| Friend,
Alright, so you've decided it's finally time to do something about the fact that you've had to add about three inches to your black belt for every stripe you've earned.
Hey, don't feel bad--it can happen to anyone. But, don't pat yourself on the back or anything, either. I mean, basically there's only one way to get where you are now, and that's sitting around on your ass and stuffing your pie hole.
Trust me, I know. Sure, I can blame it on surgeries and injuries, on steroid injections and bad knees, but nobody twisted my arm and made me eat all those tortillas and ice cream bars. I did that to myself.
So, how do you get back to your fighting weight after you've succumbed to "fat master syndrome"? Well, that's exactly what I'm going to explain in today's email, starting with stating the following...
The Fitness and Diet Industry Is Full of Crap
Now, I know as soon as I send this out today, about a dozen-hundred keyboard warriors and internet diet experts out there are going to send me emails telling me why what I wrote is dead wrong.
Let me stop you before you waste your time, by telling you that you can go peddle your diet religion somewhere else. I don't care what some guy on the internet who looks like Skeletor after a three-week meth bender said so he could sell you overpriced coffee. Really, I don't.
Bro science and pseudo-studies are everywhere on the internet. So, you have to take what the self-made diet gurus say with a grain of salt. I've been around the fitness industry for twenty years, and because of the fact that I am a consultant (I hate that word, but there it is), I've had some really candid conversations with well-known people in the fitness and weight loss industries.
You know what they say when no one is around? That the best way to make money in the diet and fitness industry is to add needless complexity to what is a very simple solution. And the more complex your "fitness program" or "diet program" is, the more money you make.
Which is why the first thing you need to do when you set out to get fit is to cut through the crap everyone is selling, so you can figure out the basic principles that make all functional weight loss programs work.
The Ground Rules
Well, for eight years my good friend Jim Mahan and I tested the crap people were selling, both on ourselves and with hundreds of clients. As I said previously, I have a degree in health science and I've been a trainer for close to twenty years.
And, Jim has more fitness certifications than you can shake a stick at, plus he was trained by the U.S. Army to create the sport rehabilitative program for Wounded Warriors on Fort Hood. They even sent him to the Olympic Training Center to learn how to coach para-athletes.
So, we kind of know how to cut through the bullshit when it comes to fitness. And you know what we found out?
1. All diets work. And some are actually healthy for you. But the bottom line is, your body works on the same physical principles that the rest of the universe works on, namely the first law of thermodynamics. The only really conclusive findings on weight loss that science and research have shown to be consistently true are that if you eat more calories than you expend, you'll gain weight. And, conversely, if you expend more calories than you eat, you'll lose weight.
It doesn't matter if you do Clean Eating, Atkins, Paleo, The Mediterranean Diet, Eat to Live, The Zone, Weight Watchers, South Beach, Ornish, Raw Food, IIFYM, Intermittent Fasting, Slow Carb, or a combination of the above... so long as you eat less in calories than you expend in activity and your basal metabolic calorie needs, you WILL lose weight.
2. A calorie is a calorie. Your body will burn or store whatever you put in it, so long as it is protein, fat, or carbohydrates. Whether you eat nothing but raw veggies and organic, grass fed meat, or a steady diet of french fries, hamburgers, and soda, weight loss does not rely so much on what you eat, but how much.
Now, that isn't to say that all diets are GOOD for you. Sure, you can lose weight by eating a calorie-restricted diet consisting of nothing but McDonald's or convenience store food. But you're also probably going to feel like crap, too.
Moreover, you're playing with metabolic C4 when you eat nothing but fat and sugar all day long... and not in a good way. What you eat has a direct impact on your biochemistry, and if you eat an imbalanced diet long enough, eventually you're going to throw your hormones out of whack and potentially cause a metabolic disease (like diabetes) to take hold in your body.
3. It's much harder to overeat when you are eating REAL food. Most man-made food (at least, the stuff that tastes good) is calorically-dense. If you count the calories in one pound of cake versus one pound of broccoli, you're going to notice there's a huge difference in calorie content (and nutrition).
This is why it's best to get off the junk food when you're trying to lose weight. And not only do junk foods generally have more calories per ounce than natural, wholesome foods, they also tend to have interesting effects on the brain. So-called "emotional eating" has a psychological component, but it also is caused by the dopamine response you get when you eat junk food.
So, not only is it easier to eat more calories when you eat junk than when you eat healthy, natural foods... you're also more likely to overeat as well. And the more you overeat, the easier it gets, because you're greasing that neural groove in your brain that says downing a package of Oreos with a quart of chocolate milk feels like a hug from your mother.
4. Movement assists with weight loss, but the real work is done at the dinner table. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say weight loss is 80% nutrition and 20% exercise... but that's bro science, so disregard the number values and don't repeat what I just said. Ever.
Yet, it is true that most of the real work done to lose weight happens when you eat. So, you need to invest time and energy into figuring out a meal plan (ergo, a "diet") that works for you... one that you can follow easily and that fits your lifestyle and cultural preferences.
And those cultural preferences are important for successful, long-term compliance. I'm half-Mexican and half-Irish (with some other random stuff thrown in for good measure). Sure, I can cut carbs out of my diet for a while and lose weight. But, it's not a sustainable dietary regime for me, and I do much better with a dietary plan that allows for eating moderate amounts of carbs. So, figure out your preferences and what you can live with, BEFORE you decide on a weight loss program.
5. The body is a complex system. Basically, your body is one big biochemical processing plant. And, everything you put in it gets processed. Everything. Some gets burned as energy, some is stored as fat, some gets eliminated as waste.
But what people often forget is that what and how much we eat has an impact on our body chemistry. Eat too much and insulin spikes, causing your body to increase the storage of excess calories as fat, and blunting your body's ability to burn fat for calories. Do that enough, and insulin resistance develops, which makes it even harder for your body to burn fat as energy so you can lose weight. Keep that up long enough, and you'll develop diabetes.
Ah, but eat too little for too long, and the body reacts by putting the brakes on certain processes in your body. Your metabolism slows down as the body begins to conserve energy, due it being genetically programmed to perceive prolonged periods of low caloric intake as a threat to the system.
Soon your body starts hanging on to every spare calorie it can find, storing it as fat. This is why you see people suffering from the yo-yo dieting syndrome, and gaining more weight back than they lost by dieting. It's also why crash diets don't work, and why slow, steady weight loss is better than trying to lose a bunch of weight at once.
And it's why when people get liposuction, they often start to store fat in weird places on their bodies, like the neck, shoulders and back. Just because you removed the fat cells from places you didn't want them, it doesn't mean you changed the underlying metabolic conditions and habits that caused you to get fat in the first place.
Nope. The only way to change that is through a long steady process of retraining the body to function the way it was meant to function; specifically, in a healthy state of nutritional and metabolic homeostasis.
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Alright, I've gone on way too long today, and I still have more to cover. So, tomorrow I'm going to get into specifics on the basic things you need to do to lose fat and go from fat master to your fighting weight.
Stay tuned...
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
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P.S. - Again, all diets work. One of my favorite "diet" books of all time is "Thin for Life" by Anne Fletcher, a registered dietitian who spent years studying people who lost significant amounts of weight for good. In that book she details how the people she studied lost weight and kept it off while following a variety of weight loss approaches and diets. So remember that it's not so much the approach you follow, but whether that approach allows you to follow a few basic, universal principles... that's what will determine whether or not you are successful in losing the weight and keeping it off.
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