This is a great article that I found that answers most of the basic questions on how to lose weight.
Shane’s Fat Loss Manifesto
Introduction
Having lost a bunch of weight, I get asked a lot about how I did it and what I’d recommend to other people. So I’ve decided to try and summarize all those ideas into this. I hope to have included enough information to help somebody else be successful without dragging the reader through mind-numbing details which I’ve left out.
Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss
The most commonly stated goal for most of the fitness-minded public is “weight loss”. What’s really intended here is “fat loss”. The difference between losing weight and losing fat is being able to build or maintain muscle mass. There are some muscle facts that need to be understood by anyone seeking to lose weight.
Muscle weighs considerably more than fat. In theory, a person could lose weight and still be fatter than before. And by fatter, I’m referring to the percentage of your body that is fat. That’s not that kind of weight loss we’re interested in. Also, a person could gain muscle and lose fat and end up both heavier and thinner. Similarly, and this happens a lot, slow muscle growth with fat loss could make a person thinner while the weight scale doesn’t see a change.
Other factoids about muscle: Muscle at rest burns more calories than fat at rest. Muscle looks a lot better than fat.
Therefore when we set out to lose weight, it is clearly in our best interest to simultaneously gain or maintain muscle mass. You’ll see later that we can make exercise and nutritional choices which conserve or increase muscle mass while we burn fat.
Burning Fat
Fat loss has only one requirement: calories burnt > calories consumed. Simple, right? Calories consumed are easy to monitor and control. Calories burnt are a lot more complicated.
Despite what your cardio machine at the gym might say, there is not a calories burnt speedometer that anyone can read (although www.bodybugg.com might soon prove it can do this). Your metabolism governs how many calories the body burns. Your treadmill knows little about your metabolism while you’re on the treadmill and it is completely clueless about the 23 1/2 hours per day you aren’t on the treadmill.
To burn more calories, we need to increase the metabolism. Exercise and nutritional choices can speed up or apply the brakes to the metabolism.
Hitting The Accelerator
Cardio is by far the biggest factor for making an immediate impact on accelerating the metabolism. Generally speaking, the faster your heart rate is during exercise, the more energy you’re burning and the faster your metabolism will run in response to that energy demand. Great, so lengthy heart-pumping exercises like brisk running are what we should strive for, right? Well, not really.
When an intense demand for energy (like running) persists long enough, the body will burn muscle mass to supply the energy for the exercise. Sadly, it is easier for the body to burn muscle than fat. This is why marathon runners thin as rails and lack muscle tone. We don’t want that (or maybe you do - and if so stop right here).
You might notice that cardio machines like treadmills show a moderate heart rate as being most appropriate for fat burning. The reason behind this theory is to avoid the aforementioned muscle burning. Long, moderate cardio sessions burn less fat than intense cardio, but it does so with minimal muscle loss. So should we make the compromise of preferring long boring cardio machine workouts?
HIIT
We can do better. There’s something in between called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT is basically any cardio-centric exercise performed as intensely as possible for short durations with rest intervals in between. One example might be 10-15 intervals sprinting on a stationary bike for 30 seconds, followed by 60 seconds of a slow pace. The intervals are short enough that the body doesn’t cannibalize its own muscle for energy. But the intensity is high enough that the metabolism is served notice that it needs to create larger energy stores called ATP inside the muscles to support future HIIT workouts. And its that that “served notice” bit that makes HIIT so good.
It takes the body hours to create more ATP. So for hours after performing HIIT, the body will mine its own fat (!) for energy to replenish and enlarge ATP stores inside the muscles. Now that’s exactly what we’re looking for - mining fat stores to benefit muscle.
A fringe benefit is that our muscles get more ATP (available energy stores) from this process. This means the next time you do HIIT, or any other intense cardio, you’ll be able to perform at a higher level. You’ll be able to go faster for longer durations (still short intervals) and/or with less rest in between. And that in turn signals the body that it needs even more ATP for next time.
The whole thing is a self-spiraling process of burning fat and increasing your performance without burning muscle mass.
How much HIIT should we perform? Everything I read says 2-3 times per week. Forget the boring cardio sessions on treadmills and such. You don’t need them any more.
How long should each HIIT session be? HIIT is a very efficient process. Depending on what you’re doing, anywhere from 5-20 minutes will do. And believe me, if you perform at 100% effort as you should during these intervals, you’ll agree that several minutes of HIIT is PLENTY.
Keep Lifting
Despite our best efforts to not burn muscle mass for energy, they’re going to fade if we don’t use them. And we might as well build them up a bit in helping our goals. So we’ve got to put weight lifting into our routine. How often to lift, what weights to use, and what kind of lifts to perform is a topic for some other book. I’ll only say that I recommend the following: lift 3-4 days per week and wait at least 2 days before lifting with the same body part twice. Also make your weight-lifting challenging. For example if you lift a weight n times, make sure it is heavy enough such that you couldn’t lift once or twice more before failure.
So now we’ve got exercise goals which burn fat and increase or maintain muscle mass. Sweet. So now we’ve got a good handle in the “calories burned” side of that fat loss equation, right? Well, mostly. You’ll see next that nutrition has an impact too.
Calories Consumed
Every time we digest food, the metabolism goes up a small notch. And every time the body perceives starvation, the metabolism slows down. Therefore, one strategy to keep the metabolism flowing at a higher pace is to eat frequently. I eat every 3 hours. In 3 hours, food is completely digested so why not give the metabo something else to do and feed the beast again. Eating frequently also carries the benefit of keeping blood sugar more constant which is another benefit for our mood, or motivation, our appetite, and our disposition to convert blood sugar into fat stores - not to mention keeping diabetes away. So, regardless of what quantity of food you eat in a day, try it in portions spread out every 3 hours.
How many calories should we eat? More than you might think.
As stated previously, there’s no proven meter that tells us how much we’re burning. So our best method is trial and error. If we’re getting fatter we need to eat less. If we’re getting leaner, than we’re eating the right amount. Pretty simple, right?
In judging whether or not we’re getting leaner or fatter, keep in mind my comments about muscle mass vs fat mass. You could be leaner and still be heavier or you could be lighter but still fatter. So I recommend using a tape measure in conjunction with a weight scale. I also recommend measuring every 2 weeks and not daily. Daily measurements have too much fluctuation to make trend spotting obvious.
As with weight lifting, entire books are written addressing what kind of calories to eat for a fitness program. In general, I’ll say the following.
FAT DOESN’T MAKE YOU FAT, GET OVER IT!
You won’t turn into a banana from eating bananas and eating fat isn’t going to turn you into fat. Eat things lean in saturated fat and purposefully eat some healthy fats like olive oil, nuts, peanut butter, avocado, etc. If you’re a guy, eat 1-1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. After workouts, eat protein with simple carbs (white rice, white pasta, most cereals, white bread, etc.) because this combination helps muscle recovery and growth. Do not eat simple carbs at any time other than post-workout. Other than post workout, make sure all your carbs come from veggies, small amounts of fruit, 100% whole wheat bread, wheat pasta, brown rice, etc. Eat your more of your carbs earlier in the day and fewer later in the day. Eat 0 carbs in your last (6th) meal at night.
Moderation, not perfection. A couple times per week, eat whatever you want to eat.
You can’t get healthy by eating healthy only once in a while. Conversely you can’t hurt yourself by eating unhealthily only once in a while!
Adjustments
Anyone serious about fat loss can lose up to a point. At some point almost everyone asks, “why have I stopped losing”. The answer is that pesky metabolism. We can influence the metabolism, but the metabolism can also be hard headed. The metabolism’s main goal in life is to keep you alive. And it doesn’t give a rat’s butt how fat you are. If the metabolism sees that you’ve been losing weight for too long, it will slow down and your fat loss will come to a screeching halt.
What then? Decrease calories? That would work for a short while, but that metabolism is one tough bastard. It will slow again, sooner than later.
After some time, we’ve got no choice but to allow the metabolism some time to relax. So after some period of fat loss if you plateau for 4 weeks, it is time to pat the metabolism on the back and let him take it easy for about another 4 weeks. Completely contrary to what your intuition might suggest, when you stop losing fat, you need to eat more, not less.
Gradually, by perhaps in 200 calorie/day weekly increments, increase your intake each week until you reach maintenance calories (whatever non-dieting calorie level causes neither weight gain nor weight loss). Keep exercising and trust me you will not regain the weight. In fact, as you may lose a couple more pounds of fat! As you eat more, the metabolism will relax and possibly even kick back its heels and speed up a little.
Once you reach maintenance level calories, stay there for about a month. This will allow the metabolism to develop a new comfort zone. It will realize that its OK to be at your current weight. After this maintenance period, commence cutting calories and watch your fat loss continue!
Counting Calories
Itsn’t calorie counting a drag? Must I carry around a PDA, calculator, or paper to track everything?
Of course not. You’re living in the information age!
Check out The Daily Plate over at Livestrong.com. They have a huge food-tracking database. Sign up for a free account over there, enter what you eat, and they track your calories as well as a breakdown of how much protein, carbs, fat, cholesterol, sodium, etc you’re eating.
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