A great trainer is not
someone who is “perfect” and NEVER makes a mistake, but one who
is willing to ADMIT IT WHEN THEY ARE WRONG and make the necessary
changes.
Unfortunately, many
trainers and health “professionals” practicing today, are still
teaching and promoting ideas and strategies that are not only
outdated and fallacious, but may even be HARMFUL to our bodies and
health.
If
your trainer tends to spout “facts” that they cannot support with
sound scientific principles, it’s highly likely that they are
getting their information from non-credible sources—like muscle
magazines, internet sites, their friends, or the buff guy or gal in
the gym! Some health “experts” probably just make some of this
nonsense up!!
It’s important that your
trainer not only be certified by an accredited personal training
agency, but that they stay up to date on the latest and cutting edge
research. Many trainers are just not interested in spending this kind
of time. They feel that whatever worked for them in the past should
work just as well today. While this is partially true, it is also
half false. Many of the diet and training strategies utilized in the
past have been proven to not only be highly ineffective, but even
unsafe. In other cases, the practices they endorse are not harmful or
ineffective—it’s just that NEW METHODS HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED THAT
ARE EVEN BETTER!!!! Why not utilize new information for improving fat
loss and health that is faster, safer, and more effective?!!
If your trainer or health
professional wants you to believe what they are saying, they should
be willing to support it with proof—modern, up to date proof! Not
some outdated study done in 1923. If you ask for such proof and they
do not comply, I think you could safely assume that they may be one
(or more) of at least three kinds of persons:
An UNWILLING
person (they can
give you the proof, but for some reason they don’t want to)…or
An UNKNOWING
person (they simply do not know what they are
talking about)…or
An UNCARING
person (they don’t consider you important
enough to reveal these details to)…or
All of the above
This does not necessarily
make them a “bad” person. The fact of the matter is that trainers
are fallible too, make mistakes, and do not know everything. If they
do claim to “know everything” then I think you have another
problem on your hands—LOL! But hubris and pride aside, hopefully
your trainer is open to opposing views and respects your right to
disagree—(just be sure you are also prepared to back up your
viewpoint with solid evidence and facts).
If your trainer is
teaching you one or more of the following “Ten
Diet and Exercise Myths,” you may want to
confront them…either that or find a new trainer!!
Rather than write fifty
pages of evidence to support the following myths, I’ve decided to
point you to the resources you can check out to view this evidence
for yourself. Some of the resources I’ve attached are video
links…others are articles or studies. I encourage you to explore
these issues further. If you’d ever like to discuss these issues
with me in person or via e-mail or blog, I’d me more than happy to
oblige. Let’s get started with…
“You
have to eat ‘less” if you want to lose weight. Therefore you need
to count calories and/or exercise more if you want to lose weight.”
This
one is ABSOLUTELY FALSE!!! And to be honest, it’s not difficult to
disprove. Consider the past: In 1950 nobody was counting calories and
only 9% of Americans were obese. Today, in 2015, we have more
technology at our fingertips than ever before to count and measure
our food intake and yet 69% of us are overweight while 35% are
obese!! The real reason we are overweight is not because people are
eating too much, but may in fact be because they are eating too
little…and of all the “wrong” food. Let me explain:
That’s
a picture of me doing a nutrition lesson in one of our group classes.
This is one of the most important lessons I share. I bring two bags
of groceries into class and ask a few volunteers to come up to the
front of the room and choose just one of the two bags of food. Before
choosing, however, I explain the following facts and rules:
- They can only choose
one bag.
- They have to make
their choice without looking in the bags.
- They can eat the
entire contents of the bag over the course of the day, but nothing
else.
- Both bags contain
similar amounts of calories, so either one should theoretically be
equally effective at helping them to lose weight.
- They’d have to eat
only what was
in the bag they choose every day for a
whole month!
They
are not allowed to look in the bag, but I do allow them to hold each
bag in their hand before choosing. Most are amazed at the difference
in the weight of the two bags. The green bag is very heavy, while the
purple bag feels almost like there’s nothing in it! The purple bag
weighs about the same as your cell phone. Invariably, everyone
chooses the heavy green bag. Why?
Remember,
I told them that either
bag would be effective at helping them to lose weight. So no matter
which one they chose, they have no choice but to lose weight. So
they are not making their food choice based upon weight
loss. They also cannot see what is in
the bags, so they cannot be making their
selection based upon hedonistic
value (pleasure).
So if they are not making their choice based upon weight loss or
pleasure, what ARE they basing their selection on???? Why is everyone
choosing the same bag?!
Here’s
why: Whether we realize it or not, we humans are instinctively
hardwired to eat more whenever we can. Eating “more,” however,
does not always mean the same thing for everybody (as we’ll see in
a minute). Just because you eat more food, does not mean you ate more
calories! Here is where I prove it!
Truth
be told, the “weight” and “volume” of specific foods may be
one of the most crucial components of weight loss that exists!! It’s
highly likely that if you do not eat high-volume, low-calorie food on
a regular basis, this may be one of the primary reasons you are not
losing any weight (more specifically—body fat)!
Let’s
take a peek at the weight of each bag and the calories they contain.
I weighed and measured each item on my food scale in grams. The
purple bag contains 1,890 calories while the green bag holds 1,805.
However, there is one major difference between the two bags. The
purple bag (the one containing 1,890 calories) weighs only a mere 1.2
pounds. The green bag, however, weighs a whopping 12 pounds!!!! Even
more surprising is the fact that the bag weighing 12 pounds is
actually the bag that has fewer calories in it—(85 calories less).
I’ve replicated this experiment on other occasions where the heavy
bag weighs almost twenty times the weight of the lighter bag while
calories remained almost the same!! If you were to look inside the
two bags, you’d find that the purple bag (the light bag) holds: 3
protein bars, two slices of thinly-sliced prepackaged cheese, a small
handful of walnuts (52 grams), and a handful of dried apricots (79
grams). These are not even foods that most people consider “bad.”
Imagine what it would have been if I had filled it with M&M’s
and ice cream! Altogether the whole amount came out at 1.2 pounds and
a whopping 1,890 calories!! The 12 pound bag, however, was loaded
with raw plant-based foods (mostly veggies) and raw fruits—only
1,805 calories!!
Many
of my first time clients report eating “barely
anything at all and not losing a pound.” I
usually tell them that this is their BIGGEST
PROBLEM!! “IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW
LITTLE YOU
EAT, IF YOU EAT THE WRONG
KINDS OF
FOODS!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Conversely:
“IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MUCH
YOU EAT, IF YOU EAT THE RIGHT
KINDS OF
FOODS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
You
simply cannot get fat eating nothing but fruits and veggies!! I’ve
heard trainers say (and I know that I have been guilty in the past of
saying this myself) that “it doesn’t
matter how healthy you eat if you eat too much. You can still get fat
on celery and broccoli if you eat too many calories.”
I know now that this is complete and utter nonsense! No-one is EVER
going to get fat eating exclusively broccoli and celery!!!! It’s
impossible!!! It’s not the broccoli and celery that is making us
fat; it’s the peanut butter on our celery and the cheese melted all
over the top of our broccoli!!! It is not potatoes and rice that is
making us fat; it is the sour cream, bacon bits, melted cheese, oil,
and fatty sauces we put on top!! The fact of the matter, folks, is
that the leanest and healthiest populations in the world eat HIGH
CARB diets! Cultures that eat predominately starch-based diets (like
potatoes and rice) and veggies are the leanest and healthiest,
despite what the high protein gurus may say.
Most
dieters that count calories simply try to eat less
of the wrong
foods. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!! When you try to eat less of high calorie
foods, you’re left with only a very small quantity of food you can
eat each day. No-one can stick to that kind of diet for very long!!
However, if I told you that you could eat 12-20 pounds of food EVERY
DAY, most people would find that practically impossible!! That’s
part of the reason why eating a mostly whole food, plant-based diet
is so effective at helping people lost weight without having to count
calories or points. Consider several examples: In order to get the
same number of calories from raw spinach as one large bag of tortilla
chips (approximately 1,400 calories), you’d have to eat not 2
boxes, not 5, not 10, or even 15, but 20 BOXES OF SPINACH!!! Who
could ever eat that much spinach?! Not even me! Someone may respond
with, “Yeah, but aren’t tortilla chips carbs?” Firstly, NO! If
you look at the percentage of fat that is found in most commercially
available chips, it is largely fat from processed vegetable oils
(almost 56%). Secondly, tortilla chips are an example of a processed
food—precisely the kinds of food we are trying to avoid! Eating a
“vegetarian” or “vegan” diet is no guarantee of health or
weight loss if the majority of foods come from processed, high-fat,
plant foods. We are talking about a diet high in whole, lots of raw,
plant-based carbohydrates that are low in fat (around 10-20%) and
moderate in protein (10-25%).
Concerning
protein and weight loss, let’s consider the calorie content of a
small, lean, grilled chicken breast (140 grams) and compare it to a
similar weight (140 grams) of plant-based food. A 140 gram chicken
breast contains about 229 calories. 140 grams of broccoli contains
only 39 calories!! In order to get the same number of calories from
broccoli as one small chicken breast, we’d have to consume 11 ½
cups of broccoli!! In that 229 calories of broccoli there are 24
grams of protein. I bet you didn’t know that veggies were high in
protein, did you? To get the same number of calories from the
following foods as one small chicken breast we’d have to eat:
- 3.75 small apples
(525 grams), or...
- 3.13 cups of
cooked, sliced beets (532 grams), or…
- 3 Slices of
watermelon (712 grams), or…
- 1.6 cups of cooked
oatmeal (374 grams), or…
- 5.25 cups of
strawberries (756 grams), or…
- 1 large head of
raw cauliflower (900 grams), or…
- 35 cups of raw
spinach (1,050 grams)
In her
research, Barbara Rolls discovered that “weight” and “volume”
of food was more important than “calories” when it came to losing
weight. Barbara understood that some foods are very small when it
comes to “volume” while still packing a caloric punch!! Take
Brazil nuts, for example, like all nuts, they are very small but
contain many, many more calories per gram than most other plant
foods. Brazil nuts clock in at 6.6 calories per gram. That means to
consume 100 calories of Brazil nuts would only be about 15 grams of
food. If, however, we wanted to get 100 calories from fresh, raw
blueberries we’d have to consume 175 grams of food!! That’s 15
grams of food compared to 175!! This means that Brazil nuts have
almost 12 times more calories per gram than blueberries!! Or, another
way to look at it is that you could EAT 12 TIMES AS MANY BLUEBERRIES
AS BRAZIL NUTS to reach the same number of calories!! Eating
blueberries will never make you fat, but a small handful of nuts can
add up quickly!!! Barbara theorized that it was the “volume” of
food that was determining how much you were eating more so than the
number of calories contained in those foods. She reached this
conclusion because her research found that even when you radically
change someone’s diet, they still tended to average out around the
same weight of food consumed each day. So, for example, let’s say
that right now you average about 5 pounds of food each day. If the
entire five pounds of food you ate came from exclusively blueberries
that would only be 1,294 calories.
If, however, the same volume of food was eaten from Brazil nuts
alone, that would come out to 14,982 calories!!!!!!!!!
If you
ate five pounds of raw spinach, on the other hand, it would only come
out to 522 calories!!! So you can see that if Barbara is correct,
WHAT kind of food you eat is far more important than HOW MUCH! Many
people eating “healthy” salads load up their greens with
oil-based dressings, cheese, nuts, bacon, croutons, and dried
fruit—all very calorie dense foods. Just one tablespoon of olive
oil, for example, has 120 calories. Per gram, refined oils come out
at 9 calories per gram!! That little dabble of oil on your salad may
be where more than 85% of your calories are coming from!!
An
interesting study published in the Journal of
Clinical Biochemistry & Nutrition in May
of 2010; 46(3): 212–223. Published online Apr 10, 2010. doi:
10.3164/jcbn.09-83 by Julio C. Fraulob, Rebeca Ogg-Diamantino, [...],
and Carlos A. Mandarim-de-Lacerda
…was
entitled “A Mouse Model of Metabolic
Syndrome: Insulin Resistance, Fatty Liver and Non-Alcoholic Fatty
Pancreas Disease (NAFPD)
in C57BL/6 Mice Fed a High Fat Diet.” The
study took two groups of mice and fed them entirely different diets
for 16 weeks to see what impact “THE KIND
OF FOOD” they ate would have on their health. Both groups were
allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the “QUALITY” of the
food in each group was very different!! One group was fed a high-fat,
low-carbohydrate diet of 60% fat, 14% protein, and 26% carbohydrate
respectively. The second group was fed a high-carbohydrate diet,
low-fat diet (normal rat chow) of 76% carbohydrate, 10% fat, and 14%
protein. So both groups received identical amounts of protein; only
carbohydrate and fat were altered. The vitamin and mineral content of
both diets was identical. At the end of the 16 weeks, the mice eating
the high-fat diet were in bad shape. They were metabolically
displaying the same health concerns seen in most obese humans. What’s
interesting is that the scientists actually wrote in the study that
“Food intake was not different between the groups, but both the
energy (+38%, p<0.05) and fat intake per animal (+729%, p<0.001)
were greater in HFC (high fat chow) mice than in SC (standard chow)
(Table 2). Feed efficiency (body mass gain in grams per kilocalories
consumed) was therefore greater in HFC mice than in SC mice (Fig.
3).” So basically the researchers found that the mice eating the
high-fat diet ate about the same “VOLUME” of food as they had on
the low-fat diet. The only thing was that the calories in the
high-fat chow were much higher than they were accustomed to and they
subsequently got very fat—very quickly!!
Eating
a large volume of food is really how we are designed. It is the way
our natural ancestors have been eating for thousands of years.
However, we are designed to eat foods very low in “calorie-density.”
Fruits and veggies are the least calorie-dense foods on the planet!
Animals that are plant eaters (especially those designed to eat fruit
like us) are known to eat many pounds of food in a day. Adult
chimpanzees typically weigh somewhere between 57-120 pounds. By some
estimates they regularly consume about 9-13 pounds of food a day. An
adult gorilla (about 2 1/2 times the size of a man at close to 400
pounds) eats around 45 pounds of food a day. If we wanted to eat like
a gorilla or chimpanzee, we could roughly estimate how many pounds of
food they eat per pound of body weight and come up with a close
approximation for ourselves. If we average the chimpanzee diet, it
comes out to around .075 pounds of food per pound of body weight. The
gorilla eats about .113 pounds of food per day per pound of body
weight. Averaged together, these come up to around .094 pounds of
food per pound of body weight per day. Based upon this number, an
adult male weighing 170 pounds would need to eat approximately 16
pounds of low-calorie, high-volume, plant-based food a day to
maintain his weight! This lines up with many of the plant-based diets
that I have entered into our nutritional tracking software to provide
sufficient macro and micro nutrients. Some days I came up with over
18 pounds of food I could eat!!! We don’t get fat because we eat
too much; we get fat because we eat too little—but too little of
the “wrong kind” of food! Our digestive systems and biochemistry
are optimized to run on fresh raw fruits and leafy green veggies
(primarily). Other food stuffs, like nuts, seeds, legumes, grains,
starches, meat, and dairy should only be consumed in sparing
quantities or not at all. Heaven forbid we are consuming processed
junk food filled with fat and sugar!!!! The “kind” of food we eat
is very important as well as the volume, but we still must go
deeper!!
Another
reason counting calories is not as important as the quality of your
food has to do with the thermic effect of digesting food…
Consider
a 360 calorie piece of baked tilapia (fish) versus a 360 calorie
doughnut. If calories are really all that matter, then it really
shouldn’t matter which food you pick as long as you don’t eat
more than you need of either one. However, is this really true? If we
look at the effects of each food on our health and weight, I think
most people would admit that common sense would say NO! The baked
tilapia is low in fat and high in protein, whereas the doughnut is
high in fat and sugar, but low in protein. Aside from fiber, protein
is one of the most difficult macronutrients to digest. In fact, close
to 30% of all calories consumed from whole food proteins (not protein
powders) are lost as “heat energy” (dietary thermogenesis) just
trying to break the protein-rich food down. This means that a 360
calorie piece of tilapia actually only equates to approximately 252
calories that are actually absorbed by the body. The doughnut, on the
other hand, is very efficiently broken down and stored with
little-to-no dietary thermogenesis. This means that almost 100% of
the calories consumed from the donut will be absorbed—the whole 360
calories!! Who do you think will lose more weight—the person who
eats the 360 calories from fish, or the person eating the doughnut?
They both “ate” the same number of calories, right? However,
“eating” and “absorbing” are two different things! It doesn’t
matter how much you eat; it matters how much you absorb! So who loses
more? That’s right—the fish!! So you tell me—does “quantity”
(how much you eat) really matter more than the “quality” of the
food you eat? I don’t think so!
Foods
high in fiber are another example of how the calories in a food do
not really tell us the whole picture and why quality matters more
than quantity:
Many
studies demonstrate that fiber is not only very inefficiently
absorbed, but that it also has the ability to bind to calories you’ve
already eaten from other
foods (fat, protein, and carbohydrates) and cause them to be excreted
in your stool. The technical term for this is “Fecal Energy
Excretion.” Here’s an example of one such study here:
Fiber
is so effective at preventing the absorption of calories that many
animals that eat high fiber diets must eat enormous quantities of
food in order to survive. If we consider the diet
of an elephant, for example, we can see how astounding this is. An
adult elephant can weigh anywhere between 5,000 to 14,000 pounds.
They are known to eat between 300-500 pounds of food a day and drink
close to 50 gallons of water. However, of the 300-500 pounds of food
they regularly consume, they are only able to absorb around 40%!
That’s interesting. This means that if an elephant were to eat
15,000 calories in a day, their body would only be able to absorb
around 6,000 calories!! If that’s true (and it is), where in the
heck did the remaining 9,000 calories go?!!!!! You guessed it—in
their poo!! The elephant was unable to absorb many of the calories it
ingested largely because of the fiber content of the meal. Because
the elephant eats exclusively RAW food, the thermic effect of
breaking down the food was also much greater (meaning it was more
difficult to digest). Researchers, Rachel Carmody and Richard
Wrangham, from Harvard University have demonstrated that even if
calories remain EQUAL between two groups of animals, those eating
exclusively raw food will lose far more weight than those eating
cooked food. Eating more raw food that is high in fiber is an
excellent strategy for losing weight! While we certainly would not
want to try and eat as much fiber and raw food as an elephant, we can
still acquire many of the same benefits by even small changes.
Animals that are very much like us (most primates) eat diets that are
exclusively raw foods and high in fiber. The take away: Eat more
fibrous fruits and veggies, small amounts of protein and reduce sugar
and fat in the diet.
For a
more insightful look at why “calories in” (quantity) is not as
important as the “quality” of your food, please check out the
following links:
“Because
breakfast is the most important meal of the day you need to start off
with a BIG
breakfast to get lots of energy and to ‘start-up’ your
metabolism…otherwise you’ll eat more, later in the evening, and
turn into a fat slob.”
This
one is absolutely poppy-cock and makes no sense whatsoever!!! It
doesn’t matter what time of the day you eat a LARGE (over one-third
to one-half of the day’s total calories) meal: you’ll always get
the same result—fatigue!!! In fact, eating a large breakfast may be
the very thing that makes you gain weight!! The sooner in the day you
overeat, the less room you have for eating later in the day! Eating
large meals does not increase energy; it actually reduces it!! Why?
Well, it’s pretty basic: When you overeat, you divert blood flow to
the digestive track. It’s often referred to as “Postprandial
Somnolence.” Check out this quote from Wikipedia:
“In
response to the arrival of food in the stomach and small intestine,
the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system increases and the
activity of the sympathetic nervous system decreases. [1][2] This
shift in the balance of autonomic tone towards the parasympathetic
system results in a subjective state of low energy and a desire to be
at rest….”
When
you eat, blood flow to the digestive tract reduces oxygen to the rest
of the cells in your body. The immediate response of the brain is to
try and get you to slow down—i.e. take a nap—so that it can focus
its energy on digesting your meal!! How many of you feel like running
a marathon after eating a large Thanksgiving meal? Yeah, I didn’t
think so! A “small” breakfast is ideal. Don’t overdo it.
While
it’s true that your trainer may show you a study like this one…
…and
by all appearances it certainly appears that eating a big breakfast
is ideal (at least for these women), but BE CAREFUL—appearances are
often deceiving!! You really must pay attention to the details.
Notice a few things:
All the women in the
group were on a calorie restricted diet.
All the women in the
group ate the SAME NUMBER OF CALORIES (1,400) regardless of their
metabolic rate or whether they ate a large or small breakfast.
The study was only 12
weeks in length—it never went on to prove that the women in the
study were able to stick to their calorie reduction plan or large
breakfasts.
If we go ahead and compare
this study with a larger more comprehensive study like this one:
We see that the size of
breakfast had nothing to do with whether or not you lost
weight—UNLESS YOU WERE COUNTING CALORIES!!!!
The TRUTH is that some of
the leanest and fittest people on the planet do not even eat
breakfast!!! It’s true!! Check out this website and the
testimonials. All the science is posted as well. The author, Martin
Berkhan, is a strong proponent of “intermittent
fasting” as a fat loss strategy that
often involves skipping breakfast. I’ve used intermittent fasting
myself to drop almost 10 pounds of fat in one week!! It works
incredibly well if you do it smart and safely! Check it out here!
“You
have to eat small meals every 2-3 hours to keep your metabolism
burning hot and fast. Long gaps in-between meals (or ‘skipping
meals’) will slow down your metabolism and put you into ‘starvation
mode’—where your body eats up your muscles and slows down your
metabolism.”
For
this one, I’m just going to default to Martin again. Check out his
“Top Ten Fasting Myths” page on the website. The fact of the
matter is that the body will increase metabolism proportionate to
whatever size meal you eat, not because you eat more often!
“If
you want to lose weight you need to eat more protein—especially if
you’re lifting weights and doing endurance exercise.”
While
I certainly agree that protein is an important food to include in our
diet, most Americans should not be eating MORE PROTEIN, but LESS.
Especially if we want to:
Trim our waistlines,
Live longer,
Stroke,
Heart Disease,
Osteoporosis,
The fact is that most of
us are EATING FAR MORE PROTEIN THAN WE NEED!! So much so, in fact,
that it is causing us tremendous harm and possibly an early and
painful death!
Protein needs for
endurance athletes and weightlifters is somewhat higher than
non-exercisers, but even this intake should be far lower than what
most athletes are consuming. To establish your protein needs for the
day, check here:
“You
can’t lose weight because you eat too many carbs and all those
carbs are just converting into body fat.”
- Once
again, another big fat lie!! Carbohydrates are rarely ever converted
to any significant quantity of fat in the body (unlike the fat we
eat) unless in very extreme eating situations that most humans would
not subject themselves to daily. The same goes for dietary protein.
The fat we eat, however, is very efficiently stored as fat in our
bodies!
and…
Oh
yeah…one more thing: The most successful long-term weight loss
maintainers (participating in the National Weight Control Registry)
eat a low fat diet (less than 25%)!!
“You
gotta’ eat more fat in your diet because fat makes you feel full
and satiated and helps you eat less during the day.”
Sorry
Folks! This one is false as well! Eating fat does not increase
satiety. In fact, many studies demonstrate that it does just the
OPPOSITE—especially certain “KINDS” of fat!!! Your trainer was
wrong again; what can I say?!!!
The thing about fat is
that it’s also a myth to treat all fat as good or bad. There are
actually many different kinds of fat. Some fats are very good for
us…in fact they are ESSENTIAL. That’s why they are called
“Essential Fatty Acids.” We need plenty of these in our diet.
It’s the other kinds of fat that we really want to reduce. If you
ever get a chance to read the book: “The End of Overeating” by
Dr. David Kessler, or the “Pleasure Trap” by Dr. Doug Lisle,
you’ll get some even deeper insights into why adopting a low-fat
diet is ideal for weight loss and why fatty foods actually increase
your desire to overeat.
“Americans
are eating less fat than ever before, but people are just getting
fatter because of all the carbs in their diet. Therefore, the fat you
eat is not the problem but all the carbohydrates.”
WRONGO!!!
FAT INTAKE HAS NOT GONE DOWN in America. It has actually GONE UP!
Caloric intake has increased as well—significantly!!! This is
largely where the confusion lies. While the “percentage” of fat
consumed has gone down a little, IT IS A SMALLER PERCENTAGE OF A MUCH
BIGGER NUMBER!!! This means that the actual fat intake in GRAMS has
actually GONE UP—NOT DOWN. Check it out:
“If
you want to lose weight you have to ‘eat less’ and ‘exercise
more’. And by the way—only OUR exercise program will get you
results!”
Hopefully
by now you know that this one is false too. We’ve already looked at
why counting calories is not necessary nor ideal to lose weight.
We’ve seen that Leptin is more responsible for controlling body fat
percentage, weight, and physical activity than “willpower,”
“structured exercise,” and/or “calorie counting.” You do not
need to “eat less” to lose weight…in fact you should do just
the opposite by eating more low-fat, low-calorie fruits and
vegetables.
As
far as exercise, progressive weight training is the most effective
fat loss training you can do!!!
“You
can eat whatever you want as long as you don’t eat too
much—everything in moderation, you know.”
LIE,
LIE, LIE!!! Tell that to a heroin, alcohol, or crack addict!!! “Just
consume a little less.” That’s crazy!! The addict knows that
“avoidance” or “abstinence” is what they need to do—not
“portion control” or “moderation!” Certain “kinds” of
food are not only addictive but makes us feel hungrier. We have to
implement strategies effectively reduce or eliminate these kinds of
foods—not portion control!!!
The
most successful weight loss maintainers in the NWCR limit variety and
high fat-high sugar foods! For more evidence, check these out:
“If
you exercise more and lose weight you’ll speed up your metabolism.”
Sorry folks, it’s
actually just the opposite! Weight loss and exercise do not
permanently increase metabolism—they actually LOWER IT!!! Yes, it’s
true that metabolism is increased as you are exercising, but the
minute you stop, metabolism quickly returns to a much lower, more
efficient rate. The more fit you are and the more weight you lose,
the less calories you burn each workout and each day. The only way to
increase metabolism permanently is to INCREASE YOUR WEIGHT by
building lean muscle. That’s why so many people hit the “plateau”
when they are trying to lose weight. They just focus on trying to get
scale weight down rather than increasing their strength and improving
the quality of their food. Check it out:
Whew!!! We’re finally at
the end!! Hope you found these tips helpful. If you would like any
additional help or have any burning questions, please don’t
hesitate to contact me at:
Attention of: Bo, CPT
bo@botafitness.com
(585) 313-8874
