Diet Study - The Designer Diet - Part 1.
Have you ever said to yourself, "I need to go on a diet!"?
And then what happens? You try some diet plan that you read about in a book or magazine for awhile. But it seems difficult to follow and strange because you are not really eating what you want to eat. You are eating the foods on "the diet". After awhile, you just quit and go back to eating as before.
What you didn't realize was the fact that you were already on a "diet" to begin with. We are all on diets all the time. Diets are simply what we eat each day. The question is whether the diet we follow each day is productive or counter-productive. For most people, it's counter-productive. Because they make a fundamental mistake in choosing the foods that they eat. The mistake is - when they are hungry, they eat foods that taste good!
On the surface, that doesn't sound like a mistake at all. But it is a big mistake! Because they left out the most important qualifier that should always come first in any diet plan we follow. The fundamental principal for any healthy diet is - eat for function first and taste second!
Nothing should ever go into our mouth unless it serves a nutritional purpose. Of course we want to eat foods that taste good also. But there are plenty of foods that we can find that taste good but also serve a nutritional purpose. Eating foods that simply taste good when we are hungry is the way animals eat! But they have something programmed into their beings that we don't. They have instinct! That is God's plan for them. He programs their minds to function in a way that will provide for them.
What we have instead of instinct is free will. And free will can get you into a lot of trouble if you don't manage it correctly. That's why you rarely see any obese animals in the wild. But you sure see a lot of obese humans where ever you go. Humans can eat way too much food and the wrong types of food that may taste good, but are nutritional disasters. We have to be much more careful in how we eat because we don't have any instinct that controls our behavior.
I'm going to show you a very simple and easy way to design a diet specifically for you. It will comprise the foods that you like to eat because you will be choosing them. The purpose of the diet is to lose all excess body fat while retaining as much muscle mass as possible. This will be the most effective diet that you have ever tried! The reason I can say this is because it is like a diet plan that many competitive body-builders use in preparing for a contest. And competitive body-builders don't mess around with all the useless diets that are promoted in the bookstores. They know what works and what doesn't work. It's the difference between the one who takes home the first place trophy and the one who doesn't even place. Competitive body-builders are the masters of diet! Because the ones who win are not always the ones who had the best exercise program. They are usually the ones who had the best diet program!
You begin by deciding what weight goal you desire. For example, let's say you now weigh 200 lbs. and you want to get down to 135 lbs. That sounds like quite a task. But it really isn't difficult at all. In fact it's quite simple and fool-proof if you know how to do it and follow your program. The key is that you eat a diet for a person who already weighs 135 lbs.!! That way your body will have to adjust your weight to adapt to your diet.
Now keep in mind that this diet should always be used in conjunction with an effective body-building program designed specifically for your diet. In a future article I'll show you how to design a great work-out routine designed to re-shape your body into a work of art.
But for now, here's how we design our own personal diet program.
If we want to drop our weight down to 135 lbs., we begin by understanding how we will structure what we eat with regard to the individual components of protein, carbohydrates, and fats. We start with protein.
The first important thing to understand about protein is that the body does not store protein. It uses protein for new cellular growth, such as skin, hair, organs and muscle tissue. So if you want new cellular growth, you must consume adequate protein everyday and preferably every meal. If you don't provide enough protein in your daily diet, your body will actually tear down existing muscle tissue to provide itself with the necessary protein it needs for new cellular growth. This we don't want! So it's absolutely essential that we provide adequate protein in our diet everyday.
This leads us to the second important fact about protein. It stimulates growth! In other words, the more protein we eat, the more new cellular growth we can achieve. Of course, there are genetic limitations to our growth rate. But this principle is important to understand in determining our protein requirements. Because if we want to gain muscle and reduce fat, we achieve this by increasing our protein intake. When we stimulate muscle growth through proper weight training, the body can utilize higher levels of protein for muscle repair and growth. The energy needs for this growth can either come from the carbohydrates we consume or from our existing fat stores. In other words, we can burn off excess body fat by consuming more protein! This is why on the diet I'm going to show you, we consume higher levels of protein than other diets usually recommend.
A person who weighs 135 lbs. and is exercising with weights on a regular basis requires at least 1 - 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. It's been my experience working with both men and women that women are better off staying around the 1 gram level while men are better off striving for 1.5 grams of protein for each pound of desired bodyweight. Unless a women is a competitive body-builder and wants a hard, muscular body like a man, her protein requirements are not as great. Most women want healthy toned muscles while men want lean mass.
In this example, let's assume our subject is a woman who wants to reduce her weight from 200 lbs. down to 135 lbs. So her daily protein requirement should be at least 135 grams of protein. Since there are 4 calories in each gram of protein, that comes out to 540 calories each day from protein.
A well-established ratio of protein to carbs and fat that has been shown to gradually reduce body-fat while at the same time providing adequate protein for new muscle growth is 40 - 40 - 20. In other words, 40% of our daily calories come from protein, 40% from carbohydrates and 20% from fat. But I'm going to show you how we can modify that even more to get even better results.
We take that 540 calories and divide it by 9, which comes out to 60. Each gram of fat we eat has 9 calories. We want to have twice as many calories coming from protein as from fat (40 vs. 20). So we divide 60 by 2 and that leaves us with 30. That's how many grams of fat we want to eat each day. Thirty grams of fat will provide us with 270 calories. So now we have 135 grams of protein and 30 grams of fat each day. This also comes out to 540 + 270 calories = 810 calories each day so far. These two components remain constant each day.
Finally we come to the critical component of carbohydrates. This is the adjustable component! Because we are going to adjust our daily diets around a process known as carb-loading and carb-depleting.
The way this works is that we alternate between high carb days and low carb days. This is a vast improvement over the well-known Adkins low carb diet. No body-builder ever follows a truly low carbohydrate diet for any length of time. Because after awhile on that diet, your body metabolism drops dramatically to a point that your immune system no longer functions correctly, your muscles are so depleted of glycogen that they can't even get pumped up, you begin experiencing mood disorders like irritability, and a whole host of other problems.
Instead what we are going to do is alternate days where we eat very low carbohydrates with other days in which we eat a level of carbohydrates which will allow our muscles to re-load with glycogen and speed up our metabolism so it doesn't begin slowing down.
The proper level of carbohydrates for a person desiring just to maintain their weight is approximately equal with their level of protein. In other words, if you are eating 135 grams of protein you should be eating around 135 grams of carbohydrates or less each day. This level is ideal for weight maintenance. But for weight reduction we need something different. We will have other days where we drop our carbohydrate levels to only about 25% of our regular level. So instead of 135 grams of carbs a day, we will be taking in 33.75 or roughly 35 grams a day.
In terms of calories, we will be consuming around 1350 (540 + 540 + 270 = 1350) on our high carb days. Then on our low carb days we will be taking in about 950 (540 + 140 + 270 = 950) each day.
To begin the program, you first go 3 days straight on low carbs. This will prime the body to begin adapting to its new eating program. Then you begin alternating 1 day high carbs and 2 days low carbs. It's that simple. Once you reach your desired weight goal, you can maintain your desired weight by alternating 1 day low with 1 day high or follow a program of high carb days on work-out days with low carbs on rest days.
In my next posting I'll discuss how we create our individual meals for the program.
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