Dec

Eat Stop Eat, Fasting to Lose Weight, How to lose fat

Alright,
Even though the things I teach professionally are exercise and training related, probably the thing I get asked about the most is nutrition. I don’t normally like to talk about nutrition because I’m neither a nutritionist nor a dietician but I have put a lot of studying into the different diet methods out there not to teach but mainly to stay lean and ripped.

the fruits of my labor

When it comes to dieting, the best diet in the world won’t work if you can’t stick to it. Also something that can happen is if you gain the fat back, for various physiological reasons it becomes more difficult to lose the second time. The death of many diets come in the form of “regular everyday life” like having friends that want to go out and eat and that sort of thing.

When I was going through my 12 week transformation I had a very strict diet. Food was weighed in a very specific proportion and eaten according to a preset schedule. Yeah I got ripped but as soon as the after pictures were taken I headed off to a burger joint and stuffed around 2000 calories down my gullet. It worked, but it was not sustainable. Nobody wants to weigh food all the time.

I was having a conversation with someone in my bootcamp class that had done the Paleo diet but found it difficult to stick to. He asked around on a popular forum about it and the response people gave him was to have a ziplock bag full of flax seeds to chew on.

Really?

That’s not a sustainable lifestyle…at least not for regular people. If you are surrounded by fitness junkies, yeah it’ll work. If you are a regular person that just wants to be lean and ripped and also wants to live a regular life then you need a nutrition style that minimizes how much it interrupts your lifestyle.

This is where Eat Stop Eat shines. This is the easiest nutrition program to stick to period. You want to eat the food that isn’t all that great for you? Yeah that’s fine. Just tweak it with a fast to either balance it out (to maintain) or to put you in a caloric deficit to lose body fat.

Oh sure someone that’s over weight is likely to tell you that your metabolism will crash and you’ll starve to death if you fast to lose weight but my metabolic rate runs hot despite me fasting. It made me ripped, not starved. Besides in Brad Pilon’s ebook he talks about several different scientific studies that say that it is actually healthy to fast.

Having to constantly digest food can be stressful to your stomach. Doing a fast gives it a bit of a rest.

When you fast you improve your insulin sensitivity, something that helps prevent diabetes, fat gain and that sort of thing.

When you fast your body switches from burning up stored sugar to burning up stored fat for energy.

When you fast it puts you in a quick caloric deficit which is critical for fat loss. Think about it. For as many methods of training that claim to burn 1000 calories, the quickest way to get rid of 1000 calories is to not eat them in the first place.

Training while fasted stimulates more growth hormone. This is a good thing.

I know it sounds a bit like common sense to quit eating for a short period of time but you’d be amazed at how people are pre programmed to believe they have to eat breakfast and lunch. Just like with many things I found that doing the opposite of the norm gives me better results.

You might think that you’d have no strength when training in a fasted state but when I first started experimenting with this. I didn’t find that to be the case.

But anyways the basic premise of this diet is to eat the way you normally do, then to fast for 24 hours one or two days a week. Think about how easy that would be.

Honestly you really ought to just read the ebook since he can explain it better then I can (he has a 74 page ebook about the subject rather then a blog post). He even includes the scientific references at the end. That way you know he isn’t just making this stuff up. It’s actually based on scientific fact. It’s just a different source science compared to what you had heard before.

Will you starve to death? No. A fast is a willfully abstaining from foods that are bad for you. And you won’t have to fast nearly long enough to starve to death.

And as much science as there is about fasting there is also a lot of “in the trenches research”. Fasting has been around for centuries. It’s been part of several religions to do a fast.

And then after the fast, you resume your normal eating habits which will prevent your metabolism from crashing. In other words you can eat and lose weight. And that’s not even including eating healthy foods. You can eat normal people food as well.

So anyways I do recommend everybody to read Eat Stop Eat. It’s something I do along with the Warrior Diet (the other one I follow normally) and it allows me to maintain a lean physique and I actually feel pretty good while doing it.