
Many studies have shown that this equation is more effective than others at accurately predicting calorie needs 3 , 4 , 5. Based on the equation, you can calculate your total daily energy expenditure as follows 6 :. This number is then multiplied by an activity factor to estimate your total calorie needs 7 :.
To lose weight , the dieter then subtracts a percentage of calories from their total daily energy expenditure to create a calorie deficit. For example, a dieter who calculates his or her need to be 2, calories would subtract calories daily to lose weight.
However, dieters can decide their calorie deficit based on their individual weight loss goals and activity levels. Macronutrients are the nutrients your body needs in the largest amounts: carbohydrates, proteins and fats. These nutrients provide calories and have numerous important functions in the body 8.
However, dieters can also calculate macros on their own by breaking down their total calorie needs into percentages of carbohydrates, protein and fat based on their specific goals. The great thing about flexible dieting is that dieters can tweak their macronutrient ranges depending on their lifestyle and weight loss needs.
A dieter looking to shed significant weight may want to go with a lower carbohydrate range, while an athlete may want to opt for a higher carbohydrate range 9 , After determining their calorie and macronutrient needs, followers of flexible dieting simply track their calorie and macronutrient intake, being sure to stay within their set goals.
There are many ways to do this, though the most popular way is to use one of the many websites or mobile apps available on the market. Most food-tracking apps have endless databases that allow users to look up any food and portion size to determine calories within seconds. Apps are helpful because they allow you to track your meals and snacks on the go without the hassle of writing anything down.
The hardest part of flexible dieting is the process of calculating your calorie and macronutrient needs, which some people may find intimidating. Luckily, the diet itself is easy to follow. There are no complicated recipes, food plans or endless lists of items that are off-limits. Dieters simply choose the foods they would like to eat, staying within their set macronutrient range and calorie needs.
Multiple studies have shown that people who follow programs that allow greater flexibility in food choices are more successful at keeping weight off over time, compared to those who follow stricter diets Following a super-restrictive diet or cleanse can be difficult, especially when you are out with friends or on the go. Flexible dieting allows users to have more freedom with food choices, making it easier for dieters to stay on track, even at parties, restaurants or when limited food options are available.
Though many diets are hard to stick to, the adaptable nature of flexible dieting may make it easier for people to follow for a longer period of time. Flexible dieting can be a convenient way for people who follow diets with specific macronutrient needs to meet their goals. For example, those following very low-carb or high-fat diets can track their macronutrient needs using flexible dieting.
Athletes and those with specific fitness goals can also benefit from flexible dieting, calculating their macronutrient goals based on their training schedules. Although the freedom of flexible dieting may work for those with strong self-control, some people may struggle to hold themselves accountable for their own food choices. As long as dieters are staying within their macronutrient and calorie range, they could theoretically choose as many unhealthy foods as they want on the flexible dieting plan.
While you can lose weight choosing unhealthy, nutrient-poor foods as long as a calorie deficit is achieved, your health and well-being will suffer. To stay healthy, dieters should keep highly processed treats to a minimum, while focusing on nutrient-dense foods like vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, healthy fats and complex carbohydrates.
This is a great learning experience to play around with these ratios and find out what works for you. Just know that those ratios are based in science to be great to stay within but going up and down those ranges are perfectly fine! In the comments below, tell me how many calories you thought you were eating before tracking and how much you really were eating.
Here is it so keep the momentum going! And if you did not read the first post of the Flexible Dieting series, be sure to check it out because it goes over why Flexible Dieting works and why most diets do not. Do I have your attention!? In this guide, I am going to cover: Our tool kit How to translate the nutritional label bulletproof you from all the BS Tracking our food intake How to weigh foods with or without food label How to calculate your caloric needs How to calculate your perfect macros Most important FAQs answered Before We Begin If you have yet to read the first post where I outline the basics of Flexible Dieting then go ahead and read it first because none of this will make sense if you skip right to here.
How to use myfitnesspal video Not going to reinvent the wheel. Fellow flexible dieter Tyler Mayer did a great job in this video explaining everything you need to know. Did you know you can even more coaching on nutrition principles like the ones covered here? High Protein Peanut Butter. Low Carb Protein Pizza.
Low Calorie Chocolate Chip Cookies. Protein Cookie Butter Powder Recipe.
0コメント