After reading thousands of articles in magazines about health and how to lose weight, I have learned that the same basic principles tend to pop up quite often. In this blog post, I explain how following some conventional guidelines can interfere with your health and fat loss goals, as well as you forming the foundation of a healthy lifestyle that will help you to keep the weight off for long after you have lost it.
There are a few weight loss tips that you should please ignore if you do come across them on health websites, social media pages about health, and health magazines. They are:
Consume 5 Meals A Day to Balance Blood Sugar Levels and Speed Up Your Metabolism
Eating too frequently can actually prevent you from losing weight, as your body will have a constant supply of nutrients and energy from glucose or even ketones if you are fat adapted and have been following a ketogenic diet. Your insulin levels go up every single time that you eat. When your insulin levels are too high, you will be more likely to store fat, especially around your midsection, and it will be a lot harder for the average person to lose fat in the presence of high insulin.
Reducing the severity of insulin spikes, as well as the frequency thereof, is very important when trying to lose weight, and therefore, I recommend that you consider trying to only eat two or three times a day when you are trying to lose weight, so that your body does get the chance to burn its available fat for energy when it runs out of glucose.
Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, refers to this extra and unhealthy stored fat as granola bars that have been strapped around your stomach. I like to remind myself of this when tempted to snack and just tell my body it can snack on my fat when throwing a cravings tantrum.
Eat a Low-Fat Diet to Try and Lose Fat and Become a Healthier You
Eating a low-fat diet that is also high in sugar is also not great for weight loss. Even without the sugar, a low-fat diet denies your body of essential nutrients, as well as the essential fats that it needs in order to be healthy.
If you consume fat regularly, your body will become used to using fat for energy, and then when you do run out of energy, you will be less likely to start breaking down your muscle for glucose, and you will be more likely to start breaking down your stored fat for energy.
Following a low-fat diet, especially for an extended period of time, will leave your body unable to use fat properly, and you will not be as healthy as you can possibly be.
It is also better if you do reduce your carbohydrate intake, especially when increasing the amount of fat that you consume. Having a high amount of carbohydrates in your system, as well as a high amount of fat, can actually lead to unhealthy weight gain.
Foods are actually more addictive when high in both fat and sugar, and especially when the food type contains them in the perfect ratio. Just think of doughnuts, pizza, hamburgers, and pretty much all of the foods that people tend to become addicted to. They all have the ideal combination of sugar/carbs, fat, and salt.
Just Doing A Lot of Cardio for Fat Loss and Health
Doing long sessions of cardio to lose weight and improve health is also outdated and not as effective as other types of exercises like HIIT training, which stands for high-intensity interval training, or weight lifting. What is probably one of the best things to do is to do a combination of exercises when trying to lose weight.
How strength training and weight lifting help you to lose weight is that by building muscle, you are actually increasing the amount of energy you burn in a day at rest, so you are increasing your basal metabolic rate naturally. The more muscle you have, the easier it will be to lose the weight and to also keep it off.
Your metabolism will also be more efficient after doing a workout that targets your muscles through resistance. HIIT (high-intensity interval training) also speeds up your metabolism. Both of these types of exercises have an afterburn effect, whereas during plain cardio means that you will burn calories during the workout, but will not burn as much when the workout is finished.
Following a Low-Calorie Diet for Extended Periods of Time
Consuming a very low amount of calories for extended periods of time is also not good for long-term weight loss, as your metabolism can actually become less efficient, and over time, you will have to eat even less in order to just maintain your weight.
You still need to burn more calories than you consume to lose fat, although your hormones, such as insulin, leptin (satiety hormone), and ghrelin (hunger hormone) are actually more important. What you should not do is restrict your calories too much for extended periods of time.
Calorie cycling is a great solution to this, as you can follow a low-calorie diet for one or two days if you want to, and then eat more calories on other days to prove to your body that you are not starving.
You can also follow the fasting mimicking diet approach, where you eat 800 calories a day for five days, and then eat normally for the rest of the month or even for a few months.
While my main focus is to become the superhuman version of myself through diet, lifestyle, and biohacking, I have to get through the first obstacle of losing my remaining fat first, which is why that is currently my main priority. Perhaps you are in a similar situation and want to currently get rid of some stubborn fat that has unnecessarily overstayed its welcome.
