Burning Desire: Do you want to lose 5 pounds of fat quickly without starving yourself?
Jumpstart your metabolism with the following eating plan:
Torn. Cutting up. Trituration. All different labels to describe the ultimate goal of the bodybuilder: dispatch unwanted body fat accumulation while keeping hard-earned muscle mass right where it is. Although the oft-prescribed method of eating fewer calories each day while burning extra calories through exercise is certainly the foundation on which a six-pack is built, many of us soon discover that approach ultimately fails.
Plateaus, those stubborn roadblocks where body fat seems to stick to your body no matter how hard you exercise or how meticulously you count calories, prevent 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-lowering caloric intake. A better solution is to follow a rotational diet which, unlike chronic diets, helps create a caloric deficit while keeping your metabolism going.
GOING HUNGRY 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, going on a severely low-calorie diet in the hope of a quick fix only sets you up for failure.
Starving yourself drains your energy and you can’t exercise, so you can’t change your appearance. The drastic reduction of calories leads to a slowdown in the 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. Meaning, when you eat too few calories, your body slows down the production of thyroid hormone, which lowers your metabolic rate. Other detrimental effects of starving include an increase in the enzymes that store fat 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 cuts actually increase LPL activity. Along with decreased thyroid hormone levels, this causes the body to hold on to stored body fat.
While severe calorie reductions seem to throw a dietary wrench into the fat loss equation, calorie surpluses or overeating exert another disconcerting effect. Not only does it increase body fat, 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 rotational approach to defining employs both dieting and feeding phases. The first requires a reduction in calories by decreasing your daily carbohydrate intake by 50% for 2-4 days. Since prolonged bouts of dieting can slow metabolism, a single “eating” day in which you increase your carbohydrate intake by 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 2-4 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, lessens the magnitude of metabolic slowdown, and can increase testosterone, growth hormone, and IGF levels enough to help keep muscle metabolically stimulated. After the one high carb day, I would go back to the diet phase.
Ingesting more carbohydrates in the eating phase can quickly reverse the catabolic environment and muscle loss associated with many diets by increasing insulin levels and resaturating muscles with their primary training fuel source: stored muscle glycogen. With a chronic diet and lower carbohydrate intake, by contrast, glycogen stores decline and insulin levels remain constantly low. While lower caloric intake, altered insulin production, and lower glycogen stores are factors in fat loss, all three can also cause you to slip into a catabolic state where the body burns protein from tissue muscle for fuel. You walk a very 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 total protein balance of muscle tissue. If you were chronically under-consuming carbs, your body would end up using more leucine for fuel, leading to loss of muscle mass. However, the eating phase of this rotating strategy requires a large influx of carbohydrates, causing a surge in insulin that rapidly reverses protein (muscle) breakdown in the short term. 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 adding excess protein to the diet. 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 increase your protein dramatically; that would negate the calorie reduction created by eating fewer carbs. Cutting carbs in half for a few days while keeping protein steady would help you lose weight, and a high carb day would give you the extra fuel to get you through the low carb days.