The true diet

In the beginning, remember we had the low fat diet ? Then we had the calorie diet. After a while, we have keto then we have low carb. Now we have intermittent fasting which has 2 versions – Eat Stop Eat (which is somewhat similar to Warrior Diet) and Leangains. The list goes on – unlimited vegetarian, leptin diet, cheating diet. carb backloading, no grains, carb cycling and many more. So instead of a lack of information, we have too much information now that needs to be disseminated to discover their efficiency.

So which one is the true diet that we should follow and stick to ? Is it anything listed above ? Or is it a combination ?  Choose no more, the true diet starts from the inside. You know that you have to count calories, you know that you have to weigh your food, you know you aren’t supposed to eat junk food, you know the satiety index, you know so many things. However we still fail, or most of us still falls into that category.

The true diet starts by being proactive and counting those calories, weighing your food, throwing away junk food, choosing foods that will satiate you better. Be proactive and start making it a habit. Motivate yourself everyday. It’s not exactly a walk in the park, but you still need to do it to prevent heart disease, diabetes. You should understand that you have to lose those fat slowly to prevent metabolic damage, so be patient. Although I did say metabolic damage is ‘negligible’ however being under severe caloric deficit like 50% (1000 cals or more) for a few weeks can be detrimental.( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html?_r=0 ) Danny Cahill went on a huge caloric deficit during the show, then they discovered that he had 800 cal less daily metabolic burn. They were going on at least 2000 caloric deficits a day and their body recompensates by lowering that metabolism. From the evolutional standpoint it makes perfect sense, 6 years of famine then 6 years of abundance and the cycle can go in. These guys are the ones that will most likely survive under a long period of famine, because they only need to consume roughly 800 calories to maintain their body.

If you are proactive and you already do these stuff and you still fail because you cheat on those donuts and mcdonalds and feel really2 bad. Hey you that means you fall under the normal range of dieters. You should be a food/carb addict, I’m not exactly joking. When you ingest junk food your brain releases dopamine, which will lead to powerful cravings. How do we cure food addiction ? First we have to realize that we are addicts then we have to go cold turkey, kill all of those junk food or we slowly phase them out from the diet.

 

 

Fallacies and rants

1. Only exercise is necessary – The equation is calories in and calories out. The cal in has to be controlled.
2. I need to read a lot of new info to maximize my fat loss – Every diet that deviates from net caloric deficit eventually comes back to it. The take home message is to maintain roughly on average  deficit of 10-20% net daily caloric expenditure.
3. This diet is gonna make me lose so and so lbs in so many days – The only thing you lose is water in these fad diets.
4. I cant exercise no gym membership/ money to buy equipments – You can always walk around the estate or even do hand aerobics if you can’t walk.
5. I cant cook , I never did – There’s no way around this man, you have to weigh and cook your own food. Buying food outside is kinda unreliable.
6. When I go to the gym , I find I can’t lift or treadmill as heavy as those guys – compare yourself in the past to yourself now and to yourself in the future. Keep those exercise logs , this isn’t exactly a competition between u and the others. Imagine those guys running in the treadmill carrying the same amount of fat as you, obviously it’s more tiring that way.
7. I dont think I can lose this much , I ‘m so way overweight – I’ve seen people who really lost a lot, just google Jesse shand. He lost like 350 lbs and the idea is to segment your weight loss programme into installments. The first thing is to believe that it can be done- then you start doing it – then you do it consistently then you make it a habit.
8. I must eat 9x a day to stoke my metabolism – This is way fake. They did a research on this.
9. Doing HIIT will burn me 5x more calories than LISS – a 2006 study compared it and it only burnt 20% more compared to normal cardio/ LISS , calories were measured in a metabolic chamber.  A lot of people were stumped obviously, but being lazy doesn’t cut it.
10. You will lose a lot of muscle when cutting – This depends on a few things, the magnitude of the calorie deficit and whether you do resistance training or not. Despite all these hype about muscle loss, you can gain it back pretty fast, especially if you do a caloric surplus combines with resistance. The reason why we ask you to maintain a daily caloric deficit of 20% is because we don’t want you to lose too many muscle (and that makes calorie counting essential) .
11. I need to use protein shake to cut – It’s better to use the solid form like lean meat simply because it digests slower and keeps you full longer.

Metabolic damage and myths

1. When you starve yourself too long , your metabolism will slow to a crawl and you will gain fat instead or reach a plateau and screw up your body. So fasting is bad and you should eat small frequent meals to stoke the metabolic fire.

How true is that sentence above ?

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/71/6/1511.full.pdf

Answer is all here , and I wouldn’t claim any credit.

 

2. Cardio makes you fat- Look you keep doing cardio and you become resistant to it and you dont lose as much fat as before. So you have to cycle it with resistance training because your metabolism ……. BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA.

Wow I was like wtf when I hear people or internet GURUS (mostly fake natties) who make stupid and unscientific claims like this. Let’s ask these idiots to go back to the basics on how to gain fat in the first place and we retrace from there.

TO FAT GAIN = CALORIES IN greater than CALORIES OUT

As you can see from this equation , doing cardio increases the calories out section not the other way round. But I did cardio , I lost weight initially and I got a plateau and I’m not losing fat anymore ? That’s pretty simply because you are not establishing a caloric deficit. But I did the same diet and I’m stuck. A lot of people don’t know this, but lighter people burns less calories than heavier people.

http://www.dotfit.com/content-1485.html

To prove this  simple logic: lift a 20 kg dumbbell vs a 5 kg dumbbell , which is heavier ? So if you lost 15 kgs and are doing the same exercises with the same intensity with the same duration with the same schedule – it’s fairly LOGICAL to infer you are going to burn less calories. So you have to readjust your diet aka cal in again…..

3. Muscle burns a shit load more calories than fats

This isn’t true obviously……. You wont really burn much more calories unless you’re actually working out to maintain those muscles aka wear and tear then rebuild.

http://www.builtlean.com/2013/04/16/muscle-burn-calories/

 

 

Exercises

Now that you have your diet more or less counted, let’s talk about exercise. There are so many types which one is the most effective ?

Note that generally there are only three types of exercises :

-resistance training like lifting weights.

-cardio like jogging or swimming or even walking.

-mix of both like swimming really2 fast or sprinting or HIIT.

 

Resistance training

The idea behind this is to CONSTRUCTIVELY damage your muscle and rebuild them during rest.

Cardio

Train your heart can be low or can be high usually a % of your max heart rate, maintain a stable heart rate for a duration, or spike heart rate up.

HIIT

Max effort sprint or cycle or swimming for 30 s followed by rest and max effort again rinse and repeat. VERY2 tiring. Kinda like a mix of both cardio and resistance.

 

The most efficient exercise for fat loss is something which you can do comfortably for a long time with minimal resting period. Like forever after with minimal risk of INJURY. For beginners i suggest light cardio like walking briskly or slow jog or swimming. Resistance training is good but not really optimal for total beginners because the you have to slowly learn the proper form and repetitions !! It’s possible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, if you are very fat. Go for 2 sets x (6 to 10) reps , each set done till 1-3 reps before failure, record each session.

On the other hand, HIIT is definitely not recommended, as it’s very draining on the cns (central nervous system) and energy level. It needs a high recovery time.

Light walking or light swimming or light biking may sound weak and puny. If you like to jog or walk and are very heavy – please buy/invest a good knee support. A good knee support is shaped like a bandage , where you can adjust the tightness of the wrap. Even if you do elliptical, it will still be very2 useful in keeping your knee safe. Always prioritize avoiding injuries.

However when you do them for an hour you can burn 200-300 calories if you are 200 lbs. AND you can do it everyday, with low risk of injury. Remember you only need  roughly a 10-20% caloric deficit of your maintenance, a maintenance of 2000 calories will yield 200-300 caloric deficit required. Just that an hour walk/swim/bike everyday and eating maintenance will work wonders.

The idea of resistance training is to damage your muscle CONSTRUCTIVELY and getting enough stimulus for it to GROW given SUFFICIENT REST and nutrients(calories and protein). You are likely to gain some fat during muscle building…… The idea is to do weight training and getting 10-15% maintenance caloric surplus + eating enough proteins and carbs + enough rest. It’s still possible to lose fat there’s a study that actually suggests that the calories for resistance training are not calculated correctly and are understated……

Things that you might need to buy

Do I need to buy protein powder, preworkout , p90x program, gym membership, creatine, books and etc ?

Fat loss industry = MULTI BILLION dollar industry. Some people offer magic pills, supplements just to boost fat loss and give you that desired body. A few of these supplements do work but have side effects, let’s look at some of them :

p90x, gym membership, crossfit – For fat loss, all these actually goes into Calories out region, as long as you do them , I dont see why not. However, some of the prescribed vids, exercises are not for NEWBIES and are too hard/ strenous and may cause injuries if you don’t rest enough. Never ever force yourself to do anything that’s too difficult go at it one step at a time. Be flexible and gauge yourself. Advance slowly and tailor your own program. For fat loss, simple aerobics/walk is usually a good calorie out machine, lifting weights aka resistance training is used to build muscles. Don’t do something that you hate doing, but also don’t judge an exercise before trying it at least 3 x. Don’t fall for idiotic ideas , a good example is spot reduction,  you can’t reduce that fat tummy by doing 200 sit ups a day, all you get is an injured back and neck, you have to keep maintaining that calorie deficit to lose all that fat and get that six pack.

Greentea – A few research been done on this supplement , apparently improves fat oxidation -> but you still need to maintain that caloric deficit.

Creatine – Improves ATP , but not necessary – good if you want to build muscles, get that extra rep. Not much side effects. Will add water weight.

DNP- It supposedly works but it’s an uncontrolled substance and is fatal if you take too much. It’s hard to gauge the accuracy of dosage. Not without adverse side effects. Don’t do it.

Steroids – This has been researched……… It apparently works which is messed up, but it has a lot of side effects and could stunt your hormone production in the future. Not reccomended unless you need Testosterone Replacement Therapy. More widely used to gain mass instead of fat loss and incorrect administration/ lack of Proper PCT can ruin your hormonal balance.

Caffeine – works as an energy booster and appetite suppressant .

Band surgery/ lippo – works but not without risks and failures.

Clen – Study showed it works but dangerous. Again an uncontrolled substance , not without side effects can be fatal.

Ephederine/ Ma Huang – controlled substance, not withoout risks, energy booster and appetite suppressant studies showed it worked better taken without caffeine. Can be fatal.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.1550-8528.1995.tb00224.x/pdf

Food scale and books to record food and training and measuring tape- This is actually what you really need . You can weigh your food, apps like myfitnesspal, calorie king and record your training. Weekly measurements of your waist and hips are imperative.

 

Emphasis on fixing diet

Now that we know 75% of our deficit is determined by our diet, how do we make sure that we don’t screw up.

I mean that it’s easy to say that today I’m gonna eat so and so only which is about 1800 calories, but most of the time we fuck up. We stick to the food plan, then suddenly we crave for some junk food and we binge. It’s easy to point fingers and blame a person’s willpower is weak, not motivated and similar things like that, but most people can’t even explain wtf is happening and wrong.

When you eat food, your brain produces dopamine, a feel good chemical same as when you take cocaine.

Ref : Food reward and cocaine increase extracellular dopamine in the nucleus accumbens as measured by microdialysis

• Luis Hernandez,
• Bartley G. Hoebel

If we study an anorexic person, who’s dying and still refuses to eat ( which a normal person would regard as ridiculous), we can probably find answers.

Ref :

Dysregulation of brain reward systems in eating disorders: neurochemical information from animal models of binge eating, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia nervosa.

Avena NM¹, Bocarsly ME.

Junk food exacerbates this problem, there are many things in there that actually fucks up your brain. The solution is to scale back from junk food as fast as possible. Slowly scale down the junk food : msg laden food, fat filled food (fried food), sweet stuff.

JUNK FOOD = Coke , Pepsi , POPs, potato chips, cereal , fried stuff, kfc, pizza, donuts, french fries, fruit juice, chocolate milk, sweet milk, hot dogs and ice cream. To sum it up , anything that’s sweet, fried, fatty and contains msg – could be classified as junkfood.

So what should you eat ? A lot of fibers, salad, vegetables, baked/steamed foods , baked sweet potato/ potato ( with no butter), boiled/baked chicken/beef/pork , oatmeal, fish, low fat milk,fish oil and apples/strawberries/oranges.

And yes, you are going to have to learn to cook and prepare your meals. Make it habitual to eat well, cook/prepare your food, avoid junk food like the plague, learn fasting .

The slower you lose it, the better….. Dont follow a crash exercise , diet regime like the biggest loser.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2927207/We-fat-Former-Biggest-Loser-contestants-admit-controversial-regained-weight-endure-lasting-health-issues.html

You are going to gain it all back again in no time, if you dont make it a habit to AVOID junk food .

 You have to keep a food log, tabulating everything you eat and drink. You should also note the fullness of each meal, how long did it take before you feel hungry. Some meals can be more satiating than others, so don’t just go by the calorie table and start looking at the satiety index.

Skipping your breakfast is

So here are the things you have to do to clean up diet :

1. Stop junk food, go clean asap.
2. Cook your own food whenever possible, if you can’t cook you’re exposed to many additional calories/msg in the restaurants’ secret sauce, dips etc. Cook once in the morning, and bring a lunch/dinner box to work.
3. Keep a food log, log what/how much you are eating. Note how satiated you are after each individual meal.
4. You only need roughly 1-1.5g protein perkg of your lean body weight , much less than that if you have high body fat%. Get some salmon fish (non polluted) oils daily and avoid cooking oil (transfat).
5. Skip your breakfast. EVERY DAMN DAY. Eat an 8-10 hour window. Fast at least 15 hours a day. You still need to count your weekly calories, intermittent fasting is not magic where you skip 1 meal and overeat  (cals) the other 2 meals.

Fat loss part 2

Now that you have learnt to count calories in minus calories out, you probably realised that you need to upkeep a constant deficit of calories weekly to lose that fat.

Now how big should that deficit be ? The ideal amount shouldn’t be too big or too small to make a difference. It should be roughly 10-25% of your maintenance calories. Maintenance cals are those cals that you burn daily from that calorie calculator ( with all your extra exercises inputted to the equation).That’s the hard part, making sure of that 10-25% of your calories every week. It’s not easy as just maintaining a net caloric deficit, but it has to be tapered down to 10-25  %. It can’t be too high, but not too low either. What this means is that we have to keep a food log and activity log.

If it’s too big, you will get sick, lose muscle , feel like crap.

How do I know a net deficit of calories will produce fat loss. can you prove it ?

Here’s a study link comparing low fat (with caloric restriction aka net caloric deficit) vs low carb. Both groups lost fat.

ref : Foster GD, et al. A randomized trial of a low-carbohydrate diet for obesity.New England Journal of Medicine, 2003.

What’s the speed of fat loss should I expect ?

We have to assume some things for this answer : assuming you have maintenance of 2000 cals, and you cut out 20% of maintenance which is 400 calories daily. That’s roughly 2800 deficit calories a week. 1 lb of fat is about 2850 cals, so you will lose roughly 1 pound.

ref : http://www.zoeharcombe.com/standalone/1lb-does-not-equal-3500-calories/

Is it necessary for me to cheat on my diets ?

Studies say yes, make sure to trigger insulin release. Leptin decreases as you follow a net caloric restriction. Leptin is a hormone that’s proven to regulate the body fat, decreases as you lose that fat, zooms back up when you refeed those calories. It means one day a week, you should eat at maintenance to 10% above, the other 6 days deficit.

Ref: Effect of Fasting, Refeeding, and Dietary Fat Restriction on Plasma Leptin Levels 

David S. Weigle, P. Barton Duell, William E. Connor, Robert A. Steiner, Michael R. Soules, and Joseph L. Kuijper

Acute and Chronic Effect of Insulin on Leptin Production in Humans: Studies In Vivo and In Vitro Jerzy W Kolaczynski

 

What’s most important in the fat loss program?

1. CONSISTENT mental strength- motivation -> the ability to go after your goal everyday
2. Acceptance of slipping once in a while -> You just climbed 200 steps of stairs and you slipped fell down lost 10 steps, you gonna give up the whole 195 steps or ?
3. Measurements/ log your results . Weigh yourself and measure your waist and hip once a week at a fixed time (usually when you wake up). Your weight fluctuates a lot and doesn’t reflect the whole picture because of water.  If you are super fat more than 50%, initially you will find yourself losing a lot of weight more rapidly, then it will start to taper.
4. Injury and sickness avoidance. Consult with your doctor first if you have a health condition.
5. Sleeping enough. When you do resistance training or HIIT, your muscle will be damaged, so you recover the muscles while resting.
6. Start small and improve, and don’t do drastic changes. The story of Jesse Shand, an internet troll who lost hundreds of lbs, showed that making baby steps do work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8svuSIYQu74

If you can lose 1 lb a week of fat, to lose 20 lbs, you will need 20 weeks. That’s a whopping 5 months. You need to keep logging in that caloric deficit constantly for a whole 5 months, so having a ‘doable’ exercise program and diet program for a whole 5 months is imperative.

 

 

The real , no BS/ Lies / Ads fat loss plan

There ‘s a lot of hype out there for fat loss, buy supplement A or B or C or D or E and you lose fat fast. Lose 20 pounds in 1 week ? Lose 5 pounds in 3 days by following this diet and so and so? Let me tell you , 99% are Bull shit. Conclusion : Fuck all of them, preying on overweight people who are really trying to lose weight.

Now look, there are laws that govern fat loss, and those are pretty simple, so simple that they are painful.

CALORIES IN – CALORIES OUT = Fat gain or loss

Calories in is what we eat, calories out is what we do and the resulting deficit or excess will be translated to fat loss/gain. Adding muscle to the equation is definitely confusing but let’s revise it again.

CAL IN – CAL OUT = FAT  gain or loss + MUSCLE  gain or loss

Next, let’s take a look at the equation and analyze one component CAL OUT. We have a daily base calorie requirement , and it actually varies depending on your activity. For simplicity sake just use :

http://activitycalc.com/

 Now this is pretty much constant and can be ramped up by activity (exercise). You can’t exactly ramp it up too much and too often, as our body needs rest after every exercise session, depending on the severity.

Exercise can be divided to 3 types

1. Cardio
2. Resistance
3. A mix of both

 

Cardio is basically any exercise that gets your heart rate up to a certain target . A light walk, jogging, elliptical , skipping , rowing, aerobics. This is one of the most efficient calorie  out exercise.

Resistance is in simple form: any exercise that mostly aims to break your muscle down with the goal of improving muscle mass/resistance during rest periods. Sprinting, Weight lifting.

A mix of both : HIIT, weight lifting circuits – supposedly better but very taxing.

We will come back to this later in more detail , but keep in mind, exercise = 25% of the equation.

Lesson 1. 

You CAN NEVER OUTRUN A BAD DIET .

The other 75% comes from calorie intake. If calories out is more or less constant with our daily activity, then you become fat thru : ‘ maintaining a bigger calorie in vs your calorie out (which is more or less constant if you don’t do extra exercise) ‘

Let’s say maintenance is 2000 cals, and we eat a daily 3000 cals. You might ask me how the ‘fuck’ am I going to eat 3000 cals, that’s a lot man. A dinner of 14″ cheese only pizza is +-2400 cals man, with a can of coke is additional 90 cals, add one more scoop of ice cream 300 cals, pretty close to 3000 cals.

‘I’ll just exercise it away then’.

Are we going to exercise out the 1000 cals everyday to keep our weight constant? That’s roughly an hour and a half jog EVERYDAY for an average person ? Is that sustainable for you ?

75% of your fat loss comes from your diet, you can even make it 100 % if you dont exercise at all, but that’s a huge disadvantage for you. There are five golden rules to dieting.

Rule 1.

Recognize junk food. Avoid junk food like the plague. Junk food doesn’t fill you up as nomal clean food does. Junk = calorie dense food = aka high calorie value per g/ounce

Vegetable oil  is 250 cal/oz ,sugar is 110 cal/g, rice is 37 cal /oz , potato 26 cal /oz,  oatmeal 20 cal/oz, cheddar cheese 113 cal/g , roasted chicken breast with skin is 56 cal/oz only. Memorize these figures.

All this info can be found in http://www.calorieking.com

Rule 2.

Weigh your food and cook it by yourself. Since you know the calorie per oz value, it makes sense to calculate the Calorie in to your mouth value.

Rule 3.

Learn your macros, protein , fat , carb. There’s so many diets now, it’s impossible to follow them all, i’d say choose whatever that suits you but count the calories and it should have all the macros. Get at least 1-1.5g perkg of your weight daily to maintain/ repair muscles. Avoid the fad diets , eat whatever you want diets, dont get caught up in a diet’s religious fervor such that you refuse to listen to logic and scientific research (it’s all about the calories) : veganism, atkins, etc.

Rule 4.

Learn the satiety list foods to stave off the hunger. http://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/fullness-factor

Rule 5.

Learn intermittent fasting. Try it and learn the idea of true hunger. Most obese people have fucked up their hunger signals from the gut to the brain. Most people don’t even realise that they get dopamine from eating food, so food is actually addictive. Fat loss isn’t a billion dollars industry for nothing, it’s actually hard to come off food addiction. The best way to get rid of food addiction is actually fasting intermittently. Start with 18 hour fasts, then proceed to 24 hour fasts. Get used to the thirst ( even if you can drink as much water as you want) and fruity breath , because that’s what fat burning is like – a state of ketosis. 18 hour fasts can be done 4-7 days/week, 24 hour fasts can be done at 1-2x a week.