When I worked at GNC during my undergrad, I had many my conversations with many different customers. The biggest request I received was for the strongest fat burner we carried (We will discuss these so called "fat burners" later). While each customer was different, they shared a common complaint. Paraphrasing all the variants, they'd tried every diet out there and nothing worked. While I know they'd all tried many different diets, they clearly hadn't tried the right one. Before we get into what the right diet is, lets look at why all the ones they'd tried had failed.
Many of their attempted diets were crazy, placing huge restrictions on calories, macro nutrients, and expecting the person to adopt these restrictions over night. While it is true that you have to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight, requiring too much of a drop too fast is unsustainable, and here is why. If you were to take 10 people and assign them all a diet plan that placed extreme restrictions on their food and calorie intakes, only 1 out of these 10 could sustain this change. Now there were a few of these diets that had merit, providing excellent recommendations and guidelines, and resulted in weight loss for the individuals. However, once they stopped the diet the weight they lost came right back. Why would this happen? They'd followed the protocols to the letter, and even lost weight. So why did it come back? Well, both of these problems have the same cause, and also the same solution.
Diets fail and lost weight comes back for the same reason, poor dietary habits. If your nutritional habits didn't keep you lean and muscular before, they surely aren't going to after you diet. Also, if you aren't used to practicing good nutrition, the extreme changes required by some of these diets are too much to handle. So there you have it, a simple cause of what would seem like a complex problem. Ready for the solution? Of course you are ;)
Now before you get too excited, the answer is not a diet the you can follow. If you want a plan like that, sorry but you gotta pay. My monthly coaching is not expensive, but is very comprehensive, as well as founded in science and results proven (www.precisionnutrition.com, website of Dr. John Berardi, will give you insight into these results). If you have questions or are interested shoot me an email, now back to the solution I promised.
Start by looking at you complete current diet; what you eat and when you eat. Do this over three days and write it down. Once you have this information, I want you to look for the following habits:
1- are you eating every 2-4 hours?
2- are you eating at least 2 servings of veggies at each meal?
3- are you eating lean protein and healthy fat at each meal?
4- are the carbs your consuming only during and after your workout?
By asking yourself these four simple questions, you will get a good idea of where you diet is lacking. Now before you get totally confused by the higher amounts of protein and fat here, if you ready my post on nutrition, you'll understand. By taking these habits and gradually implementing them into your diet, you will be much more successful at weight loss, and ultimately will be healthier as well. Once you have a solid nutritional base under your feet, then, and only under the supervision of a qualified trainer/coach, should you even attempt a more advanced "diet". However, I only recommend doing so if you are looking to get on stage or something of a similar nature.
As before, questions and comments are welcome ;)
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