Eating For Fast Fat Loss
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Your Basic, Effective Nutrition Program
The world is full of diets, diet systems, and diet books. This is one of the most popular subjects of all time—and has remained so for centuries. Everybody has a different opinion on how best to achieve and maintain weight loss. But it really shouldn’t be that complicated. If you don’t eat as much, and you engage in more exercise, you lose body fat. Period, end of discussion. The complications arise because people are not machines. We are programmed by evolution to be driven to eat. Appetite is survival. And psychologists tell us that when appetite is involved—whether for food, sex, power, or whatever—emotions and unconscious drives are involved so that people often do not have conscious control over the behavior. But bodybuilders are different. For one, they aren’t just concerned with weight control. They need programs that allow them to maximize muscle mass while reducing body fat as much as possible. These can be almost contradictory factors. So just not eating as much or doing more cardio would not be an adequate program for a bodybuilder or a physique athlete. They require a more sophisticated approach.
But another thing to consider is that athletes, compared to most people, are machines. Or at least more machine-like. Successful physique competitors are almost obsessivecompulsive about staying on training and diet programs. They are the best dieters in the world. A failed bodybuilding diet would usually be considered a major success by the general public. So what these athletes need is a program that is truly effective, that is well structured, easy to understand and to follow. The complications arise because people are not machines. We are programmed by evolution to be driven to eat. Appetite is survival. And psychologists tell us that when appetite is involved—whether for food, sex, power, or whatever—emotions and unconscious drives are involved so that people often do not have conscious control over the behavior. But bodybuilders are different. For one, they aren’t just concerned with weight control. They need programs that allow them to maximize muscle mass while reducing body fat as much as possible. These can be almost contradictory factors. So just not eating as much or doing more cardio would not be an adequate program for a bodybuilder or a physique athlete. They require a more sophisticated approach.
But another thing to consider is that athletes, compared to most people, are machines. Or at least more machine-like. Successful physique competitors are almost obsessivecompulsive about staying on training and diet programs. They are the best dieters in the world. A failed bodybuilding diet would usually be considered a major success by the general public. So what these athletes need is a program that is truly
effective, that is well structured, easy to understand and to follow
How Athletes See Food
The bodybuilding diet looks at food in very simple terms (oversimplifying, actually, in order to achieve practical results):
- Protein is used to build and maintain lean body mass.
- Fat is a necessary nutrient, so it can’t be cut out of the diet entirely.
- Carbohydrate is fuel.
No matter what diet you are on and what foods you do or don’t eat, to lose body fat, you have to remain in a state of negative caloric balance over time, to reduce caloric intake and increase energy burned up through exercise. Body fat is stored excess calories, and you have to burn off those stored calories to reduce it. Period. But how far can you reduce your calories and still maximize or maintain your muscle mass? What is the maximum degree to which you can diet without hurting your physique?
Here are the answers to those questions, as developed by bodybuilders over the past several decades:
- Eat about 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass on days when you are training intensely; eat 1 gram of protein for every 2.2 pounds of lean body mass on off days or light training days.
- Reduce fat intake, but not below a level where fat represents about 20 percent of your daily caloric intake. (Eating less fat than this has been shown by the Pritiken Institute, an advocate of low-fat dieting, to be potentially detrimental to your health.)
- Reduce your carbohydrate intake as far as possible without going into ketosis. The more you exercise, the higher the minimum number ofcarbs your body is going to require. Check whether you are in ketosis by using Ketostix, available in any drugstore. If you find the test strips are changing colour, which indicates the presence of ketone bodies, increase your intake of carbs accordingly.
Carbohydrates, Insulin and Ketosis
Of course, if you want to be strong and healthy and maintain solid muscle mass, you need to be concerned with nutrition as well as calories. So if you are going to be eating less, as you have to do to lose significant body fat, you need to get the most nutritional value from what you eat. In addition to sufficient high-quality protein, you also need to ingest the right kind of fats and oils and a variety of carbohydrates, particularly green and yellow vegetables. Remember, if you neglect nutrition while trying to lose body fat, you can suffer nutritional deficiencies that aren't obvious except that you find you are not making the kind of progress in your training that you might otherwise expect. One reason that many advocate low-carb diets has to do with insulin. When you ingest carbohydrate, insulin is secreted to metabolize it (which is a problem for diabetics who are unable to do this). Excess insulin in the body has been associated with a variety of problems, including type 2 diabetes and obesity. Advocates of low-carb dieting frequently claim that cutting down on your carbs reduces this insulin response and that this is a major factor in reducing body fat. Certainly, eating a lot of simple sugars, which leads to a subsequent “insulin spike,” can be a problem (which is why eating oranges is better for you than drinking orange juice because this results in less sugar hitting your system in high concentrations). But another factor is involved in the insulin response called “glycemic index,” which is a measure of how quickly various types of foods are metabolized by the body. The faster a food is metabolized, the higher the glycemic index. (This term has largely replaced the concept of carbs being higher or lower in complexity.)
Glycemic Index
Simple sugars have a high glycemic index and stimulate a rush of insulin to metabolize them. Starches trigger insulin response to a lesser degree and vegetables, protein, and fats still less. But when you eat both high- and low-glycemic foods at the same time, the indexes are “averaged” because lower glycemic foods bring down the index of the ingested foods as a whole. So it is possible to eat higher glycemic foods without triggering a spike in insulin production as long as you are eating lower glycemic foods (vegetables, protein, fat) at the same time. In other words, drinking orange juice on an empty stomach has a very different effect on insulin than drinking the juice along with a meal of bacon, eggs, and hash browns. Of course, advocates of low-carb diets and ketosis diets bring to bear all kinds of scientific “evidence” and research to support their views. But if Atkins and other low-carb diets are so effective, and so many millions are trying them, why is the population continuing to become more obese? And why in this culture of obesity are bodybuilders and other athletes able to get more ripped more predictably than ever before— to a point never before seen in human history?
If the proof is in the pudding, then it’s obvious that bodybuilders and physique competitors know more about successful dieting than any weight-loss “guru.” So if you’re looking for a super-effective means of reducing body fat while maximizing lean body mass, it makes sense to follow the methods used so successfully by the bodybuilders.