THE 4 SCIENTIFIC LAWS OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS
For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.
— ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER
Evolution has taught the body that having fat means being able to survive the times when food is scarce. Many thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were roaming the wilderness, they often journeyed for days without food, and their fat stores were all that kept them alive.
Starving, they would finally kill an animal and feast, and their bodies knew to prepare for the next bout of starvation by storing excess energy as fat, as it was literally a matter of life and death.
This genetic programming is still in us. When you restrict your calories for fat-loss purposes, your body reduces its total fat stores to stay alive, but it also slows down its basal metabolic rate to conserve energy.
If you restrict your calories too severely or for too long, this metabolic downregulation, or “metabolic adaptation,” as it’s often called, can become quite severe, and the basal metabolic rate can plunge to surprisingly low levels.
This mechanism is why “calorie counting” seems to not work for some people. It has nothing to do with hormone problems or eating too many carbs or anything other than the fact that the energy out part of the equation is impaired. Their bodies aren’t burning nearly as much energy as they should be.
This is only the beginning of the problems with the “crash” approach to dieting, however, that has you enduring severe calorie deficits for extended periods:
• You lose a lot of muscle, which not only leads to the dreaded “skinny fat” look, but it also impairs bone health and increases the overall risk of disease.
• Your testosterone levels plummet and cortisol levels skyrocket, which not only makes you feel horrible but also accelerates muscle loss.
• Your energy levels take a nosedive, you struggle with intense food cravings every day, and you become mentally clouded and even depressed.
Fortunately, you can fix the metabolic adaptation and all the other negative effects of low-calorie dieting by slowly increasing food intake over time and thus bringing your basal metabolic rate back to a healthy level.
But the real goal is to prevent it altogether, and that’s what we’re going to focus on in this chapter: the laws of healthy fat loss that, when followed, allow for consistent weight reduction without major metabolic slowing or muscle loss.
THE FIRST LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS
EAT LESS ENERGY THAN YOU BURN TO LOSE FAT
As you now know, fat loss is just a science of numbers. No matter what anyone tells you, getting ripped boils down to nothing more than making a simple mathematical formula work for you: energy consumed versus energy expended.
Contrary to much of the mainstream advice these days, it doesn’t matter what you eat. If your metabolism is healthy and you set your calorie intake correctly—if you maintain a moderate calorie deficit by eating a bit less energy than you burn every day—you will lose weight.
Don’t believe me?
He started the study at 211 pounds and 33.4 percent body fat (overweight). He calculated that he would need to eat about 1,800 calories per day to lose weight without starving himself.
He followed this protocol for two months and lost 27 pounds, but here’s the kicker: while he did have one protein shake and a couple of servings of vegetables each day, two-thirds of his daily calories came from Twinkies, Little Debbies, Doritos, sugary cereals, and Oreos—a “convenience store diet,” as he called it. And he not only lost the weight, but his “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased 20 percent.
Of course, Haub doesn’t recommend this diet, but he did it to prove a point. When it comes to fat loss, calories are king.
This is nothing new in the scientific study of weight loss and energy balance. Metabolic research on human calorie expenditure stretches back nearly a century, and by now, the entire physiology is fully understood.
A fantastic review of the subject can be found in a paper published by researchers at the University of Lausanne, in case you want to dive into the (fairly complicated) details.
As you also know, healthy fat loss isn’t as simple as drastically cutting your calories and starving yourself. Eventually the muscle loss, metabolic slowdown, and other undesirable effects become too much. Finally, after you can’t take the misery anymore, you’ll likely go in the other direction, dramatically increasing calorie intake by bingeing and gorging on everything in sight for days or weeks, and wind up back where you began.
In fact, you can end up even worse off. This vicious cycle has been shown to result in rapid fat storage, often beyond prediet body fat levels.
In other words, people end up fatter than when they started dieting in the first place.
So the bottom line is this: you will need to watch your calories to effectively lose weight. You’ll have to stay disciplined and forego the snacks and goodies not worked into your meal plans. You’ll probably have to deal with some hunger now and then.
But, if you do it right, you can get absolutely shredded without losing muscle…or even while gaining muscle (yes, this can be done—more on that later).
THE SECOND LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS
USE MACRONUTRIENTS PROPERLY TO OPTIMIZE YOUR BODY COMPOSITION
As I mentioned earlier, while a “calorie is a calorie” for weight-loss purposes alone, a calorie is not a calorie when it comes to optimizing body composition. What you eat matters very little if you’re just trying to see the number go down on the scale, but it matters very much if you’re trying to lose fat and not muscle.
If you eat too little protein while restricting calories for weight loss, you’ll lose more muscle than you would if you had eaten an adequate amount.
If you eat too few carbohydrates while in a calorie deficit, your training will suffer, your muscle repair will be impaired, and your hormone profile will become more catabolic.
If you eat too little dietary fat, you can experience a significant drop-off in testosterone levels and other undesirable effects.
As you can see, if you want your weight-loss regimen to be maximally effective, you want to restrict your calories but also eat enough protein and carbohydrate to preserve muscle mass and performance and enough dietary fat to maintain healthy hormone levels as well as general health. Adequate dietary fats are necessary to maintain healthy skin and hair, insulate body organs against shock, regulate body temperature, and promote healthy cell function.
While that sounds complicated, it’s not. In fact, it’s probably the simplest way of going about dieting, and you’ll learn all about it later in this book.
THE THIRD LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS
EAT ON A SCHEDULE THAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU
Most meal timing advice calls for eating multiple small meals per day, and the reason often given is that eating like this will speed up your metabolism and thus help you lose weight faster.
It seems to make sense at first. By putting food in our bodies every few hours, it has to constantly work to break it down, which should speed up our metabolism, right?
Well, kind of…but it doesn’t help with weight loss.
You see, each type of macronutrient (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) requires varying amounts of energy to break down and process. This is known as the thermic effect of food and is the metabolic “boost” that comes with eating.
The magnitude and duration of that boost depends on how much you eat. A small meal causes a small metabolic spike that doesn’t last long, whereas a large meal produces a larger spike that lasts longer.
So the question, then, is whether eating more smaller meals per day increases total energy expenditure over a 24-hour period than fewer larger meals?
Well, in an extensive review of literature, scientists at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research looked at scores of studies comparing the thermic effect of food in a wide variety of eating patterns, ranging from 1 to 17 meals per day.
In terms of 24-hour energy expenditure, they found no difference between nibbling and gorging. Small meals caused small, short metabolic boosts, and large meals caused larger, longer boosts. By the end of each day, they balanced out in terms of total calories burned.
We can also look to a weight-loss study conducted by researchers from the University of Ontario, which split subjects into two dietary groups: three meals per day and three meals plus three snacks per day, with both in a caloric restriction for weight loss.
After eight weeks, 16 participants completed the study, and researchers found no significant difference in average weight loss, fat loss, or muscle loss.
So eating more, smaller meals doesn’t directly help or hinder fat loss. What about appetite? Can it help there?
A study conducted by scientists at the University of Missouri with 27 overweight/obese men found that after 12 weeks of dieting to lose weight, increasing protein intake improved appetite control, but meal frequency (three vs. six meals per day) had no effect.
Researchers from the University of Kansas investigated the effects of meal frequency and protein intake on perceived appetite, satiety, and hormonal responses in overweight/obese men.
They found that higher protein intake led to greater feelings of fullness and that eating six meals resulted in lower daily fullness than three meals.
On the other hand, you can find studies that found participants were less satiated on three meals per day and that increasing meal frequency improved their feelings of fullness and made it easier to stick to their diets.
The bottom line is that many variables are involved with the appetite, including psychological ones, and our hunger patterns are established by our regular meal patterns, so it’s usually easiest to work around this, not against it.
This is why clinical evidence shows that both more and fewer meals per day are effective for weight loss and have no inherent drawbacks or advantages in terms of metabolic rate and appetite control.
Let’s now talk about a bogeyman that scares dieters everywhere: late-night eating.
Somehow, many people believe that eating too much food later in the day will accelerate fat storage, so they avoid it all costs, preferring to go hungry for hours on end over shifting meals around to better suit their hunger patterns.
Well, as you now know, fat loss and gain depend wholly on energy balance and have nothing to do with meal timing. This means you get to eat as late as you want. This isn’t just theory, either—it’s been proven in multiple scientific studies.
For example, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Chieti in Italy found that calorie intake in the morning or evening didn’t affect weight loss or body composition parameters.
A study performed by researchers at Vanderbilt University demonstrated interesting results: subjects who normally ate breakfast lost more weight by skipping it and eating the majority of calories at dinner, whereas subjects who normally skipped breakfast lost more weight by eating breakfast every day.
Researchers chalked this up to greater levels of satiety and thus better dietary compliance.
Another study on the matter, this time from researchers at the of University of São Paulo in Brazil, showed that splitting calories into five equal meals per day eaten between 9 AM and 8 PM, eating all calories in the morning, and eating all calories in the evening didn’t affect weight loss parameters or body composition.
I’ve also put this research to the test many times, both in my own meal planning and with people I help and work with, sometimes jamming large portions of our daily calories into late-night dinners, whether out of necessity or choice.
As expected, it made no difference in our results. So long as you stick to your daily numbers, your body will respond just as it should.
While we’re on the subject of late eating, I recommend that you eat 30 to 40 grams of a slow-digesting protein like egg or casein (either from a powder or from a whole-food source like low-fat cottage cheese) thirty minutes before going to bed, as research has shown that this improves muscle recovery due to the increased availability of amino acids for repair while you sleep.
So, the long story short is that you don’t need to be a slave to a rigid meal schedule. Eat as frequently or infrequently as you like, because when you eat has little bearing on your ability to lose fat. Use meal timing as a tool to make your dieting as enjoyable and convenient as possible. This way, you can stick to your diet, which is what matters in the end.
Now, if you’re wondering where to start—with more or fewer meals per day—I recommend that you eat several smaller meals per day (four to six meals per day works well).
In my experience coaching thousands of people, most are like me and prefer the experience of eating more small meals as opposed to fewer large ones. I personally don’t like eating between 800 and 1,000 calories to then feel stuffed for several hours. I much prefer a 400-calorie meal that leaves me satisfied for a few hours, followed by another smaller meal of different food.
If you already know that you don’t want to or can’t eat that frequently, then don’t sweat it. Do whatever will work best for you.
THE FOURTH LAW OF HEALTHY FAT LOSS
USE EXERCISE TO PRESERVE MUSCLE AND ACCELERATE FAT LOSS
You can lose weight by restricting calories without exercising, but adding exercise—both resistance and cardiovascular training—comes with some major benefits.
The addition of resistance training to a calorie deficit preserves muscle and BMR, and it provides a substantial “afterburn” effect.
Adding cardiovascular training burns more energy and thus more fat.
In my opinion, restricting calories for weight loss without also doing some form of resistance training to preserve muscle is just a mistake. It’s going to result in at least mild muscle loss, and this not only isn’t good for looks, but it’s bad for your health too.
Cardio is negotiable. There’s nothing inherently unhealthy or bad about not including it in your weight-loss regimen, but I’ll tell you this: you will only get so far with diet and resistance training alone.
If you’re planning on getting below 10 percent body fat, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to need to include some cardio in your routine to get there. Fortunately, however, you won’t have to do nearly as much as most people think
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