Pro Diets...Newsletter 4

Why Diets Don't Work

Johnny is an off-season bodybuilder wanting to lose a few pounds of flab around his mid-section, in time for summer.

Johnny follows a well-balanced, high protein, medium carbohydrate, low fat diet year round, consuming five to six small meals each day. He realizes that to build and keep muscle, you must feed your body frequently and your protein and caloric intake must be sufficiently high to sustain muscle growth.

The problem is that Johnny has probably consumed a few too many calories and, hence, is sporting some unsightly pounds of fat in places that will make his female admirers say, "Yuk!"

Johnny has only a few weeks before he is scheduled to go on his beach vacation. So, throwing all of his knowledge of nutrition to the wind, he does what most people do whenever they want to lose a few pounds. He severely cuts his calories, and also the number of meals.

We've been socialized to think that whenever we need to lose weight all we need to do is cut back on food intake. At first pass, it seems logical, doesn't it? Drop food out of your diet, and you will lose weight. Eat food, and you will gain weight.

When people start restricting calories in their diet, they definitely want to lose weight! However, weight should not be confused with fat. In reality, most people want to lose body fat. Looking at your body composition from the simplest of viewpoints, your body is composed of lean muscle tissue, water, and fat.

When you want to reduce fat, your goal should be to hang on to as much lean muscle tissue as possible while reducing the unwanted fat tissue. Your metabolism is determined by the amount of lean muscle tissue your body retains.

Your metabolism (or metabolic rate) is the number of calories required to sustain your body daily. When you lose muscle tissue, your metabolism suffers. In other words, your metabolism slows down, leaving you in a position where you burn even fewer calories.

And so, a vicious cycle ensues. You diet harder; you burn muscle tissue. You burn muscle tissue; your metabolism slows down. Your metabolism slows down; you diet even harder! And so on.

As mentioned earlier, the initial impulse of most people who are trying to reduce body fat is to cut calories out of their diet. This results in indiscriminate loss of muscle tissue along with body fat and water. Sure, you will weigh less on the scale, but you may not look much better.

Let's go back to our bodybuilder, Johnny. Johnny begins by cutting caloric intake by almost half, reducing the vital calories that his body needs to sustain his lean muscle tissue. At first, he loses weight relatively easy.

Because he has cut his carbohydrate intake back so drastically, he burns up the existing glycogen (stored glucose calories) in his liver and in his muscles. Now, in case you don't already know this, a gram of glucose holds approximately three grams of water in a muscle. Burn the glycogen off and you lose a lot of water weight. But you also lose a lot of muscle size!

So, Johnny ends up looking a little smoother and a little smaller, yet the persistent layer of fat around the mid-section is still there. Next, Johnny cuts out one of his meals, robbing his muscles of the protein they require every three to four hours for growth.

It didn't take Johnny long to realize that he was throwing himself into a starvation mode. His body's survival mechanism kicked in. Johnny's thyroid function slowed down. His body began secreting more fat-storing enzymes.

What's worse, his body began releasing catabolic (muscle wasting) hormones that began breaking down his muscle tissue for energy. Johnny's body couldn't care less about what it looked like at the beach for his vacation. It did, however, care very much about surviving. It's as if his body was clinging onto the body fat and burning the muscle tissue.

A normal person, having undergone this first phase of a restricted calorie diet, would more than likely feel self-satisfied when he or she stepped on the scale and saw that they were getting lighter.

However, Johnny is a bodybuilder, and being body-conscious, really stated disliking the way he was looking in the mirror: smoother and smaller. The diet was already starting to seem like a very bad idea.

There are many Johnny's around the country. The fact is, folks, that diets which are severely restricted in calories do not work. We've seen that cutting calories is not the way to lose body fat and keep it off. So what is? Here are some things that Johnny should have done:

1. Kept the same number of meals in his nutrition program.

2. Kept the same amount of protein consumption spaced out over those five or six meals.

3. Cut back on fat and simple sugars.

4. Eliminated all junk foods and processed foods from the diet. Instead, he should have opted for unprocessed, natural foods.

5. Increased the consumption of fibrous carbohydrates.

6. Increased his water intake.

7. Added 40-60 minutes of aerobic activity, three to four times per week to his training regimen.

8. Began his diet sooner. In other words, he should have allowed more time to strip the unwanted body fat. Typically, you will only be able to reduce body fat by two pounds per week at best, without losing much muscle tissue.

So, in conclusion, the last thing you should do when trying to reduce unwanted body fat is to cut meals or cut calories indiscriminately. Instead, a well thought out nutritional program incorporating the reduction of fat and sugar calories, together with increased aerobic activity, will speed your progress.

Until next time.

Yours In Health,
Dr. Diet

You can contact Dr. Diet via e-mail with any questions at drdiet@prodiets.com.