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developing low calorie dieter’s syndrome, which includes unhealthy loss of lean body mass and reduced metabolic rate.
Low Calorie Syndrome Hormonal Imbalances
The problems low calorie diets are causing can fill a book of its own. As you will learn there are also certain hormonal imbalances that occur with excess body fat and low calorie dieter’s syndrome.
These hormonal imbalances include hormones such as, leptin, ghrelin, adiponectin, insulin, and cortisol for example. An effective fat loss nutrition and exercise program must be individualized to help to correct these hormonal imbalances. When hormones are in balance you have better appetite control, improved metabolism, and improve the body’s ability to lose excess body fat. An important first step for health professionals is to identify these hormonal imbalances. The Body-Profile Type evaluation is an approach I developed that is designed to do this.
Personalized, Proper Exercise Is Important
Another common problem with the low calorie popular weight loss approaches is the exercise factor. Most of these one-size-fits-all low calorie diets don’t have an exercise program, or just include general exercise guidelines to make their approach seem more credible. But, guess what, they follow the same one-size-fits-all exercise approach, as they do with their low calorie diet approach. As you will learn in this book, following the wrong exercise program can actually be unhealthy for you and sometimes even interfere with losing excess body fat. Just as with a fat loss nutrition program, the fat loss exercise program has to be personalized based on the person’s Body-Profile Type analysis.
Then, there is a variety of exercise programs for weight loss that lack an appropriate, personalized nutrition program. From my experience I have found that many of the popular exercise approaches are erroneously applied to people with excess body fat, mistakenly using a one-size-fits-all approach. People with excess body fat require a different exercise starting point based on their individual Body-Profile Type. A big mistake is to make obese people to follow the same exercise program that “already fit”, normal body composition people are following. As you will learn, like a personalized diet program, you need a personalized and tailored exercise program for your Body-Profile Type.
Going Beyond Hit-or-Miss Low Calorie Weight Loss Approaches
The facts speak for themselves, the current weight loss approaches have over a 90% failure rate. Following a generic one-size-fits-all low calorie diet may temporarily work for some people. But for most people it is the same old story; they go on a low calorie diet and or exercise plan, and they might experience some weight loss. However, after a few weeks or months the weight lost is quickly regained. Additional research has revealed that these popular one-size-fits-all weight loss diets may even jeopardize a person’s health in many ways. Harmful side effects of generic low calorie dieting include reduction of bone density, reduction of muscle tissue, and hormonal imbalances, as previously mentioned.
On a historical note, when you take a look at the weight loss book trend that started back in the 1940’s with journalist Donald Cooley’s “The New Way To Eat and Get Slim”, nothing much has changed significantly. His weight loss approach was low calorie (too low calorie), increased protein, reduced carbs, and moderate fat, with plenty of low calorie vegetables. Subsequent weight loss books have just kept on serving up this generalized “low calorie” diet approach, wrapped up with seemingly new and different nutrition features. But, putting these features aside, when you get to the part of the book where the diet plan is presented, they turn out to be generic one-size-fits-all, low calorie diets, actually “too” low calorie diets.
Evidence based evaluation on popular diets done by Northwestern University and my experience dealing with patients, regardless of macronutrient composition (protein, carbohydrate and fat) of weight reducing diets, total intake less than 1,500 calories per day resulted in weight loss without physical activity. This is not the best way to approach weight loss; it underscores the fact that when caloric intake is reduced low enough, weight loss occurs. However, there are severe implications to this low calorie dieting as presented herein.
We additionally know from studying nutrition and exercise habits of people from other parts of the world that the macronutrient (carbohydrate, protein and fat) content of the food does not make a significant difference in terms of weight loss or weight gain. For example third world countries being on high carbohydrate diets have no obesity problems and France, as a developed country having a high fat diet, has no obesity problem. These lean body countries have higher physical activity level and balanced caloric intake in common. In France average person walks 7.2 miles per day, and in US the average person walks 3.2 miles per day. While this research is insightful, from my research I have determined that the right nutrient composition based on the individual’s Body-Profile Type, and individualized exercise program, will work best for causing optimal body fat loss. In other words, people can experience quality weight loss; targeting fat loss, maintaining or building lean body mass, promoting hormonal balance, and maintaining health, with properly balanced food intake.
The many popular one-size-fits-all diet books, USDA food guide pyramid guidelines, and even professional dietitian group’s guidelines do not take into account the Body-Profile Type factors, such as, body composition, genetics, hormonal & metabolic, and behavioral differences among dieters. In fact, there are actually different types of obese people.
Not everyone is obese the same way, and not everyone is obese for the same reasons.
There are obese people who under-eat and under-exercise. There are obese people who under-eat and over-exercise. There are obese people who over-eat and under-exercise. There are obese people who over-eat and over-exercise. The following descriptions will help to put these terms into perspective.
Over-eating means more than 3000 calories per day.
Under-eating means less than 1,800 calories per day.
Over-exercising means more than 45 minutes of cardiovascular or resistive exercise per day.
Under-exercising means less than 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise per day and no resistive exercise.
So, just from a quick look at these factors, this demonstrates how the numerous weight loss books do not present the complete picture of the obesity treatment problem, so how can they ever be expected to be a solution? They do not address individual needs of a diet and exercise weight loss program, they are all merely one-size-fits-all approaches that coincidentally may work for some people and may not work for others in the short-term, but overall do not work for most people in the long-term.
Determining Key Individual Factors is Essential for Medically Correct Weight Loss Success
Like our finger prints differ from each other, our genes’ activity, hormonal activities and basal metabolism are different too. We all have different gene activities (obesity or thinness genes active or inactive), different baseline basal body metabolism (some of us burn more calories at rest) and different hormonal imbalances and different body fat distribution (apple shape, pear shape). Then there are gender differences where women have more leptin resistance and they have more pear shape of body, and men have more insulin resistance and they have more apple shape of body. This is why it is an essentially important step to go through the Body-Profile Type evaluation process.
Avoiding Low Calorie Dieter’s Syndrome
Based on my research working with thousands of patients, I determined that consuming less than 1,800 calories per day slows down the body’s metabolism, in other words, it slows down the body’s calorie burning capacity. Low calorie dieting also causes loss of muscle mass as well as fat loss. You should also be aware that an adverse consequence of low calorie dieting is increased production of cortisol (stress hormone) in the body. A major problem that comes with higher cortisol levels when trying to lose excess body fat is that cortisol tends to block use of the body fat for calories.
There are minimum daily calorie intake requirements that are essential to vital body functions. For example, the brain alone utilizes about a minimum of 800 calories per day