There’s nothing worse than to be watching your calories and exercising, but the scale just doesn’t budge…. You just feel like, ‘My efforts are for naught.’ That’s when people tend to give up."
- Thomas Wadden
Most nutritionists would have you believe that counting calories is the best way to lose fat. Here’s their theory, in a nutshell:
· Calories in vs. calories out determine your weight. · Consume more calories than you burn and the rest turns to fat. · To lose weight, you either consume fewer calories or burn more with aerobic exercise.
But have you ever noticed that the people who frantically count calories are forever overweight?
Here’s the problem: Your body is not a simple machine. It’s a living, sentient system with its own "intelligence." It decides how to use the calories you consume. In fact, over the long run, what your body decides to do with calories appears to be more consequential than how many you consume.
Of course, some people just eat way too much. But for people making a serious attempt to lose weight, excess calories are not their problem (although most are made to believe it is).
Conventional diets just don’t work. Five out of six people who try to lose weight fail. And more than 90% of those who do succeed in losing weight gain all the weight back within two years.
When you consider the flawed strategy these diets use, this is no surprise. You can’t achieve and maintain your ideal weight by starving yourself thin. Even if you could, it would be bad for your health. Losing weight has been hard because you have the wrong tool for the job. If you drop your calories and go hungry - forcing your body to lose weight - your body will fight back.
This is your body’s built in "intelligence." It reacts as if you are starving and will do everything it can to preserve your fat. And when you lose weight by starving yourself, you lose important muscle, bone, fluids, and even vital organ mass.
Your body has mechanisms for setting your weight where it wants it to be. It is similar to the way you set the temperature of your house with a thermostat. So the right tool for the job of losing weight is one that changes your body’s set point. Said another way, you need to change your metabolism.
Changing your metabolism is the key to - NOT counting calories.
The good news is that you can change your metabolism with food or exercise or both. But not with the kind of diet and exercise you’re used to. It involves eating differently, not less - and exercising differently, not more. You see here are the two most important principles of healthy fat loss: You must (1) over-consume protein and (2) train your body to store energy, not fat.
Why should you eat more protein than your body is going to use? Because it throws the "metabolic switch" and changes the way your body decides to store and use the excess calories.
You see, your body has choices. It can use that energy in a nearly infinite number of ways. It could, for example, decide to use extra calories for something like building bone or repairing damaged tissues.
Doctors, nutritionists, and the media all miss this point. They still cling to the idea that your body always stores excess calories as fat. Surprisingly, this has rarely been considered in clinical research. Yet when studied, the results back me up. For instance, a study published in Obesity Research found that people could lose weight independent of calories consumed when the ratio of protein and carbohydrate changed.
The trick is to change your metabolism. By throwing your metabolic switch, you can accomplish these two important goals of sustained fat loss:
· Increase the calories you use for maintenance and repair. · Decrease the calories you shunt toward fat deposition.
Your body makes its decisions about its energy reserves for the sake of survival. It’s an instinct that goes back to caveman days, when a drop in protein and calories signalled the body "These are bad times. So to survive this famine/plague/winter, we’d better store as much energy as possible." And when protein and calories were up, the signal was "Times are good, so we can burn that energy."
During good times, your body "invests" in procreation and fat loss. It uses the extra protein to boost levels of growth hormone and sex hormones and burn fat stores by lowering insulin. Having sex and babies requires lots of energy, and your body makes these adjustments only when "times are good."
If your body senses that times are bad, it decides that this is not a good time to have children. So the production of growth hormone and sex hormones is suppressed. And to protect itself against the threat of starvation, it boosts insulin to promote fat gain. In our modern environment, excessive stress and a nutrient-poor diet can cause your body to think times are bad.
This puts your metabolism in a perpetual state of preparing for the worst. The result? You not only gain weight, you also feel sluggish and tired.
If you want to burn fat, you have to stop starving your body. Forget about the burgers and whole-grain breads. The good news is you can start eating the hearty foods you’ve been denying yourself - like steak and eggs. These are the foods we used to think were healthy. (My father said they would "put hair on your chest.")
With a little planning, you get naturally lean by eating the foods you enjoy. Start by eating at least one gram of protein per day for every half a kilo of lean body mass. You can find your lean body mass by having your body composition measured. (Ask your doctor or the trainer at your gym for help with this.)
Here’s an example: If you weigh 90 kilos and have 30 kilos of body fat, your lean body mass is 60 kilos. That means you should get at least 120 grams of protein a day. When you consider that an egg has about 6 grams of protein and a 100 gram of T-bone steak has about 20 grams, 120 grams is far more than you get from the standard diet.
To further shift your metabolism away from storing fat, cut your carbs. Your ancient ancestors never ate grains, and you should keep yours to a minimum. Take a scientific approach to this by using the glycaemic index to determine how much insulin various foods will stimulate based on the carbs they contain.
Lastly, to maximise your fat loss and boost your lean body mass, exercise in ways that burn lots of energy fast. This is important because fat is a slow-burn fuel. So if you ask your body for higher energy output than it can get from fat, it will get the message to stop shunting calories to fat. Instead, it will store more energy as glycogen in the muscles. The kind of exercises that burn lots of energy fast will feel like a short sprint and leave you panting after you finish.
You can do this with calisthenics, weight training, or routines that focus on your legs, like running or biking uphill. (Start off easy and gradually increase the intensity of the exercise as you become conditioned.)
(Source: National Geographic) | 
The decision to get healthy was a sudden one. "I came home from work late one night, and my 13-year-old daughter was still up. I asked her why she wasn't in bed, and she said that she couldn't sleep because she was worried that I was going to die. She told me that she had heard of so many people having heart attacks because they were fat, and she was scared. That was the turning point for me, I knew I wanted to be around to watch her grow up," says Hennessey, "It was like a switch went off in my head and from that moment I was done, I started eating right and looking after my body."
As fans of the show will know, the X-Weighted experts advise getting unhealthy foods out of our homes in order to avoid the temptation of eating them.
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