The truth about dieting

 If there is one word in the English language that I hate the most it is the word  “diet”.  Every time someone mentions the word diet, they are inadvertently talking about their current or soon to be current eating habits. If you lived on McDonald’s and hungry Jack’s 7 days a week, that is your diet. If you lived on vegetables with no meat, that is your diet. If you lived on bread and water alone that is your diet. A diet is the food that you are eating right now. Yes there are a million different ‘diets’ that people can and do go on, but I feel that it is so much easier to forget the word ‘diet’ and just relate to healthy eating habits. That way if you ever ‘stray from your diet’ all you have to do is just get back to ‘healthy eating habits’. So many people confuse healthy eating with going on a diet.

When you are exercising to lose weight your diet is “the” most important thing that you need to be aware of. We will talk about this later when we get into calories but the basics of losing weight and becoming healthier is to eat fewer calories than you burn every day.

This can be done with food alone.

And don’t take that literally meaning that ‘you don’t have to exercise’, because weight loss isn’t the only benefit of a healthy exercise program. You have exponentially positive effects on your body, mental state, health and fitness with exercise as well. I am just trying to point out how important food is as part of your healthy lifestyle.

Let me tell you of a quick story about me. At one stage in my life, I was unemployed. This gave me access to only a limited amount of funds per week. To do exercise, it costs you nothing. Walking/running in the park, taking the dog for a walk, doing a weights program at home using only your own body weight or a fit ball. All of this is free, so the training side of things was never the problem. Your food however cannot be supplemented. You must buy food in order to survive, and that is a fact. After saving some money I went to see a sports nutritionist/dietitian. I explained to him what I knew of the body and how it worked, and he then turned around and added to that knowledge. The information he gave me was incredibly helpful in regards to how the body works and utilises energy in food. So with knowledge in hand, I went home and reorganized my eating habits based on this information. After only 4 weeks of this new eating habit, I managed to lose 4kg in 4 weeks. A safe level of weight loss at 1kg per week. I used a friend at the time that was a personal trainer to accurately measure my body fat percentages, and losing 4kg worked out to be around 5% of my total body fat. Not bad hey!

So when we talk of diets I prefer to think of it as your habitual eating pattern. It takes just 14 days to create a pattern in which you are eating more healthily every day. As you are well aware there are so many different diets out in the world today it’s hard to choose which is best for you so the easiest way is to tell you how food is digested and used in your body to enable you to understand better what food is needed for weight loss.

 Thermic effect of food

The Thermic effect of food in simple terms is the amount of energy your body uses in order to break that food down during metabolism. Protein has the highest Thermic effect of food  (nearly 30%). What does that mean though? Well, for example if you were to eat 100 cal of a chicken breasts, 30 of those calories are burnt off just to digests that food, i.e.: your body has to use energy to break the food down into manageable parts to pass through your digestive system, extracting all the nutrients etc. Therefore the net calorie value is only 70 cal.   Fat on the other hand, is so easily digested and turned into body fat that there is little Thermic effect, perhaps only 2 or 3%. And finally fibrous vegetables have Thermic effect of about 20%.

So can you see now a little clearer how, if you are eating junk food that is really high in fat content, that your body doesn’t need a lot of energy to process this food, it realizes that it doesn’t need that food to burn off for energy, so it stores it for later, which is how you start to put weight on.

But how does this all translate? By looking at the food you eat and choosing those foods that have a high Thermic effect on your body, you will certainly increase your metabolic rate and hence you’ll be able to lose weight more efficiently and faster. Research shows a  “healthy” weight loss is around 1 kg per week.

In knowing this information now, how do we go about determining the foods we eat and when to eat them? I will touch on them briefly now, as we will explain them in the chapter “Your metabolism” but you should eat a meal every three hours. Any longer than three hours and your body triggers its starvation mode. This is a response that has evolved over millions of years. When you don’t eat, your body thinks it will not be eating for a while and therefore holds on to as much of its body fat as it possibly can. I will bring this up a little later though and give you more detail on how it works.

When you are preparing your meals, each meal should contain a portion of protein, portion of carbohydrates, and a portion of fat. A full list of foods will be given at the end of this e-book.