8 POWERFUL STRATEGIES TO STAY OUT OF THE STARVATION MODE AND LOSE FAT PERMANENTLY, WITHOUT DIETING OR DEPRIVATION.
You must give up the entire concept of dieting on very low calories to lose weight. You’ll never lose weight permanently with low calorie diets – it’s physiologically impossible. Temporary dieting can only produce temporary results. You must use other methods. Let’s look at the eight strategies you can use to lose fat permanently while staying out of the starvation mode.
1. Adopt the “habit” mind-set instead of the “diet” mind-set
The first step towards losing fat permanently has more to do with your mind-set than it does with nutrition or exercise. You have to change your entire attitude about nutrition and exercise. Instead of adopting the mind-set of short-term “diets,” you must adopt the mind-set of lifelong “habits.” A habit is a behaviour that you perform automatically without much conscious thought or effort. Once a habit is firmly established – good or bad – it takes enormous strength to break it. It’s like trying to swim upstream against the current.
The entire concept of “dieting” for fat loss is flawed. When you say you’re “going on a diet” the underlying implication is that it’s a temporary change and at some point you’re going to have to “go off” the diet. With this type of attitude, you’re setting yourself up for failure right from the start.
Permanent fat loss can’t be achieved by going on and off diets. It can only be achieved by adopting new exercise and nutrition habits that you can maintain for the rest of your life. Depending on your goal, you may need to make your diet more or less restrictive at certain times, but you always must maintain a baseline of healthy eating habits that never change. Usually you’ll eat the same foods all year round. When you want to lose body fat, all you need to do is simply eat a little bit less of those same foods and exercise a lot more.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The best way to get rid of undesirable habits such as poor nutrition or inactivity is by replacing them with new ones, not attempting to overcome them with sheer willpower. Achievement expert Brian Tracy likens this to covering up a bad paint job by layering over with a new paint that is thick enough so the old paint disappears. The new habit then takes over as the old one is filed away in the subconscious mind.
Good nutrition habits are not easy to form, but once you’ve formed them, they’re just as hard to break as the bad ones. Orison Swett Marden put it this way: “The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably.”
Initially, there will be a period where starting the new habit feels uncomfortable. Be patient – everything is difficult in the beginning. For a new behaviour to become permanently entrenched into your nervous system, it could take months. However, the roots of nutrition and exercise habits can be formed in just 21 days. That’s why it’s so important to give 100% total effort and commitment for the first 21 days. Once those 21 days have gone by, you’ll already be leaner and you’ll be on your way to making your new habits as effortless and natural as brushing your teeth or taking a shower.
2. Keep your muscle at all costs
The critical factor in turning your body into a “fat-burning machine” is to build and maintain as much lean body mass as possible. Muscle is the body-builders fat burning secret weapon! Muscle is your metabolic furnace. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even at rest. With more muscle, you burn more calories even while you sleep.
With a higher lean body mass, you’ll also burn more calories during exercise. If you put two people side by side jogging on a treadmill, one of them with 180 pounds of lean body mass and the other with 150 pounds of lean body mass, the person with 180 pounds of lean body mass will burn more calories from the exact same workout. The most efficient way to burn more calories and lose more body fat is to gain more muscle. That’s why weight training is an important part of the fat loss equation.
3. Use a small calorie deficit.
To lose body fat, you must be in negative calorie balance (a calorie deficit). You can create a calorie deficit by increasing activity, by decreasing calories or with a combination of both. The most efficient approach to fat loss is to decrease your calories a little and increase your activity a lot.
The most commonly recommended guideline is to reduce your calories by 500 to 1000 less than your maintenance level. For example, if you are female and your calorie maintenance level is 2100 calories per day, then a 500 calorie deficit would put you at 1600 calories per day. If you’re a male with a calorie maintenance level of 2900 calories per day, then a 500 calorie deficit would put you at 2400 calories per day. A 500 calorie deficit over seven days is 3500 calories in one week. There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat, so (in theory), a 500 calorie per day deficit will result in a loss of one pound of body fat per week. It follows that a 750 calorie deficit would produce a loss of one and a half pounds per week and a 1000 calorie deficit would produce a two pound per week reduction.
Because of the way the weight regulating mechanism works, fat loss seldom follows these calculations precisely, so don’t get caught up in them. An emphasis on exercise with a small reduction in calories is the best approach. 500 to 750 calorie deficit below your maintenance level is usually plenty. Add weight training and aerobics into the mix and this will produce as close to 100% fat loss as possible.
An alternate (and preferred) method is to set your calorie deficit as a percentage of your maintenance level. 15-20% is the recommended starting calorie reduction for fat loss. This is considered a small calorie deficit and a small calorie deficit is the key to losing fat while maintaining muscle.
With a 2100 calorie maintenance level, 20% would be a 420 calorie deficit, which would put you at 1680 calories per day. With a 2900 calorie maintenance level, a 20% deficit would be 580 calories. That would put you at 2380 calories per day. The reason the percentage method is better is because using an absolute number like 500, 750 or 1000 calories as a deficit instead of a percentage deficit might drop your calories into the danger zone. For example, if you are a male with a 3500 calorie maintenance level, a 750 calorie deficit to 2750 calories per day is only a 21% drop (a small, safe and acceptable deficit.) However, if you are a female with an 1800 calorie per day maintenance level and you cut your calories by 750 per day to 1050 calories, that is a 41% cut. Using the percentage method is more individualized.
At times, an aggressive calorie deficit greater than 20% may be called for, but calorie cuts greater than 20% are much more likely to cause muscle loss and metabolic slowdown. If you do use a calorie deficit greater than 20%, then it’s wise to raise calories at regular intervals using the “zigzag method” you’ll learn about in chapter six. This will “trick your body” and prevent your metabolism from slowing down when you have a large calorie deficit.
Always start with a small deficit. In other words, cut calories out slowly. It’s better to start with a small deficit and then progressively increase towards your maximal deficit than to make a sudden drop in calories all at once. The body cannot be forced to lose fat – you must coax it. Based on what you now know about the body’s weight-regulating mechanism, the optimal amount to decrease your caloric intake for fat loss is as little as possible – as long as you’re still losing body fat.
4. Use exercise to burn the fat rather than diets to starve the fat
To lose body fat, there must be a calorie deficit. Such are the laws of thermodynamics and energy balance. However, there’s more than one way to create a calorie deficit. One way is to decrease your calorie intake from food. The other is to increase the amount of calories you burn though exercise.
Of the two ways to create a calorie deficit, burning the calories is the superior method. This is because large calorie deficits cause muscle loss and trigger the starvation response. Ironically, most people do the opposite: They slash their calories to starvation levels and exercise too little or not at all. This causes a decrease in lean body mass and invokes the starvation mechanism.
Paradoxical as it seems, the most effective approach to fat loss is to eat more (keep the calorie reduction small) and let the exercise burn the fat. You don’t have to starve yourself – you just have to choose the right foods and make exercise a part of your lifestyle.
Why would anyone resort to starvation diets when they can burn fat more efficiently through exercise? Perhaps they believe that eating more food and working out at the same time will “cancel each other out. Maybe they shy away from the hard work involved in exercise. There’s also a trend these days towards avoiding too much aerobic exercise because of the false belief that it will make you lose muscle. Quite to the contrary, aerobic exercise –combined with weight training – is the only method of fat loss that allows you to create a calorie deficit and burn fat without slowing down the metabolism.
Here are the reasons why exercise – not dieting – is the superior method of losing body fat:
1. Exercise – aerobic and weight training – raises your metabolic rate.
2. Exercise creates a caloric deficit without triggering the starvation response.
3. Exercise is good for your health. Dieting is harmful to your health.
4. Exercise, especially weight training, signals your body to keep your muscle and not burn it for energy. Dieting without exercise can result in up to 50% of the weight loss to come from lean body mass.
5. Exercise increases fat-burning enzymes and hormones.
6. Exercise increases the cells sensitivity to insulin so that carbohydrates are burned for energy and stored as glycogen rather than being stored as fat.
5. Determine your minimal calorie requirements and never drop below them – ever!
One way to ensure that you never go into starvation mode is to determine the minimum amount of calories you can eat without slowing your metabolism. Then, use that as your rock bottom calorie number.
Because nutrition must be individualized, it’s difficult to set an absolute single figure for everyone as a minimal calorie requirement, but the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has suggested some guidelines. In their position stand on healthy and unhealthy weight loss programs, the ACSM recommends 1200 calories as the minimal daily calorie level for women and 1800 as the minimum for men. They also suggest a maximum deficit of 1000 calories below maintenance.
The 1000 calorie maximum deficit is good advice, but it’s just a guideline. Sometimes a 1000 calorie per day deficit can be too much. People with low bodyweight and/or low activity levels will have relatively low daily calorie needs, so 1000 below maintenance could be too low.
For example, it’s not uncommon for a female to require only 1900 calories per day to maintain her weight. If she were to drop 1000 calories off this already low maintenance level, this would bring her to a dangerously low 900 calories per day. 1200 should be her rock bottom number, and a small 20% deficit of only 380 calories would be even better (1520 calories per day).
6. Eat more frequently and never skip meals
Grazing is better for you than gorging. Chapter seven will discuss the importance of small frequent meals in much more detail. For now, let it suffice to say that the bodyinterprets missed meals as starvation. Let’s suppose you eat lunch at 12:00 noon and dinner at 7:00 pm. If you skip breakfast the next day, that’s 17 hours without food. This sends an unmistakable signal to your body that you are starving, even if your lunch and dinner are large meals.
Your goal should be to eat approximately every three hours. Establish scheduled meal times and stick to them. Regularity in your eating habits is critical. By eating smaller portions more frequently, you’ll be able to eat more food than you’ve ever eaten before without being deprived or starving yourself. Most people say they eat more on this program than they’ve ever eaten yet they get leaner than they’ve ever been before.
7. Don’t stay in a negative calorie balance long
The chances are good that you know at least one person who always seems to be on a diet. The odds are also good that although these habitual dieters may achieve some small weight losses, they are among the 95% that always gain it back. Then, discouraged with the failure of their last diet, they quickly embark on the latest “diet of the month” and repeat the cycle.
When fat loss stops or begins to slow down after being in a substantial calorie deficit, most people panic and cut their calories even further. Sometimes this works and it breaks the plateau. More often than not, it digs you into an even deeper metabolic rut. The best thing you can do is to raise your calories for a few days or sometimes even for a few weeks.
Your body’s weight regulating mechanism works both ways: It can decrease your rate of energy expenditure when there is a calorie deficit, or it can also increase its rate of energy expenditure when there is a calorie surplus. When you eat more, your body burns more. A temporary increase in calories when you have hit a plateau will “spike” your metabolic rate. It sends a signal to your body that you are not starving and that it’s OK to keep burning calories.
This practice of raising your caloric intake up and down is known as “cycling” your calories (also known as the “zigzag” method). In general, the lower you go with your calories, the more important it is to take periodic high calorie days. We’ll take a much closer look at “cycling” your calorie and macro-nutrient intakes in later chapters.
8. Make your goal to lose weight slowly at a rate of 1-2 lbs. per week. Be patient.
The best way to lose fat permanently without muscle loss is to lose weight slowly with a focus on exercise rather than severe calorie cutting. In the chapter on goal setting, we already made the suggestion to lose no more than two pounds per week. Let’s take a closer look at the logic behind that recommendation.
In the ACSM’s position statement on “Healthy and unhealthy weight loss programs,” The ACSM recommends losing weight at a maximum rate of two pounds per week. This two pound figure has become almost universally accepted as the standard guideline for safe weight loss.
Why? Because you can lose more than two pounds of weight per week, but you’re highly unlikely to lose more than two pounds of fat per week. Even at two pounds per week, it’s difficult to lose 100% body fat with no loss of lean body mass. Over the years that I’ve been doing personal coaching programs, I’ve kept progress charts for every client that meticulously document skin-folds, body fat, body weight, lbs. of fat and lbs. of lean mass. I have literally hundreds of these charts in my files. Analysing these real-life case studies has proven to me without a shadow of a doubt that when you lose more than two pounds per week, you almost always lose muscle along with the fat. I’ve seen fat loss greater than two pounds per week on numerous occasions, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Usually this only happens when someone has a large amount of weight to lose.
The more slowly you lose weight, the easier it is to maintain your lean muscle mass and keep the fat off. It’s better to lose only one pound of pure fat per week than it is to lose two pounds per week with one pound from muscle and one pound from fat.
Body-builders usually set their goal to lose weight at a rate one to one and a half pounds per week. Losing only a single pound a week may seem like an excruciatingly slow process, however, this is one of the best-kept secrets of body-builders and fitness models and one of the most important keys to permanent fat loss. Why would you want to lose weight faster if you know you’re going to lose muscle and there’s a 95% chance that you’re going to put the fat back on?
What should you do if you lose more than two pounds per week? It depends; everything is relative to the individual. If you have a large amount of fat to lose, then losing three pounds a week is safe and acceptable during the early stages (as long as you’re measuring your body composition and the weight you’re losing is fat and not muscle). However, as you get closer to your long-term goal, expect the weight loss to slow to one or two pounds per week.
For most people, losing more than two pounds per week means that you should actually eat more! This may be difficult for you to accept, but if you lose more than the recommended amount, you’re not just losing fat – you’re losing muscle. Don’t let the temporary ego boost from a large drop in scale weight sabotage your efforts in the long run. Be patient. Don’t ever confuse weight loss with fat loss.
*This post is directly out of the book “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle” by Tom Venuto.
