Burning Desire: Want to lose 5 pounds of fat fast without starving yourself?
Jump-start your metabolism with the following meal plan:
Torn. Cutting up. Trituration. All different labels to describe the bodybuilder’s ultimate goal: to shed unwanted body fat accumulation while keeping your hard-earned muscle mass right where it is. Although the oft-prescribed method of eating fewer calories each day while burning additional calories through exercise is certainly the foundation on which a six-pack is built, many of us soon discover that the approach ultimately fails.
Plateaus, those stubborn roadblocks where body fat seems to stick to your frame no matter how hard you exercise or how meticulously you count calories, keep many of us from reaching low body fat levels. Worse yet, plateaus are often so frustrating that they lead to unhealthy last-minute efforts, including very low-carb diets or massive amounts of cardio combined with ever-lower caloric intake. A better solution is to go on a rotational diet which, unlike chronic dieting, helps create a caloric deficit while keeping your metabolism going.
STARVING IS A BIG MISTAKE
Most dietary strategies are based on a calorie deficit approach: you eat less fuel than the body requires each day, creating an energy deficit, and the body responds by turning to body fat for fuel. However, adopting a severely low-calorie diet in the hope of a quick fix only sets you up for failure.
Starving yourself depletes your energy and you can’t exercise, so you can’t change your appearance. Drastic reduction in calories leads to a slowdown in metabolic rate – the total number of calories burned in a day – and a slow metabolism is the death wish for anyone seeking a strong body.
Research has indicated that the thyroid gland, the source of thyroid hormones that ultimately help determine your metabolic rate, reacts quickly to starvation diets. That is, when you eat too few calories, your body decreases the production of thyroid hormone, which lowers your metabolic rate. Other detrimental effects of starvation include an increase in fat-storing enzymes in the body. An enzyme called lipoprotein lipase (LPL) acts as a kind of gatekeeper, allowing fatty acids to move in and out of fat cells. While mild calorie reductions cause a decrease in LPL activity, giving fatty acids the freedom to flow out of fat cells, overly aggressive calorie reductions actually increase LPL activity. Along with decreased thyroid hormone levels, this causes the body to hold on to stored body fat.
While severe calorie cuts seem to throw a dietary monkey wrench into the fat-loss equation, calorie surpluses or overeating have another puzzling effect. Not only does body fat increase, but overeating can cause a slight increase in thyroid levels and an increase in anabolic hormones that help maintain muscle mass, such as growth hormone, testosterone, and IGF- one.
A BETTER WAY TO ENJOY YOUR DIET
The rotating approach to getting trim employs both the dieting and eating phases. The first requires a reduction in calories by reducing daily carbohydrate intake by 50% for 2-4 days. Since prolonged periods of dieting can slow down your metabolism, a single day of “eating” where you increase your carbohydrate intake to 50% more than normal can prevent any potential slowdown. For example, a person currently consuming 400 grams of carbohydrates per day would reduce their daily intake to 200 grams for 2 to 4 days. Then he would rotate to the eating phase and increase his carbs to 600 grams for a single day. This provides a mental break from dieting, decreases the magnitude of the metabolic slowdown, and can increase levels of testosterone, growth hormone, and IGF enough to help keep muscle metabolically stimulated. After the one high carb day, I was back on the diet phase.
Eating more carbohydrates in the feeding phase can quickly reverse the catabolic environment and muscle loss associated with many diets by increasing insulin levels and restoring muscles with their primary source of training fuel: stored muscle glycogen. With a chronic diet and lower carbohydrate intake, on the contrary, glycogen stores decrease and insulin levels remain constantly low. While lower caloric intake, altered insulin production, and lower glycogen stores are factors that influence fat loss, all three can also cause you to fall into a catabolic state in which the body burns protein from tissue muscle for fuel. You walk a fine line between progress and plateau.
Carbohydrates prevent your body from using other sources of energy, including the branched-chain amino acid leucine, which is very important in the overall protein balance of muscle tissue. If you chronically under-consumed carbohydrates, your body would end up using more leucine for fuel, leading to muscle loss. However, the feeding phase of this rotational strategy requires a large influx of carbohydrates, causing a spike in insulin that rapidly reverses short-term protein (muscle) breakdown. This, in turn, allows you to maintain the maximum amount of muscle before re-entering the diet phase.
Some people hope to keep their muscle metabolically friendly while dieting by over-adding the need for dietary protein. I know many people who increase their protein while eating fewer carbs in hopes of preventing muscle loss. But you can’t cut your carbs in half and dramatically increase your protein; that would negate the calorie reduction created by eating fewer carbohydrates. Cutting carbs in half for a few days while keeping the protein stable would help you slim down, and a high-carb day would give you the extra fuel to get you through the low-carb days.