Got Built?

How often do we hear this one? You’d think weight loss would be simple to achieve – it SOUNDS so simple.

Until you try to do it.

We have all read the articles that tell us how losing a few pounds of fat will improve our health in any of a number of ways, but they never seem to go far enough – HOW do we get it off, AND keep it off?
There are a few pieces to this puzzle that need to be addressed in wading through the information overload on this topic. One of them is the concept of weight loss vs. fat loss. The other is the relative advantages of resistance training and cardiovascular exercise.

So let’s start wading…

Weight loss vs. fat loss
I’ve been quite overweight. TRUST me – I would have cut my HAIR do drop a few pounds when I was trying to get it off me!

Losing weight is relatively easy, if unpleasant: eat less, move more. The problem is that if you aren’t careful, you’ll lose too much muscle and not enough fat, which will virtually guarantee that you’ll gain it all back, and it might bring friends when it returns.

We often hear about the benefits of losing weight, but really, these benefits happen when we lose FAT. Muscle is the good guy – muscle increases insulin sensitivity, raises metabolism, improves your lipid profile (cholesterol), and keeps you strong. Muscle is the part that burns calories. But when you diet, your body knows what you are doing – you’re surviving a famine – and it wants you to survive that famine. It will jettison some of the metabolically expensive muscle so your caloric expenditure goes down. Fat “costs” very little for your body to run, and it will keep you alive as the famine (diet) continues.

So how do we achieve fat loss without muscle loss?

This is where it gets tricky.

Relative advantages of resistance training and cardiovascular exercise
I am going to over-simplify a bit in this discussion – all exercise has some cardiovascular component, and some resistance component. I’m going to pretend that they are separate so we can see what they do.

Most of us are aware of some of the benefits of cardiovascular exercise – of course, it’s good for your heart (the word “cardio” kinda gives that one away), and it burns off some calories. Steady-state cardio, such as jogging or a brisk walk, burns calories while you’re doing it, but not much afterward.
Resistance training builds bone density and metabolism-boosting lean muscle mass, and interestingly enough, has cardiovascular benefits as well. Resistance training also burns calories, but the after-effects of these two types of activity are quite different.
Resistance training burns fewer calories while you’re doing it, but increases your metabolism for hours or even days afterward.

The difference here lies in the intensity of the activity.

Resistance training
All exercise damages muscle. But it’s when it gets damaged intensely that we see some very interesting changes in terms of body composition.

Intense physical activity performed in short bursts, such as alternating sprinting-and-walking in short intervals, or lifting “heavy-for-you” weights with rests in between “sets” of say 6-12 repetitions, stimulates what is called the “anabolic response” – your body sees that you’ve done this hard, intense, heavy work that has caused a lot of damage. You go home, eat, and your body gets to work fixing this damage – repairing and reinforcing muscle tissue so that your body can deal with you the next time you decide to come in and start wrecking yourself again.

So here’s the big secret: if you train hard and heavy with weights while you drop calories, it’s virtually impossible to gain any muscle, but you might be able to convince your body that the muscle that you have is worth keeping. It’s like running a company during a recession – suppose you’re the CEO, and you draw a heavy paycheck – if you want to keep your job, you had better prove your worth to the company.

In a (self-imposed) famine (reduced calories), your body, which HAS to “cut the fat” somewhere, well, cuts the fat. This is how you convince your body to drop fat instead of muscle.
It’s important to keep increasing the weights used as you train and get stronger – the more muscle you wreck, the harder your body has to work to repair the damage. The more damage you have to repair, the more energy is required.
That’s right. More food.
This is the part that got MY attention, too.

Cardiovascular training
Cardiovascular activity does not damage the muscle as intensely, so it does not stimulate this “after burn”. Over time, it can tend to make your muscles smaller, rather than bigger, because it’s a lot of work to haul them around – cardio is basically high-rep, low-weight training performed for extended periods of time. It’s an endurance activity. Done strategically, cardiovascular activity can support your heart health and create a small caloric deficit, which means you don’t have to diet quite so hard to lose weight. Do it after you lift, or on a separate day.

It’s surprising how few calories cardio burns off. To lose a pound of body fat, you have to create a caloric deficit of 3500 calories.

My 20-minute brisk walk in the morning probably burns off 80-100 calories. This is fewer than the number of calories in a tablespoon of natural peanut butter.

You see the problem here: I would have to do a LOT of cardio to burn off a pound of fat. If I did enough cardio in a week to burn off a pound of fat, I’d chew through muscle as well, and without resistance training, I wouldn’t build that muscle back up.
So here’s the last piece of the puzzle, the “d” word.
Diet
Diet, in my experience at least, is 80% of the game. If you overeat even a hundred calories a day, you could gain almost a pound of fat in a month. Even if you’re doing a LOT of exercise, if you eat just a little more than you expend, you’ll steadily gain weight, and unless you’re really hitting the iron hard, most of this weight will be fat.

But how to diet? There are so many choices, and they all work for at least one person – the one who wrote it.

The key to dieting is hunger control. If you feel hungry most of the time, you won’t be able to stick to any diet for long.

Many of us own a collection of diet books. It seems like we’re always looking for the magic formula that will help us melt off the pounds. There is no magic formula for this, really – but if you come up with the right combination of foods for your body, you won’t feel as hungry and you’ll be able to eat less without noticing. But you still have to eat fewer calories than you expend.

I’m going to give you a suggestion on how to make your own diet. It might take you a few weeks to get it worked out, but it will be comfortable to you because it will be yours, not somebody else’s.

Finding YOUR diet
The first step is to figure out what isn’t working.
Resist the urge to “be good”, and track what you’re eating now. Everything. Every potato chip, muffin, cream and sugar in your coffee, everything. If you don’t know what DOESN’T work, it’s hard to figure out what DOES.

You can buy books that provide calorie counts for this purpose, or you can use online diet calculators such as www.fitday.com. I like fitday because it’s free, and it’s easy. If you can force yourself to do an audit for a week, you’ll get an estimate of your daily calories which will be far better than using some sort of a formula to guess what they are. If you are neither gaining nor losing, the calories you currently eat are YOUR maintenance calories.

To lose weight, eat less. But not TOO much less. I don’t like to drop calories by more than 10-20% - it’s too hard to maintain, and I find I lose too much muscle and not enough fat when I drop more than this.

The mix of protein, carbohydrate and fat that you’ll find healthy and comfortable can be very different from person to person. The guidelines I like to use are to figure out how much protein and healthy fat I need to eat, make sure I get those in, and fill up the rest of my remaining calories with carbohydrate.
There are a variety of approaches you can follow with this – some people, like me, find that protein and fat makes us feel full, but carbohydrates make us hungry. Others are fine on lower protein and fat with lots of complex carbohydrates. You’ll have to experiment to find your comfort levels.
How much protein, how much carbohydrate, how much fat?
Many people find comfort when they keep their protein no lower than 1 gram per pound LBM (lean body mass – everything but the fat on your body. You can use your 80%-90% of your goal weight if you don’t know your LBM) and their fat at about half that – about half a gram per pound.

What about carbohydrate – how much do you need? Well, technically, none. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any, and you’re certainly going to get at least some carbohydrate from the produce you consume – and some of this will be in the form of fibre, which is a good thing because you’re also going to try to include around 25g of fibre in your diet.

Water is a good thing to look at too. Adults should probably drink at least 2-4 litres of water a day. Tea and coffee can be part of this, as can the occasional diet soda – but avoid juice. Even freshly squeezed orange juice has as much sugar as soda pop. It’s remarkably easy to drink half a dozen oranges – but I have yet to see someone sit down and eat 6 oranges all at once. Bottom line: eat fruit, but don’t drink it. Think of fruit juice and regular soda pop as liquid candy – suitable for treats, but not for every day.

Now, some folks like more protein, more fat, or more of both, and some folks are happy with less, but these are probably fairly good starting points for many people who are trying to figure out how to eat fewer calories comfortably. And the fibre and water will do much to help you feel comfortable.
Sounds complicated? It’s not, really.

Maintenance calories – finding your level, making your mix
For example, suppose Barbara tracks what she’s eating on fitday for a week, and finds that her average calories are about 2,000 a day. She’s not gaining, but she’s not losing weight either.
She’s been trying to eat “low fat”, but she’s hungry all the time.
Fitday tells her that her average diet over a week gives 80 grams of protein, 55 grams of fat, and 300 grams of carbohydrate, so it should be a “healthy” diet according to the Canada Food Guide, but she can’t seem to make it work.

For reference, protein has about 4 calories per gram and so does carbohydrate. Fat has about 9 calories per gram.

Barbara has a goal weight of 120 lbs. She decides to increase her protein and fat a little to see if this makes her more comfortable. She starts by setting protein at 120 grams a day, and fat at 60 grams a day. Those extra 40 grams of protein and 5 grams of fat “cost” about 200 calories, which she decided to “pay for” by eating less bread, and eating more broccoli and green beans – which not only lowers her carbohydrate calories a little, but brings her fibre up to at least 25g a day.

Barbara knows from experience that if she doesn’t eat a bit of chocolate every day, she feels deprived, so she makes sure to build an ounce of good quality dark chocolate into her day – about 150 calories will go there.

And she starts paying more attention to drinking plenty of fresh water through the day.

With these adjustments, she is now eating 120 grams of protein, 60 grams of fat, and 245 grams of carbohydrate for her 2,000 calories a day. Her fibre is up to 25g a day, and she’s drinking a gallon of water every day.

Now she’s still eating at “maintenance” – she won’t lose weight on these calories. But we’re trying to make her more comfortable first so she can drop her calories a little and not mind.
After a week on the new plan, she decides she feels more comfortable – not hungry all the time, even though the calories she’s eating have remained the same. In fact, she finds she feels quite full. Perfect – now it’s time to try to cut calories.

Dropping calories
She decides to start dieting by trying to cut 10% from her maintenance diet. This is 200 calories, leaving her with 1,800 calories a day. At this rate, she should lose about a pound of fat every two and a half weeks – nice and slow, so she won’t lose too much muscle and she won’t feel too hungry.
Barbara decides to try to leave her protein and fat at their new levels, and drops 200 calories from the carbohydrate. This is only 50 grams of carbohydrate that have to go – she still gets to eat almost 200 grams of carbohydrate daily, but finds that she’s eating more fruit and veggies and less pasta, potatoes, bread and rice. Her “diet” consists of 120 grams of protein, 60 grams of fat, and 195 grams of carbohydrate, with 25g of fibre and at least two litres of water daily: 1,800 calories in total.
And she STILL gets to eat an ounce of chocolate every day.

What to eat, and when?
There are many different ways to time your meals, and plenty of scientific evidence as to what is optimal, but the most important part of any diet is appetite control – if you cannot stick to it, it simply will not work for you. Most of us have probably already figured out parts of this puzzle from things that we’ve read that have worked for us in the past. Go right ahead and incorporate these tricks into your diet.

Some people find they need “balanced” meals with protein, carbohydrate and fat in each meal.
For me, I like to keep protein in every meal, but keep fats and carbohydrates away from each other or I get hungry too fast.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself is that I’m hungriest at night. So I actually hold back a few of my daytime calories so I can eat a bit more in the evening – a dangerous time for many dieters.

I find if I feel well fed in the evening, I don’t really feel like I’m dieting. I eat my last small meal of the day just before I go to bed – usually cottage cheese, a chunk of apple and a few walnuts or a tablespoon of natural peanut butter. Then I brush my teeth and go to bed.

But won’t that make you fat? No, not if you don’t overeat what you’ve set for yourself for that day.
Plan your day

Here’s a little trick I’ve learned: pack up a whole day’s worth of food for yourself.

I challenge you to try this: plan out a day’s menu; pack up all the protein, carbohydrate and fat you’ve decided to eat for your “diet” and put it in a big bag. You want to eat – go ahead and grab something. Anything. But if you eat it now, you don’t get to eat it later. And if you eat something that’s not in the bag, something has to come out to “pay” for it.

Everybody laughs at my “huge lunches” when I come to work because I do this all the time, but it’s the principal behind any of the pre-packaged diet plans out there – portion control. You can do this yourself with a bit of planning.

Over time, you’ll figure out what foods make you hungry (for me, carbohydrate without protein), and which ones make you satisfied (for me, protein and fat, or protein and slow carbohydrate, such as sweet potato). You’ll learn when your hungry time is, and when during the daytime you don’t mind eating a little leaner.

And don’t forget to live a little. Take a planned, guilt-free meal or a day off from dieting every few weeks. It’s not only good for your soul – it’s good for your metabolism.