Now that we’ve covered macronutrients, I think you now have enough information to understand why all diets work. All diets work because they all reduce your calories below your required maintenance calories.
Weight Watches (WW)
Even one of the most popular diet companies, Weight Watchers, reduces calories. They just do it by assigning a point system to different foods while reducing a person’s points instead of calories. But at the end of the day, it just lowers someone’s calories below their maintenance levels. It’s not magic, right? Especially now that you understand what maintenance calories are and how to manipulate them to lose weight.
But I get it, for most people, it’s probably easier to track one small point number rather than one large calorie number, but you’re not most people. You’re cream of the crop. Besides, with today’s calorie tracking apps, counting calories really shouldn’t be hard. No one is counting the total number by calories or macronutrients themselves. It’s done by their phone or computer. In your case, you’ll just be putting your food into the the food planner app I recommend and if you purpose my program, my auto-diet template takes care of this addition and subtraction for you.
Lo-Carb
Some diets are even more popular than Weight Watchers. The ones I’m referring to reduce calories by restricting carbs. The Keto, Paleo, and whole food diets are the most popular diets that do this. Keto restricts carbs to about 50 grams per day which, as well talked about, forces the body to use and burn more fat for fuel. The fewer carbs you have in your body, the quicker your body will use them for energy and then begin using your fat.
But, although the diet may force you to burn more of your fat for fuel if you go this route, you’ll have more dietary fat in you. You must use fat to replace the carbs you are eating, because your body will still need calories to survive. You still must eat something. So, you can still overeat. If you eat too much fat by going over your maintenance calories, it’ll be much easier to convert this excess fat into body fat.
But restricting carbs can be beneficial if you suffer from food addiction. Meaning, when you eliminate carbs, you have fewer options to eat highly addictive and processed foods like chips, Pop tarts, and pastries.
Keto, Paleo, and Whole Food
Keto, Paleo, and the whole food diets focus on eliminating processed and refined carbs. So, it’s much easier to lose weight when you eliminate binge-worthy foods like chips, candies, cakes, and cookies from your diet.
Unfortunately, when you restrict carbs, you also reduce the amount of water your body retains. And water has weight. Every 1 gram of carb you eat requires 3-4 grams of water to process and store it. So, when you reduce the amount of water you keep, your body no longer has this water in it. Therefore, restricting carbs makes you lose weight. But it’s not fat. It’s water weight.
People who follow low carb diets see a massive initial drop in their weight in the first few weeks. This gives them a huge reason to keep going and can make them fanatical about their diets being the diet that works. But as you previously learned, losing water-weight and fat are two different things. Losing water weight because of carb restrictions can be highly motivating but it doesn’t teach you how to eat for life and it’s only temporary.
Do you know someone who has followed a low-carb diet but then decided to take a low-carb break for a day or, worse, for an entire weekend? If you do, you have undoubtedly heard how their body weight may have shot up the next day.
Again, every 1 gram of carbohydrate requires 3-4 grams of water to process and store it. If they eat 50 grams of carbs in a weekend, which is only like 2 slices of white bread, that’s 150-200 grams of water. 1 gram is equal to 0.03 ounces, so 150-200 grams of water equals roughly 5.2 to 7 ounces of water, which is just under a half pound. This means their weight will go up by a half pound the next time they step on a body weight scale.
Now imagine a restaurant meal full of carbs such as 3 cups of cooked pasta and a slice of cake. They’ll get about 129 grams of carbs from the pasta and about 72 grams of carbs from the cake, for a total of 201 grams.
This equals about 603-804 grams of water, or about 1.3 – 1.7 pounds of water weight from those carbs. It won’t be fat, but just like it was very motivating to see a drop in water weight, it’s also very demotivating to see it return. This then forces a lot of people who experience this to give up on their diets. This doesn’t even account for the water the body will hold because of the increased sodium. This is why knowing how weight loss works is way more important than the type of diet someone is on.
Fortunately, we’re working on building muscle and getting lean, which means you’re going to need carbs, just not the ones that are high in calories like chips and cake. You can eat them, but you’ll need to recognize that they may quickly put you over your maintenance calories and affect how much weight and fat you will lose. I’d love to eat an entire family size bag of Doritos, but I can’t, so I stick to the 1-ounce bags I see at the grocery store checkout line.
Intermittent Fasting
The last diet craze I’ll address is Intermittent fasting. In this approach to dieting, there are supposedly hormonal benefits that help boost fat lost, but the biggest draw to many people is the idea that you can eat whatever you want without counting calories, if they only eat food within a certain window of time. The window can be as short or as long as they want, but four to eight hours of eating tends to be most popular.
Theoretically, if you can only eat food within a four-to-eight-hour window, you should eat less food, right? But we’ve learned that eating less food doesn’t mean eating fewer calories, although this is what Intermittent fasting helps people do. It’s certainly a useful strategy, but it’s not full proof. At the end of the day, you still must eat fewer calories than your body requires if you’re going to lose weight and ultimately fat.
I do a variation of Intermittent fasting myself, but it’s not because I want to intentionally eat in a specific time window. I just prefer having Black coffee upon waking up and sipping on it as I work through the morning. Then, I usually eat breakfast about 3 hours later.
What I’ve experienced as a danger in Intermittent fasting is if you wait too long to eat, you eventually will get ravenous. And when you’re extremely hungry, it’s much easier to lose control of how much you eat once you begin eating. Your ghrelin hormone, which is often called the “hunger hormone” takes over and ultimately, there will be a lag between when you begin eating and when your leptin hormone sends the “I’m full” signal to your brain. So, if you choose to use Intermittent fasting as a strategy, be conscious of this.
What I want you to ultimately shoot for is a diet that’s high in protein, high in carbohydrates, and low in fats because I want you to convert your body into an environment that’s primed for muscle growth. And of course, you’re going to eat this way while staying at or below your maintenance calories so you can lose fat. And you’re going to do this with a flexible approach to dieting, which I’ll write about later.
