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Maximize Your Nutrition Success
by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS
Neuro Metabolic Fat Loss & Fitness Expert
Nutritional success for weight loss comes down to 3 main factors:
- Calories In, Calories Out, While Preserving Muscle
- Meal Timing
- Hormonal Manipulation For Fat Loss
Once you learn how to maximize the effect of each one of these three categories, you are sure to start losing that ‘scale weight’ you’ve been working on. A lot of people ask me how they can get the scale to budge, even though they may be exercising correctly and losing bodyfat every day.
Scale weight is much more closely correlated with nutritional habits than it is exercise habits, especially when you don’t have more than 30-40 pounds to lose. Often times, we can replace fat with muscle, albeit at a very fast rate, without ever losing a pound. This is because muscle weighs more than fat, and we haven’t done anything to affect our overall calories consumed, or the way they are processed.
Let’s go a little bit deeper into the benefits of keeping all 3 principles in mind:
Calories In, Calories Out, While Preserving Muscle:
2 + 2 = 4, right?
Well, 3,500 calories = 1 pound. If we burn, let’s say, 1200 calories per day as our Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), then we are going to be able to consume up to 4,700 calories per day if we wanted to gain a pound every single day and we didn’t exercise. If we added 600 calories of exercise to the picture, we’d gain a pound per day by eating 5,300 calories. Makes sense, right?
Now, let’s take a look at how this looks over the course of a week. Let’s say we more realistically consume 1,600 calories per day, we burn the same 1,200 from our BMR, and we exercise for a total of 300 calories per day. Essentially, we have a surplus of 100 calories per day, or 700 calories per week.
These 700 calories per week, provided that we don’t change anything, will equate to gaining one pound every 5 weeks, or about 10 pounds per year. If we gain muscle in the process, every pound of muscle eats about 50 calories per day, so that number might be 5 pounds instead of 10. Sounds about right, eh?
This is why keeping your caloric deficit in mind matters so much when you are trying to lose weight. Any slight addition of 100-200 calories per day above normal, which can easily happen when you’re participating in a new exercise program or diet strategy, can clearly affect our outcomes.
I’m not a big proponent of counting calories on a daily basis. In fact, I find that to be unproductive and unnecessary; but I’d certainly suggest that you do so for a week or two, or at least until you have a better idea how much you’re consuming.
Please note that I mention that you need to ‘preserve muscle,’ while counting calories. Most diets fail to acknowledge this, and you end up losing muscle. Similarly to what’s stated above, every pound of muscle lost is equivalent to your body burning 50 calories less per day through your BMR, or gaining 1 pound every 10 weeks.
Meal Timing:
Just as important as the Caloric Deficit with Muscle Preservation principle, we need to consider meal timing. It’s been well-supported that we can lower cholesterol and improve weight loss simply by spreading the same number of calories over 6 meals instead of three. Plus, from a calorie-restricted standpoint, this is psychologically much easier on us; eating often gives us the feeling of being full, so we don’t tend to succumb to as many cravings.
Balancing macro and micro nutrients within a given meal is important for keeping your energy level high throughout the day. However, your body doesn’t operate on ‘one meal at a time.’ Rather, your body looks at your total nutritional intake for the day before deciding how to react, completely. If you happen to miss some protein with breakfast, make sure you get it with lunch, etc.
The easiest way to determine how often to eat is by taking your total number of waking hours per day and then dividing by 6. That’s how often you should have a meal. Personally, I recommend 3 main meals, and 3 mini-meals. Mini meals look just like your main meals, except they are about half the calories.
Please note: I am NOT suggesting snacking. Mini-meals are often leftovers, or meals prepared specifically for ‘snack-time.’ This is a much healthier approach to weight loss and healthy living.
Hormonal Manipulation For Fat Loss:
Interestingly, how you eat will affect the hormonal releases in your body. In fact, most stress-related cortisol issues, as well as many other disease states in the body, can be overcome through proper nutritional planning. When it comes to fat loss, however, the effect can be visible and dramatic, just by knowing when to strategically choose types of nutrients.
For example, and this is something that Joel Marion talks about in his program Cheat Your Way Thin, low carb days tend to lead to a reduction in the amount of insulin produced in the body. Initially, this might be a good thing, but over a few days our bodies stop producing the right amount of insulin, and any sugar that we consume ends up being deposited as fat.
Ultimately, we hurting our body’s ability to burn through sugars and lose fat by altering the amount of insulin production. Our bodies begin to store fat from every nutrient, as this is a survival strategy during times of famine. Fascinating!
Conversely, your body can learn to up-regulate the amount of insulin production, temporarily, along with other hormones that get released simultaneously, and this can tell our bodies that we are in time of feast; feast timing results in our bodies consuming as many calories as possible that we intake, creating a larger caloric expenditure for the day.
One thing to be careful of, however, is how long to keep your insulin levels, as well as leptin levels, high before you start gaining weight. This is where the concept of ‘cheating’ came into play, and we started seeing bodybuilders and fat loss nutritionist recommending that you allow different ‘cheat meals’ into your nutritional programming.
Let’s go one step further – what if I told you that you absolutely had to have entire ‘Cheat Days’ in your program in order to lose weight more easily and moderately?
It’s true.
Have you ever experienced the opposite effect from eating too much before?
I sure have… I remember gaining 15 pounds in 3 days during the holidays once upon a time… now, a similar behavior might have me lose 3-5. I’d like to share with you how I do this, but first, please share your stories, comments, and questions below.
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