(Background: I was vegan for about 8 years and have done raw periodically, so "what to eat" is always kind of a topic in my world. For the past 4 years I've basically eaten a cleaner version of the SAD. I don't do fast food and I don't really do junk, but I'm not super health-conscious with my foods.)
What I learned through a couple of convergent avenues was sort of shocking: it doesn't matter what you eat while you lose weight, it only matters how many calories of it you eat. Remember the fun fact about fat loss resulting from caloric deficit, period? Both my personal trainer friend and several bona fide studies and real-world experiments confirmed this for me. Some people got skinny eating only Twinkies. For real.
Having said that--which by the way I found sort of an empowering fact--I can eat cookies?!--it is undeniably easier to stay within a caloric deficit when one consumes things like vegetables and lean proteins rather than pizza and/or chinese food. Given that my caloric allowance is around 1300 calories per day, I need to be smart about where I am getting them from, otherwise one meal can knock out my whole day!
Another thing that I was worried about is this "starvation mode" idea. Notwithstanding the fact that logic must be thrown right out the window in order to consider it possible (mass hysteria, anyone?), I was concerned that if I DIDN'T meet my minimum basal metabolic energy requirements for a given day, my body would instantly begin to sabotage me by holding on to calories, and thus, fat. Actually maybe even creating weight gain just to spite me.*
Think about this for 10 seconds and it should be obvious why it doesn't work. People who are starving are not magically getting fatter just because they have a meal. If you don't eat enough to maintain your body composition, your metabolism will begin to use its available resources in the form of muscle and/or fat. That means weight loss. So... caloric deficit=losing weight.
But what about that muscle?
Yes, if you don't eat enough to maintain your current body mass you take energy (aka mass, thanks Einstein!) from both muscles and fat. But if you want to lose mostly fat and either spare or build your muscles, you have to tell your body that's what you're after. You have to work out hard enough to encourage muscle growth IN ADDITION to burning calories... because if muscles hear the call to growth and calories are too low to accommodate the demand, your body turns to burning fat instead. Bingo!
Anyway, I hope those fun facts are helpful. I mentioned I'm using MyFitnessPal to track what I eat and how much I work out, and it's a real lifesaver. The key for me is putting in EVERYTHING I eat, because it's easy to miss 20 calories here and 50 there, and suddenly find myself over the limit. So despite all the talk about how junk food is fine as long as you only eat within your caloric allotment, I'm eating "clean" because I feel good that way. And when it comes to hunger, I would rather eat 4 cups of sauteed kale than a half a cookie.
I'm doing a healthy protein shake (see below) in the morning, chicken or fish and veggies at lunch, and basically the same in the evening. I'm staying away from starches for the most part (based solely on personal preference) and have dramatically reduced my beer-with-dinner indulgence from about 4x per week to <1. I'm also experimenting, somewhat ashamedly, with Hydroxycut for the first few weeks. We'll see whether I keep that up; I can say I'm down to 1/2 - 1 cup of coffee from about 8 normally, because the powdered drink mixes have enough caffeine to cover my whole day! I have a lot of energy, I'm less hungry, and I'm sweating a bit more (that's the thermogenic aspect), so something must be happening.
Healthy Protein BreakfastSo, to recap what we learned:
high calories to start the day (~300-320)
0.5c Almond Milk (original)
1 container (5.3oz) 0% Greek Yogurt, vanilla
2 tsp ground flax seeds
2 tsp coconut oil
half a banana
Blend until happy...and I take some fish/borage oil pills to go with it, included in breakfast calories above.
- calories in < calories out = losing weight indiscriminately
- (calories in < calories out) + muscle activity = losing FAT
- watch out for mass hysteria in the fitness world
- twinkies can be diet food if you want them to be
My current mantra is "all flab must die!" in a nice way, by turning into sexy lean muscle :)
*in fact, the body does slow down metabolism a tiny little bit during caloric deficits but it's just part of the game. Another reason why working out is important... to keep the metabolism higher than any compensation it may be doing relative to available calories.
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