I’ve had a lot of questions from folks who are keen to lose weight.
Should they diet? Eat only veggies and fruit for a week? Avoid carbs? Eat no carbs at night? Eat lots more carbs? Stop eating dessert? Work out on an empty stomach? Take creatine supplements?
You can go paleo (caveman), Atkins (no carbs), Ornish (no fat), zone (rotating macronutrients that to be honest I simply find far too hard to remember, let alone follow).
The answer is No. Don’t do any of those things.
Not unless you are morbidly obese, recovering from a serious injury, coping with a chronic disease, have a food allergy, or a serious genetic affliction. And in those situations, you better be getting advice from a doctor (not a fitness blog!) about what you’re supposed to eat.
What you need to do is exercise, regularly, and preferably a lot. You should also eat natural, whole foods, as close to what came out of the ground or off the farm as possible.
The best evidence for this comes from a very interesting scientific study of contestants in the reality TV show The Biggest Loser.
Participants are morbidly obese, and attempting to lose huge amounts of weight. They spend three months at a ranch under heavy discipline, dieting and doing a boot camp, and then come back after around three months at home. The winner is the one who loses the highest percentage of their body mass over the six months.
The study, published in the journal Obesity, tracked what happened with 14 contestants in terms of how much weight they lost – and whether they kept it off. The scientists checked out the participants when they were picked, after six weeks, after 30 weeks – and after six years!
The participants weighed in at 329 lbs when they started, on average, truly an amazing weight unless you’re a linebacker in the NFL. By the end of the show, they weighed 200 lbs, an average loss of 129 lbs. Or almost 40% of their body mass. My son, who is studying fractions, will tell you that’s two-fifths.
Then they went away, back to “normal life.” The cameras turned their spotlights to the contestants in the next series. What happened to the previous participants they left behind?
They split neatly into two camps, as The New York Times explains. Six years later, “Regainers” weighed on average 5 lbs more than they had at the start. “Maintainers” had managed to sustain an average weight loss of 81 lbs six years after they starred in the show.
There were seven in each camp. Why did some keep the weight off, while others added it back, and more?
The scientists asked their subjects to drink “doubly labeled water,” which contained harmless but heavier atoms in place of some of the H2O. This allowed them to track the amount of carbon dioxide exhaled every day. The more calories burned, the more carbon dioxide they produced.
The participants all started their weight-loss project by shedding pounds due to their crash diet. This worked for the very short term.
But their bodies responded by slowing down, to cope with having less food. The contents were burning, on average, 500 fewer calories every day than the scientists figured they should. Their metabolisms stumbled, ticking along at a plodding pace.
The people who lost weight and kept weight off did so by exercising. And they exercised a lot. Still do, in fact.
The “Maintainers” have, on average, 80 minutes of medium-paced activity, such as walking, or 35 minutes of strenuous exercise, such as running, every day. It didn’t matter if they did it on purpose, by going to the gym, or because they decided to help a buddy move house, and carry all those heavy boxes. Taking the stairs in the shopping mall worked as well as the StairMaster in the gym.
That is way more exercise than the amount doctors recommend. We’ve all heard that you should exercise for 30 minutes, three times per week. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most-definitive source about how to handle health problems in the United States, recommend at least 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, for healthy adults.
The people who kept the weight off were doing more than three times the amount of exercise that doctors recommend, in other words.
I think you can achieve the same results in much less time with High Intensity Interval Training. Running on the treadmill for 45 minutes or cycling slowly for an hour is a waste of time, as I have written before. Do a high-intensity workout, and you can get the same exercise benefit in 10 minutes, and be in and out of the gym in a quarter of an hour, a brief chat at the water cooler thrown in.
But the No. 1 thing I want to stress is that you have to exercise to keep weight off, and to keep your body healthy. As we get older, it is also important to do some modest strength training, since we start to lose muscle mass and strength in our 30s.
Top this off with sensible nutrition, and you’re golden. Throw in a positive mindset, and some mindful attention to your “being,” and you’ve got the four corners to build a great little house of fitness and wellbeing for your body and soul.
We can all lose weight in a hurry. I was joking with one client that the fastest way is to cut off an arm. But you can also simply stop eating. You’ll be miserable, you will literally starve, but you’ll lose weight.
What you won’t do is keep the weight off. Your body knows you are starving, and it will wait until it gets some calories and cram them all into your body. It’s called starvation mode. And as we’ve seen with the Biggest Losers, your body will also slow down. That’s hardly what we want if we want to live life to the fullest.
You should not diet in the sense of banning or heavily restricting your intake of any category of food. Your diet should be a diet in the biological sense – what you regularly eat as a human being, to sustain you as an animal (yes, you are, you beast!).
Scientifically, we call protein, carbohydrates and fats “macronutrients,” the fuel that your body needs the most. But calling your food carbs, or protein is a bit weird. It’s too cold. And healthy fats? What’s that? (Nuts, seeds, chia, oily fish, avocados are a few answers to that).
Your diet should be roughly 50% carbs, 25% protein, and 25% fats. But who looks at things that way? You could take a bunch of brown rice, top it with sweet potatoes, cheese, cod and trout, cashews, coconut oil, avocado, bran flakes and egg whites and achieve that combination. It’ll be disgusting, but you could do it.
Carbs get a bad rap. You need them for fuel. They’re the easiest energy for your body to process. I think it’s best to structure your carb intake so you have the most with breakfast, a little less at lunch and the least at dinner. But don’t cut them out, at all. You need them. Otherwise you’ll be hungry all the time, and probably won’t have any energy either.
Protein is pretty good for you in general – our entire bodies are made out of it. But there’s evidence that a high-protein diet is bad for some people.
Young children who have high protein diets are prone to obesity later in life. Pregnant women who eat the most protein have children who are shorter through at least mid-childhood. People between 50 and 79 who eat a lot of protein from meat and other animal sources have a higher risk of heart disease.
It’s your kidneys that process protein, so a high-protein diet will actually damage kidneys for people whose kidney function is already impaired. That’s true for about 1 in 9 Americans, studies show, and many people don’t know they have that condition because you don’t show symptoms until it’s severe.
Protein supplements in particular are highly likely to be bad for you. They’re not natural. Your body won’t know what to do with that much protein. The supplements strongly encourage cell multiplication, which can harm you. Although it’s good if you’re using supplements to avoid bad dietary content like white bread, it’s more likely you are cutting down on nutritious food that has lots of other goodies like vitamins and fiber in it.
“I would never take any protein supplements. And I wouldn’t advise my children to, either,” John Swartzberg tells The Washington Post. He’s a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health.
As far as fats go, they are very different from fat, which we don’t want. We do, however, need fats to carry nutrients around our bodies, cross cell membranes and perform other important functions. Plus, fat is how we store a lot of energy. If you don’t have any, you need to be eating constantly, which also isn’t any good.
So don’t cut out all fats. Don’t live on protein alone. Don’t eliminate carbs. All these things are your friends.
Eat well, and exercise as regularly as you can. The food we eat should be tasty and enjoyable, and we should have a great time moving our bodies around, too. That’s how you’ll lose weight, and keep it off. And you’ll love life! You’ll be living it, not eliminating parts of it.
We can take our lead from the truly successful contestants in The Biggest Loser. They won, and keep on winning.
