Unlike in other countries worldwide, obesity is a disease running rampant throughout America at an unfathomable rate. It doesn’t help that fast-food restaurants are within walking distance in almost every corner of our country. That’s what making money is about, though, right?
Having the ease of convenience and receiving large quantities of food for almost nothing. I don’t know about you, but more money in my pockets doesn’t necessarily make up for the added inches around my waistline.
The biggest problem is that “dining” has become a term of the past. With the high intensity, fast-paced environment that we live in, nobody has time to “dine” anymore. So this term has fallen off the map and been replaced with “convenience food.” This convenience food is a low-quality, sometimes low calorie, nutrient-deficient food that exists all around us that we can shove into our faces in a moment when we are short on time.
More than two-thirds of US adults are overweight or obese.1 Remember, this is a problem that effects hundreds of thousands of people.
Since most of us are too short on time to even correctly eat – one of our required bodily functions – we, as a society, have tried our hardest to find the solution to our weight problems the same way; through convenient, easy, low-quality methods. Look around – if you’re in the United States, you can see how well this philosophy has worked out.
A Calorie Is A Calorie in A Lab, But Not in Your Body
Both the obesity epidemic and calorie counting started in the 1970s. Is this a coincidence? I think not!
The truth behind the “Calories In, Calories Out” rule is outdated but not at all worthless. People need to wake up and understand that we become the food we eat, period! Food quality has been all but forgotten in place of food quantity.
No, it isn’t because most foods were floating in Jell-O. Just look at a 70’s party cookbook – if that was the reason, we’d not have this book.
This is where people are really hurting themselves because foods are not just vitamins and minerals. They are also phytonutrients, energy, and information (which will be explained in further detail)! The whole information part will play a major role in determining your health in the long run. Processed foods, in general, lack nutritional value because they are taken out of their natural state. Most often, there is food out there that appears to be healthy. Still, it is grown in depleted soil with unnatural fertilizers, making it nutrient deficient!
Here is the problem, if you count your calories, you will lose weight whether you focus on quality or not, but eating processed foods over time will ultimately backfire! The same holds for eating quality food; once you start eating this way, you may not see the results for three months, but the results will last!
- Natural State – an original wild state unprocessed by people.
Quality is not the whole issue, though. Quantity can also be a problem. For example, I like to use 2,000 calories per day of quality foods as the average person’s norm, which is just a baseline metabolic rate.
Your metabolic rate typically falls in a range of 500 calories from your calorie set point. If you consume 500 more calories per day, this will lead to a gain in body fat, but if you were to consume 500 fewer calories per day, this would lead to a loss in body fat.
Now, everyone is different, whether you have a sedentary job like sitting at a desk, or you might be a carpenter moving regularly. These two lifestyles make a big difference in your metabolic set point.
What are your main factors? Do you know all of these list items?
- Your age
- How much muscle you have
- How well you sleep
- How much stress you endure each day
- The type and amount of medication you take
- The health of your gut bacteria
There’s even more that I will get into in due time.
I know taking this all in can be overwhelming, but this is why I want to teach you in a systematic, non-threatening way to help you understand what works for you and your personal lifestyle. Remember, if you are choosing quality foods, you will naturally eat less.
Set Point – the body’s thermostat to regulate body fat and weight, which is unique to everyone
Faster Metabolism Results In Faster Fat Loss Loss
Your metabolism is one of the most important bodily functions for losing body fat. It’s responsible for either massive results or an enormous flop. But why? First of all, metabolisms are different for everyone, so we must look at fat loss on an individual, case-by-case basis.
- Current height
- Weight
- Eating habits
Your metabolic range could be different compared to friends or family. You can even be eating the same exact amount and type of food as one of your training buddies, friends, or family members, but still have different results. That’s what makes finding a solution a little difficult!
I always see on television how women have more trouble losing weight compared to men, and this might be one of the only truthful facts that we are given through the media, when it comes down to weight loss. It seems like there’s some buy-it-now predator on every night pushing the latest fake product.
Females usually have an average metabolic rate of 5% to 10% lower than males do. This is because females naturally have more body fat on their frames, protecting their vital organs if they were to become pregnant. This increased body fat percentage results in a lower metabolic rate because they have less lean muscle than the typical male. This doesn’t mean that you women should give up and call it quits. Just because it’s going to be a tougher road doesn’t mean that it will never happen. The results that you will see when you do everything the right way will blow your mind. Not only will you look better, but you will also feel better!
Fat Loss Only, Please!
The ultimate goal for permanent fat loss lies in losing body fat, not just “weight” in general. Hence, the book title, It’s Fat Loss, Not Weight Loss: The Underground Secret to Permanent Results! This seems like a no-brainer, but the truth is that so many people are dieting the wrong way, leading to the wrong type of “weight” loss.
You are probably saying to yourself, “There is a bad type of weight loss?” That’s right! Not all “weight” loss is good, especially if it’s not done correctly.
The key to permanent weight loss is to maintain or gain lean muscle while torching off body fat. Imagine melting a stick of butter in the microwave. You can do that! Albeit not with microwaves, or at that speed.
Why lean muscle? Well, one pound of resting lean muscle burns around 10 calories a day! 2, 3 This means that our goal is to create lean muscle on your frame to aid in your fat loss. The more lean muscle you have on your frame, the higher your metabolism, the more calories you burn just by performing your daily activities.
Fad Diets: Lose Fast, Gain It Back Faster
Like any other system of your body, your metabolism can be damaged if not taken care of. Many dieters have succumbed to the world of fad dieting. Commonly, fad dieters are provided with no education and biased information, which ultimately results in a damaged metabolism.
When you turn on the TV in the morning and scroll through the channels, you can see that many people are hopping on the fad diet bandwagon, which results in a vicious circle of diet after diet, commonly referred to as “yo-yo dieting.” There’s “The Fix,” “Lose Weight by Eating 500 Calories,” and the “Don’t Eat Anything But Our Shakes” diets bombarding our brains. Weight loss has come a long way from Richard Simmons dancing to old hits. (The problem is, he had it right!)
The worst part about most of these diets is that they can actually put you further behind than when you first started! When you are going on one of these fad diets, your metabolism will shut down because your body doesn’t know that you are starving it on purpose. A high metabolism will burn body fat and use up energy. Still, since your body thinks it’s being starved, it will try to use up the driving force of your metabolism, which is your muscle. Since your body is trying to slow its metabolism down, it will use muscle as an energy source instead of fat and glycogen (stored carbohydrates in the muscle and liver).
Muscle is an insufficient energy source for your body, which can cause many more problems down the road. Your muscle contains many not-so-efficient amino acids that your body is using, leaving you nutrient deficient and, eventually, making you more toxic than you were in the first place.
Muscles are made up of about 75% water, so when someone goes on a crash fad diet and loses 30lbs in the first 30 days, it’s a mixture of muscle, water, and not nearly as much fat as they would like.
These diets are not only providing you with no education and giving you temporary results, but they are also hurting your body by damaging your metabolism. Instead of losing just straight body fat, you will be losing little body fat, a lot of muscle, and a bunch of water. This is why results are so temporary because these drastic losses lead your body to recover by storing fat as a safety mechanism.
Water makes up more than half our body weight; every single cell depends on it, and your metabolism will decrease without it!4
The Magic Pill: If There Were One, We Would All Take It
So, why are we still falling into the trap? Well, it’s definitely hard to pass up a “magic pill” that sheds weight, but not necessarily fat, without having to change your lifestyle. The reality is that you aren’t becoming healthier by taking these pills.
If it sounds like it’s a scam, then in all likelihood, it probably is.
Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will your dream body. Instead, by giving your body a healthy foundation, month by month, you are going to get better. So sticking to your guns and putting in the hard work now will lead to lifetime results, little by little.
Make sure to change the way that you think. In a year from now, you could have lost tons of body fat, gained a bunch of lean muscle, and all by doing it the right way.
More Fat Less Muscle
Now, after a diet, you might be looking at the scale, saying to yourself, “But I lost (x) amount of weight by using this fad diet.”
As we just went over, was this good or bad weight that you lost?
The difference is going to lie in what happens when you return to your everyday eating habits. Suppose you were provided with no education and lost “bad” weight. In that case, you will most likely return to regular eating habits, and your body will put fat back on your frame.
Even worse, it’s in the most inconvenient places. This will result in the infamous oxymoron of being “skinny fat.”
Eating a ton of food-like products, as many fad diets instruct, damages your metabolism by lowering thyroid function and lean muscle mass and causes a change in how your body reacts when it’s introduced to real food again5. The body is made to adapt. It wants to be prepared for the next time that a drastic decrease in calorie consumption (e.g., starvation) could happen.
Even though your brain knows that you have food available at any time, the body’s instincts take over to protect us. In this case, by storing fat.
Eating is actually your ally when looking to lose body fat, but choosing quality foods, eating them at the right time, and having portion control is the key.
Ready to get out your VHS player and those Richard tapes yet?
Insulin Resistance & Your Metabolism
Another big reason why your metabolic rate could be damaged is the type of food that you eat. We could have all guessed this by now but have no idea why. When someone eats a large amount of simple, refined carbohydrates like soda, candy, energy drinks, and other sugar-filled foods, this confuses your body to regulate your blood sugar level.
- Insulin – a hormone produced in the pancreas that allows energy to be absorbed into your cells.
After you flood your body with sugar by eating this garbage food, your body uses a natural defense to protect itself against high amounts of sugar by releasing a large amount of insulin into the bloodstream. These high insulin levels down-regulate your metabolism so much that you won’t even have a chance to burn fat for energy. If you choose these foods often, the chronically high insulin levels in your bloodstream will not allow your body to use its own fat for energy.
If you are constantly abusing the system like most, you will always have insulin floating around in your bloodstream – even in between meals. And in between meals is one of the most important times to fight the urge to eat because that’s when you want your insulin levels low, not elevated.
When insulin levels are chronically high, your fat-burning hormones, like glucagon, will not be able to do their job, which is to use that body fat for energy. This is known as hyperinsulinemia or insulin resistance.
It’s my worst nightmare if a patient is trying to lose body fat. If you cannot take care of insulin resistance first, you will not lose fat. Period! But don’t worry – insulin resistance can be taken care of by exercising, changing your diet, and practicing my wellness tips!
To give you a mental picture of what occurs when insulin resistance happens, here is my Insulin Resistance Chart:
Eating Too Much But Still Starving?
Having these high amounts of insulin in your system will cause your body to feel that it needs to overeat because your cells still think they are hungry since they are starved of good nutrients. Insulin works like a key and lock – the key is insulin, and the lock is the receptors in your cells. When you have insulin resistance, the key no longer fits in the lock. No matter how long you scramble to get that key in, like in all those classic horror scenes, in this case, the monster will catch you.
Following this idea, the energy has no way to get into your cells. It floats around in your bloodstream until your body stores that energy as fat or makes it into bad cholesterol (LDL) to be used at a later date. And after that, low energy follows. The worst part is that when this constantly happens, you aren’t ever using that fat for fuel “later,” but just adding to those reserves for no reason.
Move More & Eat Better, No Pill Required
You have to fight the urge to keep reaching for processed foods and foods full of sugar so that you can repair your metabolism. You have to treat your body like a temple and only allow the highest quality foods to enter. When I suspect insulin resistance in my patients, I have the patient concentrate on eating high amounts of fiber, healthy fats, and proteins.
Furthermore, exercising and moving more works like insulin by activating your energy receptors, called GLUT4, which allows food energy to be absorbed and used by your cells!
The bottom line is that if your metabolism is damaged and you don’t repair it, fat loss will be much harder to attain. As an example, can you drive a car with a gunked-up engine? Of course not! The good news is that this program is designed to set you up for ultimate success, meaning those repairs are coming.
The Rant Corner
Whether it’s damaged from insulin resistance, not training, using fad diets, or eating the wrong types of food, you MUST know that fixing your metabolism is the first step in seeing permanent results. Our passion, experience and advanced treatments help you achieve your dreams.
