"Don't diet in a straight line." If you just read that and have no idea what it means, I will explain in a little a bit. But first... Ever wonder why you still see fat manual laborers? Let's pretend you're an office worker. One day you come to the realization that a desk job is just not for you, so you quit and sign up to be a garbageman. Your first day on the new job is brutal. The next morning you wake up and are so sore, you can barely get out of bed. You think about calling in sick, but then you come to your senses and realize you don't want to be fired on your second day so you drag yourself to work anyway... Part 1: Beware of fad diets. Part 2: Don't focus on losing weight. Focus on losing fat. Part 3: You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. Part 4: Stop obsessing over calorie counts. Part 5: Don't diet in a straight line. Continuing with the garbageman story... You'll probably lose a lot of weight from all that physical work at first. But after a while, the job won’t have the same effect anymore. You won’t get anywhere near as sore, and your weight will stabilize, if not start to creep back up. What happens is your body gets used to it and becomes more efficient, burning less calories to do the same job. Welcome to the law of diminishing returns. Dieting follows this law too. When you stay on your diet for too long, your body adapts and slows down your metabolism.[1][2] Eventually, you need less and less food to keep burning fat. This was that third problem with the "Calories In minus Calories Out" equation that I wrote about in Part 4 of this series. If you stay in the same caloric deficit every day for weeks/months on end (what I call dieting in a straight line) you will not see linear results like the chart on the left. You will get the chart on the right instead. That 500 calorie a day deficit won't lose you as much weight in three months as it will now. In order to keep progress going, you will need to make whatever it is you’re doing harder to have the same effect. Just like how a drug user will need a stronger dose of the drug in order to get high. Just like how a weightlifter will need to move on to heavier weights in order to keep getting stronger. A dieter will need to eat less and less food in order to maintain the same caloric deficit as his/her metabolism slows down. Obviously, you can’t whittle away your food intake to nothing. So what can you do instead? Instead of eating lighter every single day for weeks on end, take planned breaks from your diet where you eat normally (ex - once or twice a week). Just don't eat so much that you gain everything back. Eat normally. Sort of like "two steps forward, one step back" ... not to be confused with "one step forward, two steps back." An alternative is to try fasting on occasion, while eating normally the rest of the time. You don't need to be in a caloric deficit every day in order to lose weight. You only need to be in the deficit over a period of time. Eat normally for a few days, and have one day where you don't eat anything at all (or only one regular meal). Then go back to eating normally. If you fast for one day and go back to normal, your metabolism won't slow down permanently like it does with long term dieting. To that point, a study was done that, among other things, looked at the metabolism of weight loss participants who fasted completely every other day for 22 days. Although, in my opinion, fasting every other day to lose weight is a bit too extreme, it is interesting to note that the average resting metabolic rate at the end of the study was only slightly lower than at the beginning (the variance was less than 100 calories and within the Standard Error Margin)[3]. Again, this was from fasting every other day. Think about this analogy, if you lose your job and have to settle for another one that pays less, you will need to start cutting your expenses if you want your finances to stay afloat. On the other hand, if you're self employed and had one day where almost no customers came in, but all the other days were fine, you'll say to yourself... "it was just one bad day." You're not going to start re-evaluating your whole business model or anything like that because of one day. You will need to see a sustained pattern before you do all that. The whole point of dieting this way is so that you don't give your body enough time to recognize that there's a pattern... ie... "Calories have been low for weeks now. He/she must be starving. Better slow down the metabolism if we want to stay alive." Your metabolism slows down because of signals from hormones.[4] You want to interfere with this process enough so that the effects don't accumulate too much and ruin your metabolism permanently. Don't just limit it to a diet break every few days. You may even want to take a whole week or two off every few months or so where you eat normally and then resume your diet. Give your metabolic hormones some time to recover. Continuing with the fasting idea I mentioned earlier... It's similar to what I tried when I did Intermittent Fasting, except like an idiot, I was skipping the same meal every day. As expected, I lost a good amount of fat the first few months and then plateaued. The fat loss didn't restart until after I took a break from this regime for a few months. I know that for some people, the idea of taking a break from your regime of diet (and exercise, if you're still doing that too) is hard. I am one of those people. In my mind... if you are taking a break from something, you are slacking... every time you take a break, you are delaying your goal. This is not how the real world works though. Very few things happen in a straight line. You must fight your mind and realize that the breaks are part of the process. Understand that if you go too fast and too straight, you will stall out and not get to the finish line. And even if you do... in a few years when you look back, it won't matter that you reached your goal weight in April 2009 instead of February 2009. In fact, don't sweat it too much if you regain a little bit during your diet breaks. Just think of the big picture. "Two steps forward, one step back." "Two steps forward, one step back." If this is still hard to fathom, here is a "scared straight" story about what happens if you "diet in a straight line" ... There used to be a reality show on TV called the Biggest Loser. Those of you living in the United States are probably familiar with it. The contestants were pretty much forced to diet and exercise for hours on end every day and get yelled at by drill-sergeant like coaches while they were doing it. The contestant that lost the most weight won. It should not have come as a surprise that this intense protocol destroyed everyone's metabolism.[5] One guy ended up burning 800 less calories a day than he did before he started.[5] This persisted for years and most regained weight.[5] One more reason to take a diet break Even if everything I just said about metabolisms turns out to not be true, there's another good reason to take occasional diet breaks... to hedge your bets and save you from yourself. Let's say you decided to ignore my advice in Part 1 and went all-in on some fad diet with, as of yet, undiscovered health consequences. "I don't care what anyone says. The potato-only diet is the healthiest thing ever thought of and all the scientific research agrees." A diet break will give your body a chance to repair some of the damage. In summary...
Frequently asked questions Q: Fasting? You can't be serious. That's too hard. A: I'm not saying you have to fast in order to lose weight. I am only presenting it as an option. I'm also not talking about going days without food. Fasting could be something as simple as not snacking between meals. If you can do that with no problem, you can also try skipping a meal, for example, dinner, and not eating until breakfast the next day. Even with a 24 hour fast, you're still eating that day (if you eat dinner on Tuesday, you don't eat again until dinner on Wednesday - remember, the hours you sleep count toward the fast!) And in all seriousness, fasting is not something bizarre or out of the ordinary. People have fasted for thousands of years. Many religions incorporate fasting. Jesus fasted. In my Church, you're supposed to fast before Communion. So if you plan on receiving, it means you're not eating breakfast on Sunday. Fasting is definitely something worth trying. And you won't "lose your gains" either... I say this from experience. Part 1: Beware of fad diets. Part 2: Don't focus on losing weight. Focus on losing fat. Part 3: You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. Part 4: Stop obsessing over calorie counts. Part 5: Don't diet in a straight line. Thank you and God bless. References
Image credits
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
September 2016
Categories |