One of the most common goals I am asked to help my patients achieve is weight loss. There are so many fads and so many gimmicks and everyone wants the “magic pill” to shed the bulges around the waist and hips. It’s time to address the science behind weight loss.
As discussed in a previous article, the thyroid plays an important role in regulating metabolism. If yours is sluggish, you will have a very difficult time losing weight. So first, always have blood work performed to make sure there are no metabolic reasons to keep you from losing weight. This article will address someone whose labs are normal and who has no medical conditions preventing dieting and exercise.
One of the most common mistakes in dieting is to starve yourself and consume too few calories. Your body requires a certain amount of food to provide energy and nourishment to your cells just to maintain normal function. If you skip breakfast and scrimp on lunch, by the evening your body is screaming to meet the caloric debt you created all day. Nighttime meal consumption is typically large and eaten late. All of this contributes to laying down lots of body fat.
When you eat, you actually speed up your metabolism. The process of digestion burns calories! If you could do it, eating seven to eight times a day would be ideal! Old school diets were the three square meals and no “in-between” snacks and certainly no “before bed” foods. The newer science based diets recognize that our bodies are more suited to “grazing”; food consumption in small quantities all day long. Large meals over-tax many of our organs. Sugary foods and starchy carbohydrates cause the pancreas to work to secrete enough insulin to handle the amount consumed. Usually after years of over-consumption, this leads to a minimal response from the over-burdened pancreas, and the insulin produced is too little to handle the amount eaten. This dysregulation of insulin leads to a spill-over of sugar into the blood. This hyperglycemic state is called pre-diabetes. If not controlled carefully by diet, it becomes full blown Type II diabetes.
Similar problems occur when too high a consumption of fatty foods overburden the body’s abilities to metabolize it, and cholesterol levels rise. The fats not only build up in the arteries, causing atherosclerosis, but it infiltrates many other organs, including the liver. Blood tests often show elevated liver enzymes in obese patients. Usually an ultrasound of the liver reveals it to be “fatty liver”.
So there are many physiologic reasons to consume small quantities of food throughout the day. The types of food consumed are critically important. First, protein is the building block of muscle mass. As an athlete, your muscle mass has to be fed to be maintained. The minimum requirement of protein in a day is based on your own lean body weight. Let’s say you weigh 180 lbs, but you are carrying body fat and your ideal weight is 150 pounds. We use 150 pounds as the number to work with. Ideally, you should aim for between 6 to 8 meals per day. To maintain muscle, most people need between ¾ to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of lean body weight as their protein intake. So our 150 pound dieter would need 25 grams of protein per meal. If eating 8 meals per day, each meal would need 18.75 grams of protein. You see how this works. You get a calorie counting book and figure out how many ounces of lean protein you get to eat at each meal. Yes this involves buying an inexpensive kitchen scale and some measuring cups. Typically, once you do this for a week, you get the hang of guessing fairly accurately on portion sizes of protein. Just make sure to measure anyway! 
The next area of most confusion is with carbohydrates, starchy in particular. Examples are rice, bread, pasta, potatoes, certain beans like pinto, lima, and kidney beans. Starchy carbs are high in calories and when dieting, counting carbs is a must. If you are overweight, you probably have a slow metabolism, but you are going to fix that with eating 6-8 meals per day. The amount of carbs to be eaten can vary from person to person. But there are a few tricks. First, pay attention to portion size. Most women when dieting will need to eat between 100-300 grams of carbs, depending on their height and weight. Look at labels carefully and make sure that if you are seeking 60 grams of carbs, you know that for instance with whole wheat pasta, that’s about 3 ounces of pasta. Truly, its about 10 noodles. Hardly worth the effort! But you can eat almost 2/3rds of a cup of sweet potato for the same 60 grams! Use carbs that give you more volume if you are hungry and choose the pasta for meals that you are less hungry for. Dieting tip for almost everyone – don’t eat carbs at night! Carbs are your energy fuel, and if you are sitting around on facebook or computer at night, you really don’t need carb energy for that! Have carbs with your first 4-5 meals, then only have veggies with the protein of your remaining meals. Eating carbs at night will keep you fat! Don’t break this rule!
There are many dietary variations that are necessary to keep tricking your metabolism to shed the excess pounds. You have to trick it! One day, maybe have 60 grams with 4 meals, the next day, cut it to 30 grams. Go back to 60 grams the next day. When you eat the same number of calories every day your metabolism may be stubborn about fat loss, so tricking it with carbohydrate rotation is a successful way to upregulate it. Also, there is the all important “cheat day”! When dieting for contests, a lot of these rules don’t apply, but for the general population seeking healthy weight loss, a planned day of cheating accomplishes many goals. A – you are human! You have to have some pleasure in your food, right? B- it causes a metabolic shake-up; changing the total number of calories that day then resuming your strict dieting the next day results in a much faster weight loss!
Cheat days typically change over time. Initially, it may be pancakes for breakfast, pizza for lunch, pasta meal for dinner. But the longer you eat “clean” the less appealing these foods become. Foods taste differently when you eat clean. Suddenly the high fat foods that were so much a part of daily life just don’t taste as good, and your cheats evolve into maybe steak or salad with blue cheese dressing; watch and see if this doesn’t happen to you!
I can tell you that when you eat like this, your body becomes a fat burning machine, and its like a freight train hurtling down a hill. The fat loss is fast and permanent. And your eating habits are changed for the better for life. Its no longer dieting, its just how you eat. It is so easy when you start you will be pleasantly surprised. You will feel better, and by eating so frequently, you are never hungry! The ultimate diet is one you stay on and it is my sincere hope that you will try this and discover your beautiful lean self underneath whatever fat layers are hiding it!
If I can be of help to anyone, my email is glajoiemedical@cfl.rr.com. I have a telemedicine service to help anyone who needs it and I look forward to hearing from you!
www.DrMarilynlajoie.com
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