DIETS:  Why most Fail.  How YOU can succeed!

Ok, it's no secret that diets are a booming industry in this country.  Fad after fad after fad diets are let loose on an unsuspecting American Public on a yearly basis, and a glance at the top selling books in any given month is bound to have some NEW diet book that guarantees success where all other diets have failed...namely, losing fat, and keeping it off.  Why are there so many different diets?  Why do so many of them fail?  It's common knowledge that the success rate for losing weight and KEEPING (and that is actually where most diets fail) it off is less than 5%.   What the heck is going on here?  We can put a man on the moon and we can't even figure out how to lose bodyfat?

I'll tell you why most diets fail:  It's because most of them are missing out on the three crucial ingredients required for fat  loss

1. Muscle Building Routine:  I've said it before, muscle burns calories, fat does not..ergo, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn just by being alive.
2. Aerobic Routine:  This is required to help your body LEARN how to burn fat more efficiently.  It burns calories too!
3. Diet:  Though part of the TRIAD necessary for long term weight loss, (actually it's the easiest to do too), this is the component that causes most people to fail to lose weight, and keep it off.

I've already talked about the first two, now let's talk about DIETS.

Now I'm going to be a bit blunt here, but I'm getting a little tired of all the crying and sympathizing and "It's not your fault...come here for a hug" that goes on in the Infomercials (and I bet you know which one I am talking about!). 

The term diet itself already sets you up to fail.  It gives you the idea that it is a short term thing, (have you ever heard anyone say "I've been on this diet for 2 years..and it works great!") and that it is something that you can stop or decrease once you've reached your goal.  Furthermore, most diets are CRASH diets, meaning you lose a lot of weight in the first few weeks (most of it water by the way, or worse, muscle), and then suddenly comes to a complete halt.  That's why I really detest those crash diets, the fat loss is an illusion, and you are actually priming your body to hold on to fat like it was gold!  That's right..when you go on these sub 1,000 calorie diets, your body thinks it is starving..so what does it do?  It holds on to fat, because fat is such a rich and efficient way of holding on to energy (calories).  Your body doesn't know that you can go out and eat a Hamburger and Fries anytime you want!  Your body has no idea when the next meal is going to come, so it prepares for a food shortage....by storing fat, and burning muscle (yes..even that HARDGAINER earned muscle that took months to obtain).  Crash diets are also downright dangerous.  They screw around with your electrolytes, glucose, and your mental health.   Don't even get me started about what those abnormal electrolytes can do to your heart rhythm.  Now look at Oprah Winfrey...a multi-multi-millionaire, and she goes on a liquid diet (less than 1,000 calories a day).  Then she has the gall to go on her own show and display to everybody what a dramatic change she had made to her body with this liquid diet!  Nice going Oprah, I wonder how many near deaths she almost caused with her endorsement of this ludicrous diet.  Even worse, how many people felt that if Oprah with all her millions, personal trainers,  nutrition experts and expensive gym equipment could fail, what chance would the average person have?  Needless to say..no one can stay on a sub 1,000 calorie/day diet for long, and sure enough, neither could Oprah.  The results of course, were rather embarrassing.

For all those people who claim to have the FAT GENE, or it's genetics...try again.  The so called FAT GENE does account for some of the fat that a person retains on his/her frame....about 1% or less of their body weight.   So if you weigh 400 lbs...you can thank your Fat Gene for about 4lbs of that 400lbs...

The sad fact is, most people don't realize how much they are really eating per day.  They nibble here, they nibble there, and then they proclaim "I just don't understand it!  I don't eat anything and I'm not losing any weight!   What?  Yeah I ate that bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.  What?   Yeah I was by myself...what's your point?!?!?"

This was brought home to me, when I came to live with my brother and sister in law.  I had always thought that I didn't eat much, skimping on breakfast and lunch, then having a pizza with the works for dinner (I'm talking I had half a pie here).   So there I was, starving myself throughout most of the day, then having what I thought was a relatively low calorie dinner late at night.  So what did I do wrong?   First, I was starving myself during the day, whereupon my body went into fat retaining mode.  Then, just when my body was primed and ready to store fat, I ate a "low calorie dinner", meaning I thought I was eating at the most, about 1200 calories for dinner.    Anyone want to guess how many calories I was really eating?  About 2000.   I weighed about 185 lbs. at the time, I should have only been eating 1850 calories per day..and that is if I wanted to maintain!  So I was eating about 150 calories over my requirement, which means that in about 20 days, I had eaten about a lb. of fat calories.   Now remember, I didn't always eat only at night, sometimes I would eat the pizza throughout the next day (and when you are getting a 2 for 1 special, you tend to have a lot to eat the next day).  Needless to say, I was pretty shocked to see some of my pictures from Christmas 98.  By the way, I also did no aerobics and only worked out once a week if at all.  Gee...how'd I get so fat?

So anyway, getting back to my "odyssey of self discovery" (Ha ha ha, where do I come up with these lines?)... I pretty much had nothing to do all day since moving in with my relatives, but learn how to train and workout.  (By the way, these are the same people that showed me my Christmas pictures, stating that I "looked different back then").  So, I began to workout...hard.   I bought one of those calorie books, and began to mark down all the foods that I ate per day.  I'm not talking guesstimating how many calories I was eating, I actually opened the book before putting anything in my mouth....and I wrote it all down..religiously.  I also started doing 10 second sprints in the mornings x 10.  (Every other day that is, between the weight lifting workouts).   Now my brother and sister-in-law  cook pretty low fat foods, as they were expecting the infant that this site is dedicated to.  So here I went, from eating carte blanche whatever and whenever I felt like it..to three square meals per day, with the last meal occurring at 6 PM.  I mean, I was eating salad before lunch and dinner for crying out loud!  At any rate, there was a dramatic change in my body composition in one month, and I owe it to the three components that I had mentioned earlier:

• Muscle building
• Diet
• Aerobic Exercise

I still ate steak, chicken, low fat lasagna with turkey meat etc.., but I also ate in moderation.  I didn't go berserk with the lasagna just because it was low fat (you know, like eating an entire box of cookies because they were low fat).  But I was definitely eating a lot less than I used to.  I was also supplementing my food with the protein powder that I had mentioned earlier, which meant that I was less prone to losing any muscle.  Don't get me wrong, I still eat a lot on occasion, but now I alternate it with a day or two of low calorie intake.

To summarize:

• Don't view a change in your eating habits as a "DIET", consider it as eating more healthy.
• You have to do Weight Training and Aerobics in addition to eating healthy. 
• No starvation diets..they JUST DON'T WORK!  Dangerous too!
• Actually keep a log of all the foods you eat (even chewing gum and tic tacs...I actually did this for only a week, as it got easier to roughly estimate how many calories I was taking in after a while)  Yeah it seems fanatical at first..but it's the only way that you'll convince yourself that you ARE NOT EATING "Practically anything!"
• Eat about 10 times your  weight (in lbs.) in calories per day.   If you add weight training and aerobics, I'm sure you will start losing fat.   To increase the fat loss, drop your calorie intake by an additional 10% each day..and not a calorie more!  (It gets too easy to fall into the MORE IS BETTER mindset when you start losing weight)  There is a fine line between a calorie deficit sufficient enough to lose weight, and a calorie deficit sufficient enough  to push your body into fat retaining mode.  Do not cross this line...
• Don't get rid of your favorite foods..just eat less of them.
• Losing fat, like building muscle, is actually quite simple.   Don't get suckered into all these new diets, new pills, new powders etc...   Stick with the basics, and be strong in your belief that it will work!
• Don't  weigh yourself.  It doesn't REALLY matter if you lose weight does it?  It only matters if that weight is fat, and unfortunately for some of us, we can only determine how much fat we are carrying by how our bodies look.   (Or you can get some fat calipers). Besides, if you lost one lb. of fat and gained two lbs. of muscle, the scale would  reflect an increase of one lb.  But you will look more muscular and more cut..so are you going to be upset about gaining a pound?   By the way, has anyone ever SEEN a lb. of fat?  Next time you got to the supermarket...ask for 1 lb. of pure fat!  (And don't make any jokes about the butcher giving you a pound from his head..they got cleavers you know)  It's actually quite huge, and you may then be satisfied with losing a "mere" lb. per week.
• You didn't gain all that weight in a few months..so don't think you can lose it all in a few either!
• Eat at least 4 small meals a day.  It is well known that each time you eat..you rev up your metabolism for about 2 hours.  Therefore, the more times you eat per day, the higher your metabolism stays.  Bodybuilders actually use this technique to get cut, sometimes eating 6 times in one day.  Keep a close eye on your calories though!

Now that you realize that you can lose fat, it's up to you to implement it.