Paradise in Cheeseburgers. Matt James
the dirty secret about trying to emulate that lifestyle. If you’re fat right now, you do not have the DNA to do it. Sorry. You also may not have the DNA to be 6’ 4” or have naturally smooth skin or grow a lot of facial hair. Here’s the thing. There is no billion dollar a year industry trying to make you taller or help you grow a beard. And when some company does try to sell you these things, they get exposed as the phonies they are, and banished to the 2 a.m. infomercial scene.
I believed it too. I used to work ten hours a day on my feet walking and lifting, burning roughly 2,750 calories at work per day. After work, I would either get on an elliptical or play basketball in the summer and hockey in the winter. My weight never fluctuated by more than 5%. Then one day, I decided to reduce my caloric intake significantly. I went from eating 2,250-2,750 calories down to 1,200 calories per day. You know what? It worked. I dropped 20 pounds in about three months. Awesome, right?
Not so awesome as it turns out. Having reduced my calories so drastically, I was essentially starving myself. At first, my body burned my fat stores to make up the difference in energy. The problem presented itself when my metabolism pretty much went in to preserve mode. I became easily fatigued, I could sleep for ten hours and still not feel rested and of course, I was starving literally and figuratively. This type of diet, if you can call it that, is sometimes referred to as a “crash diet.” This causes more problems than it solves.
The lowest my weight became during this experiment was 192 lbs. I am 5’ 11”. Yeah, I was skinnier than before. My pants fit better (actually I needed new pants). The problem was, I was miserable and still not all that lean.
Counting calories is a horrible way to spend your day. I’m going to take a guess here. I bet you, as did I, made deals with yourself when you were on similar diets. You said, “Hey, I’ll have this piece of chocolate cake tonight but I’ll be up early tomorrow to run three miles and burn it off” or “I just won’t eat that muffin for breakfast tomorrow.” My next guess is maybe you did run or maybe you didn’t, maybe you ate that muffin or maybe you didn’t, but it more than likely led to the ultimate downfall. The “Oh, yeah” moment, meaning “Oh, yeah, I love the taste of chocolate cake or enter vice food here and I will continue to eat it because I can now balance that out with the rest of my routine and diet.” That vice food led to more vice food which led to more fatigue and less time to work out and ultimately, added weight.
Then, of course, you went back to the weight you were before or close to it. Don’t be mad at yourself for this, just about everyone that has tried this approach has come to the same conclusion.
For me, I reverted to my old diet of junk food mixed in with healthy food and that 20 lbs. came back posthaste. What made matters worse weight-wise is that I changed jobs. I went from running around and lifting product to sitting in front of a computer making pretty graphics all day. My daily caloric burn fell accordingly. My diet did not initially match that fall. This culminated one day with an unpleasant glimpse in the mirror. I was huge. Not Maury Povich needs to take down a wall huge, but huge nonetheless.
I had ballooned to 248 lbs. in less than three years. That’s a 36 pound increase above the 20 lbs. I had already gained. I was eating horribly too. I ate fast food almost every day, lots of pastas, breads, and sugary/corn syrupy foods, especially soda. Here’s the odd part; I stayed at around the 245-250 pound range for over six months eating this way. I didn’t keep gaining weight at the rate I was. It actually slowed down. How can that be? The calorie counters and the simple math discussed earlier states that I should continue to gain weight at a pretty steady clip. Why wasn’t I? DNA.
Our bodies regulate themselves with remarkable efficiency. My body, according to my DNA, said that eating this amount of calories with this amount of carbs, fat, and protein will place me at this particular weight range. The term for this is of course, metabolism. If I ate a huge crappy meal, my body would tell me so by feeling full or super full. What did that do? I didn’t eat for a while, or if I did, the next meal was tiny as I was still full. Our bodies will balance that out. It knew that I didn’t require those extra calories and told me in its most annoying way. Think back to your diet failures and look at the results. Did you revert to your old diet and gain back all the weight you lost? Probably. Well, why is it that you can gain weight so quickly from your lowest weight back to what you live with as “normal” yet do not gain more at a similar clip.
If you emptied a water balloon and then gradually filled it back up, it would get bigger and bigger. Unless you shut off the water, and if we pretend that it couldn’t explode, it would just keep getting bigger. So, you are filling yourself with calories that are supposedly making you gain weight. Then, you stop gaining weight at the rate you were. How can that be? You didn’t stop eating those calories did you? If you are taking in roughly the same amount of calories from when your diet changes from dieting to normal and you gain all that weight back, shouldn’t your weight continue to increase no matter what, like that balloon? It doesn’t though. The math says it should. The diet promoter’s logic says it should. Very interesting, no?
I must note that if you go nuts and eat horribly bad foods high in simple carbs, like sugar and refined grain (flour for the most part), you will continue to gain weight above and beyond that range you seemed to have lived with all your life. I am simply saying that the gain affected by these foods will slow down from when you ended your latest diet to what you live with as normal.
Let’s get back to exercising. Again, do what makes you feel good. I love playing basketball and hockey, so I continue to do so. It doesn’t change my weight in any significant way. Here’s why. After I play basketball, hockey, or partake in other exercisey things, I get hungry as I am sure you do as well. So, naturally I eat. In fact, I eat enough to replace just about every calorie I just burned during said activities. Hmm. Well, that dieting promoter’s math is coming back to haunt me again. I effectively lost no weight. So, here is my second rule.
Rule 2: Exercise if you like to, not because you think you have to, to lose weight.
On a side note: I get on my stationary bike three or four times a week and ride until I burn 80 calories, or more appropriately when the display reads 80 calories. I choose 80 calories because if I ate 20g of carbs that day, the amount known to enable you to enter the ketosis phase (can be a higher amount, more on that later), I would need to burn 80 calories to use up those carbs. This is purely a psychological exercise as there is no technical reason for it. I doubt it is doing anything seeing that I am on the bike for only 9-10 minutes. Again, it just helps me mentally, and I don’t have to get all sweaty.
Here’s where you step in and say, “Matt, just don’t eat as much after working out and you will burn more than you take in.” As the previous paragraphs discussed, it doesn’t work that way. Starvation cannot be the answer. Furthermore, how much less should we eat? 5%? 10%? 20% or more?
Let’s break out that math then. Let’s say you intake 2,000 calories and burn 2,000 calories per day, but you’re overweight and want to lose it. So reduce your caloric intake by 5%. That’s 100 calories per day. Instead of one Twinkie, you can have one-third. Bam! That’s 100 calories right there. Think about that for a second. Do you believe you will lose weight if you only eat one-third of a Twinkie everyday instead of the whole thing?
How about reducing your intake by 20%. This is something I bet you have done. Let’s take the same 2,000 calorie diet and reduce it by 20% or 400 calories. Your new diet now contains 1,600 calories per day. Your body burns 2,000 calories a day. Guess what? Your body will manage to only spend 1,600 calories per day in energy. At first it won’t, and you will see that initial drop in weight, but then your body will adjust, so now what do you do? Reduce your caloric intake by another 20%? As I stated earlier, I did just that. I realize now that because I cut my calories so drastically, I cut carbohydrates as well. This was the reason for my weight loss. Pretty soon, however, my body went in to protect mode because I was not ingesting enough calories compared to my expenditure. It’s the reason I got so tired. My body basically said enough. This is not a rare phenomenon.
To further the point, behavior is significantly affected by semi-starvation. In 1950, Ancel Keys and his colleagues at the University of