Tag: fats

nutrition, weight loss

The best diet for weight loss

Telling yourself carbs is the reason you’re overweight,
is akin to blaming your council tax instalment for going overdrawn!


The reality is that it’s the total calorie intake that is cause of being overweight. Consuming more calories required for the amount your burn. Through movement and body function (metabolism). And yet so many people think that carbs are to blame.


It’s like cutting any macronutrient or food group from your diet. All you are doing by omitting a macronutrient (protein, fat, carbs) from your diet is cutting hundreds/thousands of calories from your diet.


In doing so you have achieved a calorie deficit! That’s all.


The biggest impact in weight loss (not fat loss) is when people take the carb cutting option i.e. keto/carnivore. This is because for every gram of carbohydrate you store (glycogen in your liver and muscles) with it you hold onto approximately 2.3 grams of water. So you have lost that water weight too along with the drop in body fat from creating a calorie deficit.


Not all that weight lost is from body fat! Which is not the optimal way to lose weight!

Your ideal weight loss would see you lose the majority if not all the weight from body fat. And keep the muscle, glycogen and water.


So what’s the best diet for weight loss you ask?!


Well, I want you to put exercise aside and tackle weight loss from adjusting your diet. Keep your regular exercise going (it would be prudent to do some weight/resistance training as part of it).


When setting up your diet for weight loss (fat loss) your diet needs to start off with a daily or weekly energy target. Download my free guide to work out the target relevant to you.


Then inside that calorie target you want to have a certain amount of calories assigned to protein. This is going to be a high proportion of those calories for several reasons. The most important ones being that high protein diets will aid muscle retention during weight loss. And also you’ll see a reduction in hunger (again very helpful when dieting).


Download my FREE guide to work out how much protein you need during weight loss.


The remaining calories are going to come from carbohydrates and fats. These proportions are going to be personal preference. Although I would try and encourage you to have a higher amount of calories from carbs, which will guard against muscle breakdown, than fats.


The end result will be far better as you will have achieved body recomposition. From reducing your body fat levels and retaining possibly slightly increasing your muscle mass.


There you have it, the optimal way to diet for weight loss. And you get to eat donuts and cake in the process! Which will play a big part in the psychology of dieting as you won’t feel restriction or guilt for breaking erroneous ‘diet rules’.

nutrition

A beautiful mess

As I scan the health and fitness horizon I see that from certain perspectives nutrition is an absolute mess.


Lots of competing theories. One source seems to suggest one thing. The very next day they seem to say the opposite. People interested in health, fitness and wellness are stuck in limbo. Confused.


Another point of view could be, that “mess” demonstrates the beauty of science. Putting all these ideas; good and bad into the ring and letting them fight it out.


This takes place over hundreds of years. And using a particular method to determine the winners. And that’s why nutrition science is so confusing at times. We haven’t yet had the hundreds of years for the best ones to emerge.


Fats, carbs, and protein weren’t even discovered until the 1800s. It’s only in the last 20 years that we’ve begun studying new problems, such as what’s healthy.

In a world full of tasty processed food and very little movement. All scientific disciplines begin with confusion, dead ends, frustration, and silliness.

But what’s young is going to mature. Nutrition science will grow up. Not as fast as we’d like. Yet over time, the scientific method will cut and prune and do its work. Meanwhile, here are some reasons why nutrition science can be so confusing at times. And why (sometimes) the media screws up reporting it.

1. It takes time to master a science – compared to Chemistry, nutrition is in its infancy.

2. Most funding goes to disease prevention, not preventative nutrition. Most researchers would ask ‘how can we prevent this epidemic’ over ‘how can we get abs’.

3. Where funding comes from can affect what studies find. Corporate pressures can influence study design so the results favour what the company want to show!

4. Most nutrition studies are observational. Remember; correlation isn’t causation! Does red meat cause heart disease and cancer?! Or do people with these chronic diseases happen to eat more red meat?!

5. If doing the research is tough, reporting it is going to be even harder! Journalists aren’t usually trained research scientists, which means that they often:

  • misunderstand study conclusions
  • over exaggerate single study findings (intentional or not)

Single studies are interesting but often not important. They only usually provide one piece of a big puzzle that may take hundreds of years to complete! So when you are perusing through the broadsheets. Take an article that’s based on the findings of a single study with a pinch of salt (which is healthy, for now lol).