nourishment it needs.
This is a survival mechanism (probably left over from our caveman days) that keeps you alive when food is at a minimum. So when you skip meals and drastically cut calories, your body can’t differentiate between a real famine and you just deciding not to eat. It just knows it’s starving, and slows down your metabolism to desperately hold on to every critical calorie it gets. It’s a fight your body wins, which means those love handles are going to cling fast to your sides.
Here is more bad news: The fact that you are always hungry ultimately leads to binging and overeating, and when that happens, your body thinks, “Finally, some food! I’d better store it for later,” and retains as many calories as possible as — you guessed it — icky fat. Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, director of education, prevention, and outreach at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center (a division of Harvard Medical School) who treats eating disorders says, “If you begin to restrict or think obesssively about food, you are very likely to binge.”1
You can gain weight due to the famine stress reaction, even when eating only twice a day and with limited portions. Consider this incredible story. A woman complained to her doctor about being depressed and having low energy. When asked what she ate, she told him she had one bowl of soup at lunch and one yogurt at dinner. That was it. Nothing else. Not even a raisin. Since she wasn’t consuming enough calories in those two “meals” to sustain her basic dietary needs, she was constantly fatigued and depressed. On weekends, she rewarded herself for all her suffering by binging on junk food, which accounted for her overweight condition. This is because her body frantically accumulated all the calories in her fat cells to use as energy during the long week of starvation. She had been following the I’ll-just-eat-less-and-lose-weight logic for five years, never once questioning that it just might be the root of her problems. Her doctor immediately saw what was happening and put her on a healthy diet with fixed times to eat throughout the day. Within one week, she dropped three pounds and immediately began to enjoy greater energy and a happier outlook.
Lack of Energy
This will be discussed in detail later, but for now know that you cannot get a productive workout when skipping meals and cutting calories drastically. Calories are not bad guys; you need them desperately to train, compete, strategize, and recuperate. Later we provide you with several plans to cut calories intelligently so you can still slam and bam with energy to spare.
Something to Get You Started
Later, we give you several ways to reduce calories, but here is a trick you can start using right now since it’s used in all of our eating plans: Eat frequent, small meals throughout the day. This prevents your body from declaring a famine and defensively retaining all the calories and nutrients it can get. By eating five or six small meals throughout your waking hours, you speed up your metabolism, which sends your body the opposite signal: It has enough calories and nutrients for what lies ahead.
One other benefit, which sounds almost too good to be true, is that since it takes a lot of calories to digest your food, eating several meals a day turns your body into an efficient calorie-burning machine. In other words, the more often you eat the more calories you burn. Life doesn’t get much better than that. Additionally, you enjoy ample and consistent energy from the moment you get up until you crash into your bed 16 hours later. More on frequent meals in subsequent chapters.
I’ll Stop Eating Fat to Lose Weight
We don’t state many absolutes in this book because it’s difficult to do so when discussing how the human body reacts to various programs. That said, here is one absolute about dieting, or more specifically, about calories. As you know, there are gazillions (read: a lot) of diets in books, magazines, on the internet and on photocopies passed around the office. Some are good, some are absurd (the beer and steak diet comes to mind. Darn it!), and others are seriously dangerous to your health. There are diets designed around eating only vegetables, eating only meat and a popular one at this writing that touts the wonders of eating lots of fat.
If any of these diets work, whether they are the healthy ones or the crazy ones, it’s because of one reason and one reason only: Your body uses more calories in its daily activities than it takes in. It doesn’t care if the calories are from fat, carbohydrates (carbs) or protein. If you eat fewer than what your body needs to train, work, play, sleep or zone out in front of the tube, you lose weight. It’s a simple concept. There is no argument.
Since fat holds more calories than carbs and protein, it would seem that fat is the bad guy in your diet. Much of this myth comes from the negative connotation conveyed by the word. We want to trim fat from our waistlines; our butt is too fat, our thighs are too fat. Therefore, fat is bad. While that seems logical, it’s dangerously incorrect.
The truth is that there are vital biochemical functions in your body that need fat. For example, fat is required to maintain a correct hormonal balance, maintain healthy skin, maintain a healthy testosterone level, and absorb certain vitamins. Totally eliminating it would lead to illness. Even if it were possible for you to avoid dietary fat altogether, you wouldn’t lose weight if you consumed more protein and carb calories than you use in your daily activities.
Make fat a part of your diet, just make sure it’s not the biggest part. More on fat in Chapters 3 and 4.
Why You Crave Fat
Fat cells supply you with energy and protect you from hunger and cold. Eating it is a primal survival mechanism you inherited from your prehistoric ancestors. In their era, fat was a valuable commodity, but in your world, it’s ever-present. Unfortunately, the survival mechanism still works to make you crave the stuff. Eliminate or drastically reduce it, and you soon hunger for it, and hunger desperately as it gives texture, flavor and taste to food. You become obsessed, especially for burgers, chips, milkshakes, cupcakes, and other high-fat goodies. When you do give in, usually after rationalizing that you need it, you overindulge.
It’s More Expensive to Eat Healthily
This is patently untrue. Basic, nutrition-rich foods, such as vegetables, fruit and lean cuts of meat, are almost always cheaper than ready-made meals and dining out. Take advantage of the time of year and buy whatever fruit and vegetables are in season and at their lowest price. Get to know the stores in your community, since one might offer the best buy for fresh foods and another the best buy for lean cuts of meat.
Want a snack? A medium-sized, 100-calorie apple with no fat costs you about 50 cents, while a chocolate bar, a 300 calorie, fat laden chocolate bar, costs about a dollar. If you don’t know which of those are the best for your kicking and punching body, you soon will as you delve deeper into these pages.
Eating After 8 PM Makes You Fat
This myth is based on the fact that since you don’t use many calories after 8 PM, any you take in are stored as body fat. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Once again, it’s all about calories; in this case, it’s about how many you consume before 8 PM. Let’s say you need 2000 calories a day to maintain your weight, and today at breakfast, at your midmorning snack and at lunch, you took in a total of 1,300. This means at your afternoon snack and at dinner, you can have no more than 700 calories. That’s it. You are done eating for the day. If you do have a little something beyond your 2000, say, 300 calories worth of something, there is a good chance it will accumulate as fat. The solution, therefore, is to take in 1,800 in your fist five meals, so that you can have 200 calories
