Losing weight and maintaining optimal health aren’t always one in the same. Utilizing vitamin and protein rich foods that nourished us through our evolution is the key to success. The following pages will give you a list of foods and some basic principles to help you achieve both. Eating foods we ate while we were evolving as a species will have an amazing positive effect on your health. This isn’t a new concept! As a matter of fact, it is the oldest.
Why is it so easy to gain fat, not lose fat? We have lots of primal mechanisms built into our physiology to keep us from starving and to save fat for times of famine. When we restrict calories too much, malnourish ourselves, or spike our insulin, we activate our genetic code to save fat. To avoid these deprivations and put your body into starvation preservation mode, you need get an idea of what types of food and how many calories you need to maintain your current body weight.
So what do you do to lose fat and get healthy? Count calories? Carbs? Fat? Protein? Glycemic index? Concentrate on nutritious foods? Yes, all of the above. There aren’t any magic pills here. Your body is a fascinating machine with lots of mechanisms. There are plenty of fad diets out there focusing on one of these aspects. Most lead to weight loss via controlled insulin response or calorie deprivation, but few are in the interest of optimal health. Sorry, there isn’t any single answer. Let’s also get something straight right off the bat—there isn’t an accountant in your body that tallies your numbers at the end of the day and decides if you get to lose fat or not. Your body decides within five minutes after eating something where it’s going.
A quick note about fat loss—a great fat loss goal is about 4–8 lbs a month,1–2 lbs per week. You might lose zero in one week and two in another. For some perspective, 3500 calories = one pound of fat. That would be a daily calorie deficit of 1000 calories off your basal metabolic rate (BMR). If you’re any more aggressive, I feel you spark the body’s starvation mechanisms and you'll start holding every calorie you take in. This is the rule, not the exception. If you are over 300 lbs, you may very well lose a lot more.
Consistently weighing yourself and recording this data is very important. I know the modern idea is to throw away the scale and spare your feelings. I feel the scale is a useful tool to track progress and collect data points to see if your program is working. When do you weigh yourself? I suggest first thing in the morning before you eat or drink anything. Consistency is the key. A typical weigh-in process should be wake up, urinate, strip, and weigh. Remember fluids are going to play a big role in this, too. So if you drink a big glass of water, that water could easily weigh a pound. Mentally, if you have a hard time weighing yourself, drop the first digit when you record your number. Say you way 168.4 lbs. Just record the 68.4 and the date. Make notes in your log. If you had a moment of weakness the day before, note it. For example, you ate popcorn last night and your weight increased. Now, you probably didn’t get fat from the popcorn, but you’re probably holding a ton of water in your intestine trying to push the grain through. While I’m on the topic of water weight, ladies, due to certain monthly biological reasons, you probably gain weight close to or around the time Aunt Flo comes into town. Don’t avoid the scale at this time. You know it’s going to happen and you need to know what that average gain is. If you know you always gain 6 lbs during this time, you will be less likely to get discouraged when that time comes around.
A word about your scale—I suggest a digital scale. Accuracy isn’t as important as consistency. What does that mean? That means you should be able to step on and off your scale three times in a row and it should give you the same number within 0.2 of a pound. Always use the same scale. Variances between my scale and your scale could be 2 lbs. As long as you always use your scale, you will be more accurate with your data.
Another useful tool to dial in with fat loss is to know what you’re eating in terms of quantity, calories, and macronutrients. This means creating a log. Yep, more data. There is a great free tool for this at http://www.livestrong.com/myplate/. Get used to logging your food. Pay attention to calories and grams of protein, fat, and carbohydrates. To do this accurately, buy a little digital scale that shows grams and ounces to weigh your food. This will help you really get a handle on true portion size. Avoid measurements like “one medium apple.” What the hell does that mean anyway? Have you ever see a medium-sized apple in Texas? It’s the size of a volleyball.
Finding your caloric needs
This is a goofy one. In one respect, you could argue that max calories don’t matter at all. On the other hand, I believe you have to keep above the minimum to keep your body from going into starvation preservation mode. An easy to use resource for this is the basil metabolic rate calculator. You can find these free online. There is one at http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/.
Enter your data points and then add/calculate for your activity level using the Harris Benedict formula. This is usually included on the same page, so I won’t type it out. Keep in mind this is a math problem and just a place to start. Losing weight is more an "art form," as we have so many mechanisms built into our bodies to save calories so we don’t starve. Concentrate on keeping this your minimum. I would rather you go a little higher in calories from day to day with an animal protein and fat keeping your body from triggering a starvation mechanism.
Macronutrients
Protein (4 calories per gram): Keep your protein high to keep your muscles fed (about one gram of protein per pound of lean mass). This means you have to get an idea of what body fat percentage you have and subtract that from your body weight. You can get fat calipers online. There are also calculators where you input your age and measurements or try one of those fat impedance scales.
Make protein your priority. I’ve had great success with fat loss by doubling my protein to straight body weight intake. For example, I weighed 200 lbs and ate 400 grams of protein a day. I suggest using an animal source protein to make up the difference in your total calories per day as opposed to a carbohydrate.
Fat (9 calories per gram): You'll probably need more fat to feel full, which is OK because fat is hard to make into fat and you will not have anything spiking your insulin to store it anyway. It will also trigger your metabolism to utilize fat burning mechanisms. I prefer more natural fats from grass-fed or range-fed animals. It’s crazy what they feed animals in those “feed lots.” If you can’t get grass-fed, look for lean choices. Grilled skinless chicken and turkey and raw nuts are good (not peanuts because they are a bean), but do what you can.
Carbohydrates (4 calories per gram): This is an important part of fat loss, so pay attention. The absorbable form of all carbohydrates is glucose. Whether it starts out as a fat-free whole grain bagel, sweet potato, or soda, it gets broken down and absorbed as glucose. For fat loss, pay attention to your effective carbohydrate count (ECC). Try to get your ECC down to about 50–55 grams a day. When I say this, I mean 7–10 grams of ECC per meal. Keep 90–100 grams as the upper limit for the day if you’re trying to lose weight. Don’t save 50 grams for a piece of cake before bed.
How do you calculate the ECC? If you were reading a label, you would see that they have total carbohydrates and 2–3 sub carbs listed, usually fiber, sugar, and starch. Just subtract fiber from the total carbohydrate to get the ECC. Why? Fiber is a carb, but it’s a carbohydrate that doesn’t break down to glucose.
Just to make things more complex, not all carbohydrates are created equal. Some will raise your blood insulin levels more than others by changing to glucose quickly. Why is that bad? Insulin is the hormone that tells your body cells to absorb the glucose in your bloodstream. This is the main mechanism for making your fat cells bigger and fuller. Constantly spiking your insulin has also been associated with more negative health effects than you could imagine including heart disease, inflammatory diseases, and insulin resistance.
There are resources available to find out which carbs digest quickly. It is called the glycemic index. The glycemic index is a list of foods consisting mostly of carbohydrates. In a nutshell, it assigns a numerical value based on how fast that carbohydrate converts to glucose, raising your blood glucose level, which in turn causes your body to react by releasing insulin. These tables are easy to find online or in book stores in the diabetic health section.
So what if you have a little bit of a food that has a high glycemic index versus a lot of something that has a low glycemic index? Congratulations! You’ve stumbled across the glycemic load. The glycemic load is relative to how many grams of a carbohydrate you ingest in relation to the glycemic index rating. That’s why you could eat a lot of broccoli compared to say one medium sweet potato.
So how do you determine the glycemic load? Well you asked, so get ready. You multiply the absorbable carbohydrate or ECC (glycemic index percentage) by the value (glycemic index divided by 100). Let’s use an example from the University of Sydney. A 120-gram piece of watermelon has six grams of usable carbohydrate or ECC. Watermelon has a glycemic index of 72. The math: (72 ÷ 100) × 6 = 4.32, which is less than ten, so it’s low.
Try to keep your glycemic index and glycemic load foods down by avoiding whole grains (corn, oats) and starches (potatoes) where you don’t’ get a lot of bang for your buck. (Grains are horrible for you. They’re filled with lots of anti-nutrients, and they don’t have much, if any, natural nutritional value, but that’s another article.) In the interest of fat loss, be cautious of some fruits or dried fruit that increase your insulin levels. Stick to the berries if you need fruit to sweeten things up. Strawberries are great.
This is where the food log at Live Strong and the glycemic index really come in handy. Just start typing in different fruits and vegetables that you like and be consistent with portions. Enter everything in as one cup or 5 oz for serving size. Then you will have an accurate way to compare them. Once you do this, print it off and keep it as a reference. Again, in the interest of optimal health, try to get organic produce when you can. They really spray all kinds of weird stuff on our food.
For more information on the glycemic index and glycemic load, check out diabetic web pages. The Mendosa site has more information then you would ever need (http://www.mendosa.com/gi.htm) or just search the web for glycemic index.
A high protein diet in conjunction with meal cadence is instrumental to fat loss. Borrowed from a common bodybuilding philosophy, I suggest eating every 2–3 hours and always get a lean source of protein with every meal. This tells your evolutionary programming that hunting is good so there isn’t any need to slow your metabolism down.