No Weight Loss - Is It Muscle Gain?

Once I had settled into my fat loss plan I estimated that if I followed my plan carefully, I should be able to lose 1lb a week. In my first year on the plan I lost a total of 23lbs. Well, I lost a little more than that but I put a few back on too! It’s evident that I most certainly did not lose 1lb a week. I averaged 1lb every other week.

There were some weeks where I blatantly did not follow the plan; I had takeaway pizzas and curry, I ate out at restaurants and didn’t hold back, I skipped workouts and so on. On those weeks when I did my stats at the end of the week I was just glad if I hadn’t put any weight back on. But there were some weeks, quite a lot in fact, where I followed my plan pretty well and yet at the end of the week there was no change, or very little.

A “No Change” Week – So Common and so Demoralising

I know I am not alone in this situation. A few years ago I spent several months as a consultant for Slimming World and week after week I would have several members who would adamantly state how they had followed the plan to the letter and had not lost any weight. As a member this is terribly demoralising. You go along to some club who sells you a plan that promises to allow you to lose weight. You follow the plan and nothing happens. As a consultant I found this very hard to deal with as I just didn’t know what to say to these people.

The story is the same with slimmers all over the world on all sorts of fat loss plans. When one of these “No Change” weeks crops up, (or worse, weight is actually put on) most people will try to rationalise the results and come up with a comforting fact that could explain the results. The most common one I hear is this:

“I must have put on muscle which is cancelling out the fat loss on the scale” ... (or something to that effect)

Digging Into the Logic

Let’s take that statement and examine it for a while. On what logic is it based? Muscle is a much denser matter than fat. If you take a chunk of muscle and a chunk of body fat of the same size and weighed them you would find that the muscle weighs much more than the fat. This is the reason why two people can be exactly the same height, exactly the same weight but look completely different where one appears much fatter than the other. The slimmer person holds more muscle and less fat on their body but the muscle weighs more than the fat causing the person to weigh the same as the larger person who holds more fat.

These days it is widely accepted that building muscle is beneficial for fat loss so many slimmers will sensibly combine a healthy diet with exercise that includes some kind of strength training. Putting these two things together then and you can see where the conclusion comes from. If in any given week I am burning off fat and building muscle at the same time then won’t they cancel each other out on the scale?

Simultaneous Fat Loss and Muscle Gain

This is a topic that I am going to cover in it’s own post so I will keep it brief here. We all know that in order to lose fat, we must create a calorie deficit in our bodies. That means that the number of calories we supply in terms of the food and drink that we consume is less than the energy used up by our bodies. The extra energy required is then taken from our fat reserves (hopefully!) We also know that muscle is build through resistance training, not on cardio machines. But what many people don’t realise is that to gain significant amounts of muscle, a calorie surplus is required. Obviously the two goals are in conflict with one another.

Now there are some exceptions to this rule and there are some people who swear that it is all rubbish and that you can quite happily build muscle whilst losing fat. However, to do so would require extremely strict training and a very clean diet and I doubt that somebody who is being that strict with themselves would get on the scale at the end of the week, see no change and just rationalise about why.

So let’s move on...

Crunching the Numbers

Now for arguments sake, let’s assume that it is quite normal to lose fat and to build muscle at the same time. What kind of numbers are we talking about here? Well in my case I was planning to lose 1lb a week. I am quite a small person so my calorie allowance isn’t all that high and I simply hate dieting so I don’t have a very low deficit but many other people are more aggressive and are aiming for a loss of around 2lbs a week. So if we get on the scale at the end of the week, see that there is no change and then assume that we must have put on muscle instead, we are implicitly making the assumption that we did indeed lose that 1 or 2lbs of fat and that we also gained that same amount of weight in muscle.

There are 52 weeks in a year. 52 x 2 = 104. For us folk in the UK we need to think in stones, and there are 14lbs in one stone. 104 lbs is over 7stones! Wow that’s a lot. I don’t know many people who have lost 7 stones in one year. Taking my own example of a loss of 1lb a week, with a maximum of 52 lbs in the year that would equate to a total possible fat loss of 3st 10.

I know many people who have lost 3 stones in a year. I’m sure you do too even if not personally. There are many success stories to draw from. But let’s look at the other side. How many people do you know have put on 3 stones of pure lean muscle in a year? Hmmm not as many I would suspect. By saying that your lack of movement on the scale is down to muscle gain you are making the assumption that you can put on muscle just as fast as you can lose fat.

It is Simply HARD to Gain Muscle

Ask any body builder how fast the average person can put on muscle and they won’t tell you 1lb a week, maybe 1lb a month would be closer. The situation is worse for women; we simply lack the testosterone required to build muscle so it is much, much more difficult for us to increase our muscle mass.

Those bodybuilders that do put on large amounts of muscle in a short space of time work incredibly hard. My gym is a bit of a ‘muscle gym’ and there are at least two professional bodybuilders who workout there and let me tell you – they do not do gentle recreational lifting! The average member here comes in and works very seriously, squeezing out that last rep with every iota of energy in his body. This is in stark contrast to my previous gym that was a hotel guest gym also open to the public. Most of the members there were women and hardly any used weights at all. Those that did tended to have the same routine – they would move from machine to machine doing 10 reps of this, 10 reps of that and barely breaking a sweat. Which one are you?

If this post is making you feel a little uncomfortable, perhaps a bit defensive then I hope that you’ll also have realised that the reason you feel this way is because you have been kidding yourself all this time. You haven’t been secretly putting on muscle, perhaps you’ve just not been working hard enough or perhaps you’re suffering from a fluctuation, or any number of other reasons why the fat has not come off. Fluctuation is another subject that is to be covered in a future post but if your weight is fluctuating upwards then it must come down as well so that excuse will only work for so long.

Give the Excuse the Boot

There are two things that we must understand. Firstly we must know the difference between weight loss and fat loss. Our bodies are made of water, bones, muscle tissue, organs, blood, skin, fat and probably a whole host of other things that I don’t know about. When we lose ‘weight’ it can be coming from any number of areas. I’m sure many of us have suffered with ‘water weight’ at some time or other. What we really want is to lose fat, not just weight so that means that using the scale alone is not a sufficient stick to measure by.

We need something else. We need a way of measuring how much fat we have and that is what body fat testing is all about. In my post about the Different Types of Body Fat I talk about some different methods of measuring body fat and the ups and downs of those. Whichever method you use, although it may not be totally accurate it will give you a much better idea of how your body is composed. You will know how much is lean body mass and how much is fat. If you track these numbers from week to week then you don’t have to wonder whether or not you have gained muscle because your measurements will tell you.

So stop kidding yourself, get rid of the excuses, measure properly and if you don’t get the results you want take a close look at your behaviour and see if you can spot the real reasons for it.

As a final note on this topic, I am not suggesting that in all cases, the lack of fat loss is simply due to not trying hard enough. There are other isues such as food intolerances, water retention especially for women around menstruation etc, but in many cases we are just making excuses for ourselves. And if there is a proper medical condition underlying our symptoms then we should get them checked out by our doctor.

The Different Types of Body Fat

I've recently been learning a little bit about the various different types of body fat and thinking about how that affects my health and my fat loss. There are three primary types of body fat:

• Subcutaneous - sits underneath the skin
• Visceral - deposits around the internal organs
• Intramuscular - is weaved throughout our muscle tissue

The subcutaneous fat is the stuff we see on the surface, it's what's makes us flabby and wobbly. Got bingo arms? That's the subcutaneous stuff! This is the kind of fat that I suspect most women are thinking about when they want to lose fat. Losing this kind of fat will make you look leaner.

The visceral fat is hidden away but this is what gives people that pot bellied look. Beware, this is the dangerous fat and makes you susceptible to obesity-related diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Those of you who are more apple shaped than pear shaped have a tendency to store visceral fat.

The intramuscular fat is also hidden away. If you look at a cut of beef that has fat marbled through it - that's the intramuscular fat. I couldn't find very much information about this fat in relation to humans.

Measuring Body Fat

This new found knowledge has now given me a greater understanding of why different methods of body fat measurement can give such different results. When I first started out I used skin fold calipers. As these literally measure the size of a fold of skin they can only measure subcutaneous fat and so visceral fat is ignored.

When I started on my current plan I tried using a tape measure to estimate body fat and measurements were taken from the waist and the hips. I was shocked to find a difference of 8% in the two readings! My tape measurement put me at 40% body fat and the calipers at 32%. What does this tell me? That I carry more visceral fat than subcutaneous fat and the mirror tells the same story - my belly pokes out like a football. A year ago I could make myself look six months pregnant by pushing out my belly!

My recent results are also correlating the conclusions that I have reached about my body fat. About a month ago I lamented the fact that I had not yet seen any grand transformations; that I seemed to be just a smaller version of my former self. This is also indicative of the loss of visceral fat - my belly has got smaller but I have not lost much of the outer fat. I've lost some of course but not as much as I would have hoped for.

What Does This Mean?

First of all everybody is different. Two people who weigh the same and have the same levels of body fat can still look quite different if their fat is made up differently. The person with high visceral and low subcutaneous may look quite lean but still have a sticky-outy-belly. A person with the opposite ratio can have a slim figure but still look flabby and soft.

Armed with this knowledge I can see an obvious question - how do I lose a particular type of fat? Answer: you don't get to choose the type of fat you lose any more than you can choose where you lose it from, so you can banish those illusions of losing the subcutaneous fat from your right kneecap on Saturday's workout! Fat is lost all over the body and of course Sod's law says that the fat you most want to lose will come off last.

We need to lose the visceral fat for health reasons and we want to lose the subcutaneous fat for vanity but we have no control over the precise mechanics of it. The advice then is simple - no matter how your body is composed, if you want to be healthy and look good then you just need to keep working at lowering your body fat until you have achieved both of those aims.

One Year On - How Have I Done and What's Next?

7th July - Funny Date to Start Something New

Two years ago today, a cyst on my ovary ruptured, requiring surgery. The surgery should have been routine but something went wrong and two days later I was in intensive care. I was in intensive care for a week, sedated for 2 days and had another major surgery whilst I was in there. The whole ordeal lasted 11 days and left me heavily scarred both physically and emotionally.

The experience stayed with me for a very long time. I even had some weird symptoms that lasted almost a year. The incident happened during the summer holiday between my 2nd and 3rd years at Uni so when I went back to Uni for my final year I was not long out and still recovering. I found it very hard to get around campus between lectures. I needed to get myself better and boost my health but instead I threw myself into my studies, put on a truckload of weight and did zero exercise.

Fast forward almost a year to 6th July 2006. On this day I graduated from University with a First Class Honors degree, an award for the Best Student, and a new job all lined up. It was time to make a change. The very next day, the anniversary of the day I went into hospital, I would clean up my diet, start exercising, build up my new career and change my life for the better.

One Year on the Plan

Now here I am a year later. How did I do? Well the first most obvious point is that I am here writing about it, I have worked my plan for an entire year. I had been overweight for about 12 years and I had tried tons of diets and been on and off countless exercise plans. Nothing usually lasted more than a few weeks. I had some brief success with a Simming World club, but I didn't really make any permanent changes with that. This time around I had stuck to my plan, and tweaked it constantly for an entire year. My life has changed for the better!

Lets See Some Stats!

I started out my measuring, weighing and seeing just where I was at. These were my starting stats:

Weight: 161 lbs
Bodyfat: 40.6%
Lean Body mass: 93.2 lbs

I was shocked at first. 40% body fat? Wow that seemed really high. Here's an important point I woud like to make about this. There are many different ways to measure body fat and none are all that effective but if you always use the same method to measure then you can at least ensure that the number is getting smaller. That is what I have done. I use a tape measure to take measurements of my waist and hips and plug them into this website to get the numbers. I know its flawed because my tummy often gets bloated, especially around period times but these are just blips. Over a long length of time, (especially a year!) you can see a trend.

Here's a couple of pictures from 2006 when I started:

Ugh! Check out the rolls of flab!

Graduation Day. I look fat & tired.

After figuring out where I was, I set about setting a goal. At first I wasn't too sure what I could achieve so I just plucked an arbitrary figure from out of the air - 25% body fat. That seemed like fairly average and figured that would be a good starting point. I plugged the number into my spreadsheet along with my lean body mass and figured I would need to lose about 28lbs to get there. In hindsight, I now know that spreadsheets don't always reflect reality as two weeks ago my loss had reached 27lbs and my lean body mass was higher than it started but still my body fat was over 30%.

My Current Stats

Ok where am I now? Well unfortunately I put on a whopping 5lbs on holiday so I have undone some of my progress but that is life. Here's the numbers:

Weight: 138 lbs (23 lbs lost)
Body Fat: 31.2% (9.4% lost)
Lean Body Mass: 95.2 lbs (2 lbs gained)

It's all positive but not as much as I would have liked. A few weeks after starting, I began to plan more carefully and figured I could lose 1lb a week. After a year I have lost only 23lbs so that's an average of about half a pound a week but it did not work out like that. I have plotted a little graph of my progress over the year:

I started off really well, for the first four months I actually lost more than I had planned. That took me to November when it all started to go horribly wrong. For me Christmas has always been a very bad time, but not just Christmas Day or even Christmas week. Oh no, for me Christmas starts when the shops get the Christmas stuff in. Now I dunno about the rest of the world but here in the UK that starts in October! Usually I could put on a stone over the whole of the winter period.

Looking at the chart I slowed right down in November then from December to January I had a sharp increase in weight. January I didn't do too badly and I lost most of what I had gained but I took another bad turn in February and put more back on. From November to March I had lost a net total of 1.5 lbs! That's a crappy four months. I got myself back on track in March and steadily lost all through the summer until my holiday when I had that massive jump back up!

Here are some recent photos. I don't have any flesh revealing ones yet this year but on the closeup I can see a marked difference around my neck. I hated looking so fat around the face so I'm glad its come off from there.

Same baby as before, we both have more clothes on!

I've been snapped eating, hence the odd expression!

Plans for the Coming Year

Obviously I'm not done yet. I haven't reached my goal, and as I discovered recently, I don't think 25% is good enough anyway. They say that the closer you get to your goal, the harder it is to lose but I don't really buy that. After a year, I've learned a few things and I have found stuff that works for me and stuff that doesn't:

• I now have a very good idea of the ideal meal for me, how many calories, the macronutrient ratio etc and I have built a ton of recipes that match it for breakfasts, lunches and dinners. When I started out I had to largely wing the food and just make small adjustments along the way. Now I have it sorted pretty well.
• I have identified many things that sabotage my diet and I've come up with strategies for dealing with them when I want to.
• On the other hand, I also know that I can lose fat when I want to which allows me to go out an enjoy good food on occasion without worrying about it. Over the long haul, I'm making progress in the right direction whilst still having a social life.
• I've started running. This gives me a form of cardio that I can do anywhere so that I am not tied to a gym. I still have a long way to go with running but that's something I'm going to work on in the coming year.
• I now know that during the winter months I crave chocolate and comfort foods heavily, and I also hate getting up early! I can use this to my advantage. I have done a plan for the year but I am only planning to lose just 1 lb a month in the winter months.
  
• Exercise has become fundamentally ingrained into my lifestyle. I do some kind of exercise every single day - whether it's cardio down the gym, going for a run, karate, or weight training either at the gym or at home. This is a habit I intend to maintain for the rest of my life.
• Oh yes, how could I forget - I started karate this year. Not only is it something I have wanted to take up for years but its an excellent form of exercise.

These are all tools & knowledge that I did not have a year ago. So with that in mind, here is my new target for next year:

15% Body fat, 95lbs lean body mass by 7th July 2008.

Breaking it Down

One of the mistakes I made last year was that I set my one year goal but I never broke it down further. I knew I wanted to lose 1lb a week roughly but if I had a week where I didn't lose enough or I gained I just said "oh well, there's plenty of time yet, I'll lose next week". The time period was too long and I simply didn't notice how badly things were going during the winter.

So this time I have started to break down that goal and I have set myself goals for the next three months and I'll continue to re-evaluate those as the year progresses.

Conclusion

When I came out of hospital I said that I wanted to improve my lifestyle and become a fit and healthy person so that I would never have to go through that again. I somehow attributed my poor lifestyle to the first operation going wrong. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter. It took me a year to actually start doing something about it but at the back of my mind the whole time has been the overarching goal to be healthy - not just thin.

Sure I wanted to lose the flab, but I wanted to get fit too. I wanted to change my habits and make healthier choices the norm for me. Even though I have not lost as much body fat as I had wanted in this year I am way, way fitter than I was back then, and I am much healthier.

As I tell people in the Burn the Fat newsgroup that I subscribe to, it's not a matter of losing as much fat as quickly as possible thats important, it's imprinting the right habits onto your life that are going to make the difference long term. I will continue my plan for another year, and I get real excited when I think about what I can achieve in my second year at this.

Reducing Exercise: Can I Still Burn the Fat?

I have recently encountered a situation in my personal life which has put sudden and great demands on my time and attention. Having looked closely at where I spend my time, I realised that a large proportion of it is spent on exercise. I'm usually spending about 10 hours a week on exercise. That's not to say that I am physically spending 10 hours doing the exercise, just that when you take into account time to get to the gym, shower, get changed etc, that it all adds up to that amount of time taken out of my week.

I have to cut it back. This is painful for me as over the last few months I have been slowly increasing my exercise just to maintain my fat loss and it has grown into a healthy lifestyle that I enjoy. If I cut back now that it going to hurt my progress and it will also weaken the exercise habit which could have long term repercussions. But the alternative is worse, so I have to figure out a way to deal with it. I recalculated my calorie requirements based on a lower activity level and if I want to continue with my target deficit of 500 calories a day which would allow me to lose a maximum of 1lb a week, then I need to reduce the calories I eat from 1650 to 1500 a day. Ouch!

This is a major nuisance for me, because over the last few months I have tweaked all my recipes to the point where they are all a very similar number of calories so I can just mix and match as I please and my calories for the day work out about right. I have hundreds of recipes, and I'm going to have to tweak them all over again. *Bashes head against desk in frustration*

I believe that life sends us these little trials in order to test us, and there must be something good to come out of it. So I had a look at my food and asked myself the question, "how can I eat less calories and not go hungry?". The answer was simple - eat better quality food. Ever since starting up this plan I knew that my food was not perfectly 'clean'. There's still too much fat, especially saturated fat, still too much sugar and other simple carbs. I had a look through some of my recipes and found that I could reduce the calories without reducing the amount of food in any way by being more strict with the extras such as dressings and sauces.

So the downside is that I have to spend time re-doing these recipes but I'm going to just take it a week at a time, doing just the ones I need for that week. But the upside is that this forces me to eat cleaner. Now what happens if in a few months from now I resolve my personal situation and find that I have more time for the gym again? Then I can exercise more and lose the fat even more easily than I do now. I have a feeling I'll reach my target weight before I get my time back but either way, it's always a good thing to be eating more healthily than before.

Transformation or Transition?

I'm always hearing about these people who have had a major body transformation; these success stories who have lots several stones in weight and now look like fitness models. For some reason, I also keep hearing the time span of three months - "you can totally transform your body in three months", I am always being told.

Well, in three weeks time it will have been an entire year that I have been on my new food and exercise plan. I have not yet transformed my body. It's changed for sure, but there's no magical transformation yet. I still look the same, just a little smaller. I don't think of myself as fat any more but I've still got over 30% body fat and plenty of wobbly bits to show for it.

So why is that? Why are some people able to "transform" themselves so quickly, whilst others slog away for months (or years) and only make slow progress?

When I think back along my fat loss journey what I see is a slow but certain transition. My diet has slowly transitioned from one of totally adhoc eating of mostly crappy junk food to a well planned diet of balanced nutritious meals. My exercise habits have slowly transitioned from a lifestyle with zero exercise to daily activity and a regular sport. My body has slowly transitioned from a fat, ugly lump that moved slowly and had no energy to a fairly average looking, slightly more energetic thing that's still a bit wobbly here and there.

I suspect that there are a lot more people out there like me than those that have transformations. When I read the stories there is usually a turning point, a wake up call of some kind for the person in question that triggers a total life change. In an instant that personal totally changes everything - they throw out all the junk food, radically alter their diet, charge straight into an exercise plan and they just go for it 100% Wow, just writing about it makes me feel exhausted.

We are all different but a lot of us are creatures of habit. We don't like major changes. If somebody comes along and tells you that you are going to be dead in six months if you don't lose some weight then sure that will trigger a change but I believe that for many of us that doesn't happen. The fat creeps on slowly throughout the years, the exercise peters off to very little or none and we become entrenched in our unhealthy lifestyle. We know we're not happy and we want to look better but there's no real compelling reason. We probably won't die if we stay fat. Or perhaps we will but we don't know that. For most of us, risks like heart attacks etc are just an unknown. They could happen but they might not and its just easier to ignore the possibility.

But for one reason or another here we are, having decided to lose some of that flab. The trouble is, we're not really ready to dive straight into some major lifestyle change; it's just too much. We may have tried several times in the past and failed miserably. In fact I think a lot of people fail at losing fat for this very reason - almost any diet or exercise plan seems like a massive change when you live really unhealthily and people look at the difference and it's too much for them so they give up.

I adopted my changes slowly. The biggest change I made in the beginning was joining at gym close to work and going every lunch time. However, I didn't really do a lot while I was there! I remember my first day. I climbed on the cross trainer (elliptical machine) and almost fell off the bloody thing! I put it on level 1 and started peddling (? peddling, what's it called on an elliptical?) away slowly. There was a lady next to me who was much bigger than me but obviously much fitter too. Her level way way high and she was going for it, pounding away really fast. I meekly continued at my level 1 sluggish pace and tried not to show how out of breath I was getting. 10 minutes was enough and I spent another 10 minutes pretending to stretch and then went back to work. Sometimes I'd use the pool. Oh yes that jacuzzi was very hard work :-) My new gym hasn't got a pool. Shame.

Anyway, I progressed very slowly. Sometimes I'd do a little cardio, other times I'd pick up some weights and play with them and eventually I started doing it more seriously. After a few weeks I started karate which was a massive shock to the system. A few months later I added extra gym sessions in the morning. A few months later still I started running which would have been totally impossible for me a year ago. The point being, I added all this stuff in very slowly.

I took the same approach with my food. I brought my own food into work mainly because I simply couldn't afford to buy stuff from the sandwich shop but I didn't really pay much attention to what I was eating. I have experimented with new recipes and tweaked them weekly for this whole year and the changes have been very gradual.

I feel like I have slowly transitioned from a fat, unfit, unhealthy person into a healthy, fit, and not quite so fat person. I don't think I'll ever see that transformation but if I keep doing what I have been doing long enough then I may eventually transition into what I eventually want to become. Maybe.

Why do we self-sabotage?

I plan my food at least a week in advance. I shop on Saturday and I spend several hours on Sunday cooking for the week. I'll also have to do additional cooking and preparation on a daily basis. Food planning is hard work and takes a long time.

I take great pains to improve my recipes on a regular basis. I'm always tweaking them, trying to find ways to reduce fat, eat more whole grains, get better quality protein and get my five a day. So when I spend hours and hours a week doing all of this and then on top of that I spend hours and hours in the gym every week, why on earth would I go and sabotage that by ordering a great big Chinese meal that feeds me for three days?

In this particular case it was because I was feeling ill. I'd been off sick from work, I'd had a crappy day and I just did not feel like cooking at all. Luckily I already had my lunches pre-prepared from the day before but I was supposed to cook an evening meal that would last me three days and I simply did not have the energy so I ordered a Chinese instead.

Now I'm not going to beat myself up about it too much because these things happen but it made me think about the reasons that we self sabotage. I was not feeling well. What does that mean? I was very low on energy. I was totally demotivated. I didn't really care about my fat loss at that point. Do we get those feelings at other times? In my case yes. Sometimes I feel like that if I've not slept well, or if I've had a particularly bad day at work, or if the traffic has been really bad. Usually I can handle any one of those on their own but it's when I get a combination of all three that dinner is usually replaced with a pizza!

What do these things all have in common? They sap our energy levels. If we feel ill, we're low on energy. If we don't get enough quality sleep we're low on energy. A tough day at work, bad traffic or train journeys, arguments with a partner, stress over kids etc etc. All of these things sap our energy and cause us to sod the diet and fitness plan and reach for the comfort food and the sofa. The question is, what can we do about it? I haven't quite figured that bit out yet :-)

But one thing I have been learning in recent months is that the food we eat has a great effect on our energy levels. If we skip meals, pig out on high carb, high sugar, high fat crap then we're going to feel that crash later on and get cravings for more of the same crap. On the other hand, if we feed ourselves with regular meals that are full of all the good stuff we're far more likely to have sustained energy all through the day.

I think that one of the things I'm going to do from now on is analyze my sabotage patterns. Anytime I go off my plan, rather than beat myself up about it, I'll think about why I did it, how i felt at the time and try to think about the real cause. Did I really, really want that ice cream at that point or was I suffering from a sugar craving because my last meal was nutritionally poor? Did I really want to drink a whole load of alcohol or was I just feeling peer pressure from my friends? And so on. I think it's important to figure out why we do things if we're ever going to come up with ways of preventing these sabotaging habits.

Slacking Off Just Before the Deadline

The date for the completion of my one year goal rolls around in 6 weeks time. As I draw closer to the date there are a few things that I have come to realise:

1. I am not going to reach my original goal.
2. Even if I did, I will not look how I envisioned at that bodyfat percentage.
3. I will reach my goal, and even better ones, but it will take a bit longer.

My goal was to reach 25% body fat by 7th July 2007. A few weeks ago I made realision 2 that 25% would not be anywhere near the kind of look that I have in my head of exactly what I want to be like. As I learn more about bodyfat and talk with others in my new gym I now see that I will need to have a percentage in my teens before I get there.

Summer is here and I'm still at 30% body fat. On the other hand I've dropped around 10%, losing 25lbs in the process. I have been keeping track of my progress over the year and today I made myself a line chart. I can clearly see that I made great progress for the first few months, had a large blip around Christmas, stumbled my way through the early part of this year and then got back on track and have been making good progress since then. So this leads me to realisation number 3. I can lose fat, I don't have to be perfect, I can skip workouts sometimes, I can eat takeaways sometimes, I can have a normal life and still make progress.

So, my beloved summer is upon us and I intend to enjoy it. I have more social events during the summer so I wont be eating perfectly all the time. Not only that but over the last few months I have become so obsessed with reaching my goal by my deadline that I've been overdoing it with the exercise. At one point I actually tried working out three times in one day. That is just too much. I'm not an athlete. I'm an ordinary person with a day job, a family, a social life and lots of interests. Fat loss is a goal, it is not my entire life.

So, I've decided to relax. I'm going to try to exercise daily but I'm dropping two of my cardio sessions and one of my weight training sessions to give me time to work on some of my other interests (software development). I'm going to continue with my current eating plan as normal but I'm not going to obsess over it. I'll continue to improve recipes and look for new ones but I'll also continue to enjoy my social life and eat out now and then without feeling guilty.

The fat will come off and it will do so slowly. It wont be linear but overall, it will move in the right direction. I find myself in a position now where I have confidence in my ability to lose fat safely. It's not easy but I really don't have to kill myself to do it so I can finally just relax a bit and enjoy all that life has to offer, and not just my new gym!

I Lost 2 Stones Today ... In My Head

I have a long drive to and from work. The traffic lights are not working at one of the roundabouts at the moment and it took me over an hour to get in this morning, ugh! Tonight it took 45 minutes to get home. On these long drives I quite often find myself drifting along on auto-pilot. I'll suddenly come to my senses and find that I haven't heard any of my music for the last half an hour or so.

This happened to me tonight on the way home. Last week I dropped to my lowest weight in years and I am really starting to see and feel the difference. I've had really good workouts all week long and my goals are starting to feel more real and achievable every day. I'm always visualising about the future and these days 95% of the time I'm day dreaming about either fat loss goals or karate.

Tonight I actually took it one step further than usual. I was driving along and suddenly I caught myself planning out my blog entry announcing my weight loss of 2 stones! I haven't lost 28lbs yet, only 22 so I'm a way off yet but in my mind I had already done it. I didn't even realise I was doing this and when I caught myself I actually felt a bit embarassed because it seemed rather silly but when I thought about it and realised that it's not silly; it's incredibly powerful.

Everything that is manifested in the real world starts of as a thought in the creative faculty of the mind. What the mind can conceive and believe the mind can achieve (Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich.) Not only do I believe that I can reach my goals but I can visualise them so clearly that I can experience the feelings as if they were really happening right now. I can see every detail of how I look, the clothes I'm wearing, the way I've changed my hair, the things other people say to me, and of course how all of this makes me feel. I can feel it with such intensity that I'm able to put it into words as a blog entry. I could write it right now!

The reason I believe this is such a powerful thing is that the mind does not distinguish between thoughts that are in the past, present or future, and the mind does not distinguish between thoughts that are real and those that are not. What you think about the most you move towards. The predominant thoughts in your mind will manifest themselves in the physical world. And no, I don't mean by magic!

We have literally billions of thoughts and inputs entering our lives every day. All the things we see, hear, feel etc as well as all of the thoughts that go on in our mind enter our brains daily. Our brains are neural networks - networks of neurons. All the billions of neurons are linked together to billions of others. When all these inputs, senses and thoughts come in some of those neurons will be fired along pathways to other neurons. When this happens the pathway is physically strengthened. This makes it easier to fire off those same neurons again in the future. Similarly if particular neurons cease to be fired, pathways from them will eventually weaken.

Enough of the AI lesson... The point is that the thoughts you think about the most will strengthen in your mind and will become more predominant in your mind in the future. If you continually focus on what a big fat failure you are, you'll strengthen all neurons and pathways relating to that making it much easier to feel that way in the future. Do the opposite and feed your mind positive thoughts and good things happen. The other important thing to understand is that thoughts that have high emotional intensity will fire much more strongly in the brain and this is where my blog entry story comes in...

You see I am able to visualise with such clarity that I can experience all those emotions and feelings right now. Aside from making me feel good and motivating me, its strengthening those neurons baby! Every time I do this I bring myself closer and closer to manifesting it in the real world. In a few weeks time I will be back here making that blog entry for real :)

How do I know this for sure? Well I must have graduated from Uni with a First Class Honors degree about a thousand times in my mind before it happened for real. I focused on that goal so intently for three years that it would have been impossible for me to fail. The best student award was just icing on the cake. I wonder what my icing will be for my fat loss goals?

Exciting stuff. Visualise. Have complete Faith. Achieve anything you want.

A Week of Painful Experiments

Last week at the gym Caroline (my trainer, I'm not just talking to myself) convinced me to have a go at a spinning class. I've not done any kind of cyling before, let alone spinning but I've heard all the rumours of how tough it could be.

So, feeling brave, I took the plunge and turned up Friday night for the class. I got on the bike and wow, that was one hard seat! We're talking seriously uncomfortable. It felt like I was sitting on a piece of wood! I squirmed around a bit trying to get comfy but I just couldn't. After about five minutes I was just about ready to give up but of course the thing about spinning is that its not a solo activity - its a group thing with somebody running the session and encouraging everybody. Maria, who was running this session, knew it was my first time and at that moment she said to me "Caroline, I think you'll do great, you'll be able to get through this". So of course, I couldn't quit then could I?

For some of the session we stand up on the bike, lean forward and drive more with the legs. This makes the legs burn more and pumps up the heart rate but for me this was welcome releif from the pain in my a***!

About half way though I was going to quit again but Maria must have seen the look in my eye or something because she managed to come out with another comment that kinda forced me to stck with it. Well I did - I managed 45 minutes on that torture device. Never again!

Seriously, after a workout I expect my legs to ache, or my back to ache perhaps and after weight training then all sorts of things ache. What I do not expect is to spend the entire weekend nursing my seriously bruised nether regions and having to sit on extra cushions! I thought I had enough padding of my own down there but I guess not!

My second new experience of the weekend came Saturday night when I went round to some friends for a BBQ. One of my friends is a physiotherapist and she's just completed a course on accupuncture so of course she wanted to test out her new skills on everybody!

Now I'm not exactly a needle fan and the idea of somebody sticking a needle in my head (yup, head!) for a laugh just seemed a bit twisted to me. But what the hell, I grabbed a glass of wine and let her do it. "You wont feel it she said" and she spanked down on it. "OW, yes I felt that!". So when these people say you wont feel something, they LIE. Anyway it only hurt for about 0.2 seconds so I got over my wussiness eventually. It was actually really weird. I started to feel hot in my face and feel drowsy. It was just like a mild form of pethadine!

So that was my weekend, how was yours?

Good Results, but Keeping it Real

Good results for me this week, I lost more than 1lb last week to total 22lbs lost which finally brought me under 10st which is a big milestone for me. I also lost noticeable amounts around my waist and tummy and I am now able to comfortably wear my last pair of trousers that were previously too tight. I'm now in new territory. That the good news!

Now the reality! I've been here before. About 4 years ago I lost around a stone to get me to 10st and I went out and bought a whole bunch of new clothes which I am now wearing again. The trouble is that at the time I was so pleased with my new look that I was no longer dissatisfied enough to carry on - so I slacked off. Over the last few years the weight crept back on and brought another 7lbs with it.

This time it's different. I have been focussing really hard on what I want my *ultimate* goal to be. Yes I'm pleased that I'm thinner now and that I can wear some of my nice clothes again and its nice when friends that I've not seen for a while say "oh you've lost weight!" but I'm not yet where I want to be - far from it. Its easy to get disollusioned with good results while we're on the journey but we need to keep our eye on the ultimate goal or its too easy to slack off.

One thing that is really odd is that every few months I take some "fat photos" from several different angles. I compared the ones from today to the ones from a year ago before I started my current programme and when I was 22lbs heavier. I can see the difference in my face and neck immediately but the rest of my body looks exactly the same! I know that cannot be because inches have gone but my basic body shape is identical. The same football-belly and backside! I'm just becoming a smaller version of my fat self! And that is better than the big version, but not good enough. I'm looking for a total body tranformation - a change in shape.

So now I'm in a position where I can celebrate my results so far and yet look at the photos for a reality check. Good work but keep it up. I'll think of those photos when I hit the gym tomorrow morning.

Moral of the ramble - don't let partial results allow you to slack off. Keep going all the way.

Goal Setting

The first chapter of the fat loss book I'm reading talks about goal setting. I'm good at goal setting, I do it all the time. I have a list of 114 goals for all areas of my life written down which I reviewed on the 1st of this month and I have my current ones, 26 of them taped to my bathroom wall next to my mirror.

Still, despite having read this all before, I always manage to pick out something new every time I read it. I've had the same fat loss goal since I originally set it back on the 7th July 2006 - to reach 25% bodyfat without losing any LBM (96lbs at the time). So far I've lost 20lbs but my bodyfat is 32%, still way off. In the book, the author says to set both your long term and short term goals, and also to set BIG goals.

My deadline is 7th July this year, just 11 weeks away so long term and short term are now the same thing. But thats taught me a lesson the hard way. I never set myself 3-month goals along the way - I just did the yearly one and now I've got less than 3 months to go.

So lets have some fun with that... 25% body fat, pah, thats crap really isn't it? That was only supposed to be an interim goal. 20% should be a maximum really. At 25% I'd still just be average. Average is better than fat but who wants to be average? I'm working too damn hard just to be average! No, I've changed it so now my new goal is 20% body fat which is interesting because in order to reach that wilst maintaining 96lbs lbm, I'd need to lose a further 22 lbs - in 11 weeks - when I've never lost more than 1lb a week!

Well if the theory is correct then by aiming for 2lbs a week I may actually manage 1 which would just about get me to my original goal. I figure I can endure a lot more for just 11 weeks. After that I can relax a bit and take things slowly again. Ideally I'd like to lose a bunch of fat and then switch to a mucle building cycle to get a few more lbs of muscle to help my metabolism and then try to lose some more fat after that but the problem is that I want my first goal - NOW, this summer.

There are no more summers! For ten years I have said "NEXT summer I will look good in a bikini". No no no no no! No more summers!!! I have to do it this summer! I'm gettting all emotional now which is probably a good thing but I'll shut up and start on chapter 2 :)

Denial = Bingeing, for me anyway!

A week or so ago I decided that I was going to just ban certain things from my diet because I couldn't be trusted to eat them in moderation. This list included chocolate, sweets, takeaways and so on.

Nice idea, didn't work :-)

I was doing okay for a few days then I got a bit of a chocolate craving and there in the fridge was an open, half-eaten easter egg. I had a nibble and then that chocolate feeling just took over and I devoured almost the whole thing. In fact the only thing that stopped me eating it all was that it wasn't my egg! My other half was not pleased lol!

So that idea didn't work so I guess I'll have to go back to allowing myself treats in moderation. As summer is approaching so is my deadline and I feel like it's slipping away and it's really making me desperate so I've started reading my fat loss book again and this time I'm really going to go for it and try to apply all the principles without compromise.

Lets see how that one goes!

New Gym, New Resolutions, and New Disappointments...

It's been all change this Easter weekend! A few weeks ago I started getting really good progress by doing cardio & weight training 5 times a week and by really sticking to my diet and then it all kind of went a bit pear shaped and I started sabotaging badly.

This weekend I had 4 days off work, and I ate a ton of chocolate and just over-indulged all over the place! Don't you ever get times like that? Where you kind of rebell against yourself and stuff yourself silly with whatever you can fit in your mouth? I figured I wouldn't beat myself up about it but I had to do something different if I was going to make a change.

The deadline for my fat loss goal is in July, just 3 months away. Seems like a long time but I set it last July and I'm nowhere near it so I feel like it's slipping away fast! I realised that there are certain foods that are real weaknesses for me and I can't seem to eat them in sensible amounts. Once I start, I just can't stop. Familiar for many people I'm sure. These foods include chocolate, sweets, savoury snacks, takeaways, ice cream, alcohol etc.
Until now I've always believed that you shouldn't ban foods because that instantly causes a sense of deprivation which will make you rebell. But it's just not working for me. I have something like this quite often and it takes me well over my calorie limit each time. So I made the decision that I would ban everything on that list - just until I reach my goal. Now what I figure is that if I can go that long (heck, if I can go just a week!) that I'll see the results I want and I just wont want to go back to eating them but we'll see what happens.

Also last week the company I worked for moved offices and as a result I changed gyms. I joined up today and had a quick nose around. It's great! This is a true bodybuilders gym unlike the hotel guest gym I was in before. It's full of people with real muscles lol! Its very inspiring and somebody helped me straight away to get started. I just can't wait to get back in there tomorrow. I actually WANT to get up at 5.30 so I can get a session in before work!

And now for the disappointment... Back in January I started running (on the treadmill) and after a few weeks I make quite good progress so I signed up for Race for Life which is a 5k race. A couple of weeks ago I was thrilled when I managed to run my first 5k, again on the treadmill. So I figured it was about time I got out of my comfort zone again and start running for real outdoors. Oh my, what a shock that was! I was right back where I started, barely able to run for two minutes before my legs (calves and shins) started screaming in agony. I went through all this on the treadmill so I know it goes away with time but damn, I don't want to have to go through all that pain again! It makes me sad but such is life, these things are sent to test us I think.

It would be easy to say that its just too hard and to give up but then I'd feel lousy. I've been able to push through it before, I can do it again. I just think about how great it will feel to actually cross the finish line on Race day - and thats over 3 months away so I have time to train for it.

One Week Committment - Week 2 Check In

Two weeks ago I started a "one week" committment to really make a change to try and breakthrough a plateau that had lasted for months. My committment was:

1) To absolutely stick to my planned food, no cheating!
2) To increase my exercise to twice daily, one cardio, one weight training, 5 days a week

After my first week there was absolutely no change, though I hadn't been able to stick to it 100% as I missed a day's exercise due to a minor injury. Undeterred I reduced my calories a little and tried for another week. I still wasn't quite able to stick to it as I had a day off work this week and my gym is at work so no work = no gym. Sure I could have worked out at home but I didn't :-)

I'm sure my scales are lying to me (I changed them a few weeks ago and I don't trust them!) but this week they're telling me good lies. An astonishing three pounds lost this week! Now I don't believe for a second that I lost nothing the first week, and 3lbs magically melted off this week. I never lose more than 1lbs a week.

However, I just realised that its been that time of the month (well for me, that time of the 10 weeks) slap in the middle of this fortnight which could have caused the apparent standstill the first week due to bloating. I often show weight gain around this time but I had forgotten all about it.

Anyway, obviously I'm so delighted at the results that I'm sticking to my committment. My stats show a slight muscle loss despite breaking all weight training records in the gym so I'll kee an eye on that. It could just be fluctations or innaccuracies in the measurements but if it drops again I'll put the calories back up to what they were.

So, to anyone who's hit a plateau, take a close look at your behaviour. Could you be slacking a bit? Could you try a little harder for just one week (or two!)?

One Week Committment Check In

Earlier in the week I posted about breaking plateau's. I commited to try an experiment for one week:

1) I would stick to my diet 100% as I had been cheating a lot
2) I would exercise twice per day. One cardio and once weight training. (weekdays - gym at work)

Here's my results: Diet wise, the only cheating was 1 biscuit and 1 chocolate in the entire week. (I dont use cheat meals, as I figure they come naturally with my lifestyle) Exercise wise I was doing really well until Wednesday evening when I sustained a slight injury at karate and was out of action Thursday. However I picked things up yesterday and swam in the morning (foot still dodgy so I avoided the usual treadmill / crosstrainer), and did weight training at lunchtime. In all I did 4 x cardio, 4 x weight training and 1 x karate which is 2 hours, so thats quite a lot.

The result? No change AT ALL. No weight change, no measurement change. Nothing, zip, nada. I'm trying very hard not to be disappointed.

I think these things are sent to test us. There are several things that I could try. I'm going to start with the simplest to implement: Eat Less. Obviously I hang on to fat a lot so I must be a bit endomorphic so I'm dropping my deficit to 28%, which is a drop of about 100 calories a day. Ugh, that means I need to go adjust a bunch of recipes again. *sigh*.

Oh well never mind. It's not like I'm just going to give up because that wont get me nearer to my goal.

Overcoming a Fat Loss Plateau

I've been at a plateau with my weight loss since January. I had put on a few pounds over Christmas and manage to lose it again fairly quickly but then I got stuck again but I didn't really notice it until this weekend just gone because I kept making excuses for myself - my brothers birthday, night out with friends, being sick with a cold, etc etc.

Anyway, I looked back over my log and was shocked to see just how long I have been going up and down just one or two pounds and not really making any solid progress. In reality this plateau has not just been since Christmas - it goes back to November! I find it really hard to diet in the winter time.

Here is what I am doing: I'm making a commitment to myself to take the following steps for one week only and then I'll re-evaluate:

1) I will stick to my diet 100%. So far I've been cheating and I know it
2) I'll do my cardio every weekday morning
3) I'll swap 3 weight training sessions at home (which I often skip) for 5 at lunchtimes

That's two more weight training sessions than I'd usually do but it also has the added advantage that I'm far less likely to skip it because I don't like being stuck in the office all day so I look forward to going to the gym at lunch. As for the diet, I've been cheating so much! I wrote a diary of my cheating for a few days and I was going over by as much as 200-300 calories on some days on all those little things that you don't count!

Lastly, and this may seem a bit odd, but I've decided that reaching my bodyfat goal is the single most important goal in my life right now. I've written out a statement in big letters saying exactly what my goal is, the date for its achievement, and exactly what I'm commited to do in order to achieve it. I printed it out, laminated it and stuck it on my fridge! Furthermore I'm going to read it out loud every day lol!

Fundamentals of Fat Loss

I have previously talked about what our bodies are made of, and made the distinction between body fat and lean body mass, and in my last entry I talked about metabolism and how that affects our ability to lose fat.

So, armed with this information it should be possible to put together a list of fundamental principles for the safe, effective loss of body fat.

1) There Must be a Calorie Deficit

The human body lives of fuel which is measured in calories. As mentioned in my entry about metabolism, one pound of fat equates to around 3500 calories. Therefore if you wanted to lose 1lb of fat a week, you would want to drop your weekly calories by around 3500. It's not quite that simple, but nothing else will matter if you don't grasp this concept first.

Your body burns a certain number of calories through the course of a day and this is affected by many things - age, weight (kind of), your activity level etc. You feed your body via the food and drink you consume. Generally speaking, you'll want to match up the calories that your body needs with the the calories that you consume. In order to lose body fat you need to create a 'deficit' which means that you give your body less calories than it needs thus forcing it to metabolise parts of itself (sounds nasty huh!) - hopefully just the fat and not the lean body mass, in order to survive.

We all know what happens when you give your body more than it needs - it stores the excess calories as body fat.

For most people, when they decide they want to lose some fat they take one of three approaches:

1) Just eat a lot less
2) Cut out all the 'crap' from their diet
3) Ignore the diet, and exercise lots instead

Any of these three approaches has the potential to work but all have their pitfals. To really lose fat effectively, we need to be a little scientific about it.

The main trouble with the approaches above is that they all rely on guesswork. If I eat less than I was before, or eat less of the high calorie stuff then I should lose fat. Or, if I do loads of exercise I should burn off enough calories to lose fat. The theory is sound, and it may work for some people if they just happen to guess correctly. But how do you know how many calories less you are eating than before? How do you know how many your body needs? Thus, how do you know what deficit you are creating? I'll go into these things in more detail in another entry. For now, just realise that this guesswork approach is risky at best.

2) Metabolism Must be Kept High

As I explained in my last entry, any calorie deficit maintained for too long will eventually invoke the body's starvation response which will drop the metabolism and thus negate the calorie deficit that you have created. You absolutely MUST keep that metabolism up to avoid this from happening. There are lots of techniques, here is a summary of them:

1) Keep the calorie deficit relatively small, no more than 25%
2) Eat little and often through the day
3) Don't skip meals
4) Do daily exercise, preferably not last thing at night

Lets go over these in a little more detail...

If the calorie deficit is too large, the metabolism will drop very quickly and dramatically. You'll also feel like crap because you're just not eating enough to function properly. By keeping the deficit small, like 20-25% of your daily calorie needs you are far more likely to be able to offset any small drop in metabolism via exercise. Plus, by basing it on a percentage rather than a fixed amount, it can work for anyone regardless of their needs.

In addition to changes in your 'base metablism', it also dips and rises throughout the day in response to the food you eat and the exercise you do. If you skip meals such as breakfast or lunch and go for hours without food, it will drop. By spreading your food out into 4-5 small meals a day you will stop this from happening. There are other advantages to this approach too. The body needs fuel on a regular basis (hence the dip in metabolism when there is no food), so by eating regularly, you will find that you are not hungry as much and you'll experience a lot less hunger pangs and cravings which can be diet destroyers.

Exercise can instantly boost your metabolism, and of course it burns off calories. Some exercise, particularly strength training, can also have an 'afterburn' effect which means that the metabolism stays elevated for some hours after the exercise is performed. So if you do this kind of exercise some hours before you to go bed, you'll be burning more calories than normal as you go about your normal daily routine. Of course some times this can't be avoided. I do karate twice a week and the class is held late in the evening. By the time I get back I just have time for a quick shower and then its time for bed so I dont benefit from the afterburn here. However, this is just a bonus.

3) Your Must Retain Your LBM

LBM = Lean Body Mass, in case you forgot! Your base metabolism is based mainly on your LBM. In another entry I'll show the formula for working this out. Its crucial that you hang onto your LBM and only lose fat. The easiest way to do this is to ensure that you incorporate strength training into your routine. This tells your body that you need your muscles for the work they are doing and encourages your body to look elsewhere (such as your fat deposits) for its energy.

Also, by training hard you may even be able to gain a little muscle and actually increase your base metabolic rate. However, don't rely on this because in general, for muscles to grow they need a calorie surplus and we're putting ourselves into a calorie deficit. Its possible to lose lots of fat and gain a *small* amount of muscle at he same time, but dont expect to lose loads of fat and gain loads of muscle - it just can't happen.

That's the basics of fat loss and we can summarise all of that into three things:

1) Diet
2) Cardio
3) Strength Training

All About Metabolism

Do you know anyone who seems to be able to eat as much crap as they like and yet is stick thin? Perhaps you know somebody else who only has to look at half a grape and instantly puts on half a stone! The reason for this descrepancy is that these two people have different metabolic rates.

Put simply, your metabolic rate is the rate at which your body burns calories. The higher the rate, the more calories you will burn. Obviously then, higher is better. Some people are naturally blessed with high metabolisms, others cursed with a low one. Some medical conditions such as an under-active thyroid can lower metabolism. However, you are not stuck with what you've got as there are many factors that influence it.

The first and foremost of these is your muscle. Muscle needs energy, fat does not. The more muscle you carry on your body, the more energy (in the form of food and drink) your body needs to sustain it. Your fat on the other hand can survive all by itself!

So, think for a moment what would happen if you were to go on some crash diet in which you lost a large amount of body weight in a short space of time. Take the example of your friend who lost 1 stone in 2 weeks on the Atkins diet that I mentioned in the last entry. We already know that most of that stone is lean body mass because unless he had a very large amount of fat to lose, probably no more than about 4 lbs of it was fat loss. So if that was the case, your friend has lost 10lbs of lean body mass, which in turn means that his metabolic rate has just dropped dramatically.

In real terms, on average, every pound of muscle requires around 50 calories a day to sustain itself. So if you lost 10lbs of muscle, your body would need 500 calories less per day than it did before! This is disastrous! So let's say that your friend is at first happy with his weight loss so he goes back to his eating habits before the diet but now his body doesn't need as many calories and 500 a day extra are being consumed!

1 pound of fat equates to 3500 calories. Eat 3500 calories too many and you gain a pound of fat. Eat 3500 calories less than your body needs (slowly!) and you lose a pound of fat. It's never that precise but you get the idea. So your Atkins buddy goes back to his old ways, and because he's now eating 500 calories a day more than his body needs, the weight starts creeping back on at a rate of around 1 pound a week (Oh, and this will be fat he's putting on, not lean body mass - that takes effort!). What does he do? Goes back to Atkins of course! He goes on another crash diet, loses another stone and reduces his metabolism further. You get the picture... This is called yo-yo dieting and it's a Bad Thing.

To keep the fat off on a permanent basis then, it becomes apparent that you must keep up your metabolism. A large part of your metabolism is based upon your lean body mass so you want to preserve what you have at all costs.

But there's more to say about metabolism. Your metabolism has a base rate that it works at all the time but it can also rise and dip over a period of weeks, days and even over the course of the day.

What makes metabolism drop?

A great way to make your metabolism drop is to reduce the number of calories you consume! The further your drop them, the more your metabolism will drop! How can tha be? How is anyone supposed to diet if reducing their calories just reduces their metabolism as well? This is probably the biggest problem with a 'diet-only' approach. First I'll explain why it happens.

Have you ever heard stories of people who have managed to survive for weeks without food? Humans have a strong survival instict thats built right in to them. The body can detect when it is being deprived of food. Thus, it tries to conserve precious energy by lowering the metabolism so that it doesn't need as much food. This is called the starvation response. There is usually a delay beween the calories dropping and the metabolism dropping. The higher the drop the shorter delay but this is the reason why even a modest diet can seem to plateau after a few weeks.

Another way to make the metabolism drop is to go without food for long periods of time. I don't mean weeks or days, I mean hours. Lets say you eat dinner at 7pm and you're the kind of person who tends to skip breakfast. You'll probably be hungry before lunch so you grab something at 11am the next day. Your body has gone 16 hours without food and that will trigger the starvation response. While your body is sleeping the metabolism will naturally drop anyway but after you wake up in the morning it will need some food to kick start it into action again. This is the reason why you are often less hungry in the morning if you skip breakfast!

So it seems as though all the things that are involved on a diet will actually cause the metabolism to drop which work against what the diet is trying to do! Exactly! This is why you'll often hear 'diets don't work'.

It's not all bad news. There are several ways to raise your metabolism.

First and foremost, any form of exercise will give your metabolism a big boost whilst the exercise is being performed. So, if you reduce your calories slightly, and exercise daily you should be able to offset the metabolism drop caused by the diet by the increase caused by the exercise.

Secondly, eating will raise your metabolism. Thats why its much better to spread your meals out throughout the day and eat 'little and often' than just eat 2 or 3 big meals.

What Are Our Bodies Made Of?

The first mistake that people ususally make when starting some new diet or exercise plan is confusing weight and fat. Most people say they want to lose weight when in fact what they really want is to lose fat.

Its your excess body fat that makes you physically look fat and flabby. Its your excess internal fat around your organs that make you more susceptible to heart disease and all manner of other ailments.

However, our bodies are not just fat! They are made up of bones, muscle, skin, water (lots of water) and many other things. For simplicity, we usually separate out all of these things into two categories:

1) Body Fat
2) Lean Body Mass

The Lean Body Mass is basically everything that is not fat. This is the good stuff. You need strong bones and muscle to enable you to move around and function normally. As we get older, past around the age of 30 or so our bodies naturally start to lose muscle and our bone density reduces. The lack of muscle tissue makes us weaker, and lets not forget that the heart is a muscle so that is affected too! The lowering bone density can make us more susceptible to breaks and diseases such as osteoperosis.

Getting old sucks! The good news is that it is possible to reduce the effects of this muscle loss and lowering of bone density by regular strength training, but let's leave that for another post.

So we know that our bodies are made up of both body fat and lean body mass so what does it mean to lose weight? When a friend comes up to you and says "Wow, I lost a stone in 2 weeks on the Atkins diet!", what does that mean? Well, it probably means something quite different from another friend who says "It's taken me four months to shift this stone!".

It is actually rather easy to lose 'weight' quickly. Firstly, our bodies are primarily made up of water so dehydration will lead to weight loss which can be quite dramatic. For example, have you seen adverts for services that wrap you in cling film and make claims about how much weight you can lose in the process? Sure, you'll lose a few pounds doing that because you've just sweated out a few pints of water! But what they don't tell you is that when you get home and have a couple of glasses of water that weight is right back where it started! Those kinds of treatments may be wonderful for the skin but they will not do anything to help you permanently lose fat.

Going back to your two friends that both lost a stone in different ways... fat cells are stubbon creatures and it takes your body considerable time and effort to 'burn' the fat that is contained within them. If your body is put into a position where it needs energy quickly, it may not have time to get to the fat cells so it will simply metabolise something it can access quickly, such as a chunk of your right bicep! Ok, that is perhaps a silly metaphor but the point is that body fat must be lost slowly. I'm sure you've all heard the guidelines of no more than 1-2 pounds a week unless you have a lot (like 4+ stone) to lose. The reason for this guideline is that your body simply cannot burn huge amounts of fat quickly and if you try to force it to do so, you'll eat into your lean body mass instead.

Why is this such a bad thing? As I mentioned earlier, the heart is a muscle and if you lose muscle you could be losing part of your heart tissue and the smaller your heart is, the weaker is it. That may sound far fetched but it is not. There was once a singer called Karen Carpenter who suffered from Anorexia for many years. She died aged 32 from a heart attack. Her overall bodyweight had reduced so low that her heart had weakened to the point where it could no longer function.

Of course, that's an extreme case but there is a another reason why lean body mass, in particular muscle, should be very important to somebody interested in losing fat: the amount of lean body mass that your body carries is a primary factor in determining how many calories your body needs on a daily basis.