For lack of a better word to adequately describe the action, I’ve been on my diet for 46 days and have lost a total of 16.5 pounds and 3% body fat. I don’t like to use the term “diet” anymore because I think most people understand diets make people fat instead of thin.

Diets are by nature, a temporary change in behavior; if they were anything more, so many people wouldn’t name weight loss as the top New Years resolution. The fact we as a nation keep finding our collective waistbands expanding instead of shrinking should validate dieting makes a person fat.

Stop and think about every diet you’ve ever been on as well as the ones you’ve created. You cut your calories so low, you make parakeets look in their cage mirrors and ask, “Does my butt look big in these feathers?” You experience palpitations and nausea as you pop the latest and greatest “NEW!” diet pill that will give you the resistance and discipline of a Tibetan monk, but all you can think about is that dirty four letter word: F-O-O-D. You crave cake, ice cream, burgers, French fries, and everything else under the sun – and your pet begins to look tasty. Lastly, your mood swings could get you a guest shot in any horror flick as your spouse screams, “Who are you and what have you done with my mate?!”

If you really, truly, HONESTLY want to change your body image, you need to admit to yourself, “I am fat. I did this by myself, and only I can get myself healthy.” I will admit to walking around with a mental image of a skinny woman with perfect abdominal muscles and a drum tight booty. Sometimes, it’s much easier to pretend than it does to actually come to terms with the reality because when you do, you are faced with taking action.

Next thing you need to do is to put aside your concepts about weight – unlearn what you’ve been taught and start fresh. Weight is an overall measurement of the body; it contains bones, skin, organs, fluids (blood, water), waste products, muscles, and fat.

The more I watch TV these days, the angrier I become with the diet pill industry. Almost every single advertisement created makes the same claims: “lose weight now the fast and easy way!” My brow furrows in frustration as I see through the obvious flaw that’s so simple, I often why I never asked the question myself: “What KIND of weight will I lose?” If the American public demanded to know the answer, they would be surprised to learn the obvious answer: muscle tissue and fluids, and very little fat.

Unmasking the diet industry is the big challenge because people are still emotionally attached to the idea of a quick fix pill, but you’ve heard it said a million times before there are no magic bullets to solve an obesity issue. It’s time you admitted this to yourself!

Ok, many will stop and ask, “What’s the difference if I lose mostly fat, or mostly muscle and water weight? Ten pounds off is still ten pounds lighter!” Yes…and no – what registers on the scale isn’t necessarily a good thing.

• A pound of water lost will register on the scale, but will it help you to fit into your clothes? Maybe for that day, but not much past that point as fluid retention is a sign of a different problem. Plus it always returns.

• When you diet, you lose necessary fluids that help your body to perform cellular level tasks, which result in waste product production. If you dehydrate, you may hinder the vital processes as well as store wastes.

• Diet plans often set up a strict low caloric eating plan, and in some cases, go below the critical energy production required to survive; your body needs energy to pump blood, to expand and contract your lungs, and to move. You go below these requirements and you will find not only your thinking slows down and daily tasks become muddled, but also you will encounter the starvation shakes and heart palpitations.

• Low caloric diets cannibalize muscle tissue to meet protein needs. This means you’re losing lean muscle tissue and endangering other muscles – like your heart. NO muscle tissue is immune when your body’s hungry!

• Low amounts of lean muscle means you will have an even greater challenge in losing those extra pounds. Muscle tissue his a higher energy demand to “feed” it, versus fat tissue. If you want to slim down, don’t trade away your best weapon!

• Lose fat tissue and you’ll fit into your clothes much better and for a longer period of time. Most people understand one pound of weight is equal to 3,600 ingested calories. Fat cells never go away, but they can shrink. Water weight that’s lost returns as soon as you consume the slightest amount of sodium! It’s a lot easier to lose water weight, but water weight returns exceptionally fast and will disappoint you if you worship at the altar of the “almighty scale”.
• You can be skinny on the scale and still carry a large percentage of body fat; it simply means you’re weak as a cat (because you have no muscle strength) and carrying a layer of fat. These are the people who can eat a pizza by themselves and then the largest ice cream sundae they can find and “never seem to gain an ounce”. Truth is they’re probably fatter than you are (percentage-wise), but notice their bodies – there’s no definition, no muscle tone, and rather plain. If you’re eating fat, you’re going to store it somewhere, and most likely at the expense of lean muscle tissue.

• Carrying excess fat is a health risk for everyone – including “fat ‘skinny’ people”. Fat loves to settle around your liver, which is dangerous and further slows down your metabolism. Ever hear of an enlarged heart? What about heart bypass surgery? “Skinny” people carrying a high percentage of fat are just as vulnerable to chronic conditions as visually obese people are!

So you see, you can lose muscle and water weight and still not have the dream body you’re dreaming about with diet pills and fad diet trends. You will weigh less, but what will your body look like? How about a shar pei puppy – otherwise known as the dog covered in thick wrinkles of saggy skin. It’s cute on a dog, but hell in a bathing suit! Instead of fat rolls, you have empty saggy rolls.

When you lose “weight”, you have a new physical problem: the lose skin that flops around and sags. How many times do you hear this question asked of diet and fitness gurus? “I lost all this weight…how do I tighten up my skin?” Well, there are two ways of doing that: gain the fat back, or develop muscle tissue to fill it back in. You should understand at this point lean muscle tissue is your friend:

• It burns more body fat as an energy source
• It speeds up your metabolism
• It fills out the empty spaces and gives you shape and definition

Some people are still going to be thinking about the easy way around the problem of how to develop lean muscle tissue. You see the advertisements again from the diet pill industry, and they guarantee if you take this “scientifically engineered” formulation, it will increase your body’s ability to enter into a thermogenic state (which is just a fancy word for turning your body’s thermostat up so it liquefies the fat so you can excrete it). Yes, the pills do work – but only a tiny bit! They will not increase your temperature enough to “burn” anything, except your wallet and your willpower when you don’t see results. The diet industry’s not there to assist you in getting skinny – they’re there to keep you fat and buying their products!

At this point, you should see there’s a big difference between weight and fat. You can afford to carry extra water and lean muscle, but not fat! No one ever died from being fit and well hydrated. So how do you lose the fat, keep the muscle, and manage to look like one of those diet commercials? Cardio and strength training exercises, in addition to proper diet – there’s no way around it that will give you lasting results. Focus on the cardio as your main point if you want to lose fat, but don’t neglect building muscle to have something to give you definition. You might have six pack abs, but until you lose the fat layer on top of it, you won’t ever see them.

Also give up on the fantasy you can “spot reduce” in problem areas – you can’t. Calories will be expended and fat will burn where it wants to. All you can do is continue using cardio workouts to burn the fat. If you continue working the muscles in your problem areas in addition to the cardio, your efforts will pay off.

I’ve got an assorted collection of exercise videos; some I like, most annoy me. Almost three years ago, I purchased the “Slim in 6” and the “Winsor Pilates” DVD series, and although I’ve started using the Slim in 6 program, I have recently gone back and looked at their diet plans. For some reason, I didn’t like the Winsor Pilates diet, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. Recently I saw the advertisement for “Slim in 6” and noticed the claim of being able to lose ten pounds in a week.

At this point I had been doing the Slim program for a few weeks – I was working out on the second of three workout schedules and thought, “How come I’m not losing weight at ten pounds like the ads claim?” So I went digging around in my large diet and fitness box and pulled out the diet plan to figure out what I was doing wrong. It turns out you must go on a liquid diet for a few days, then solid food, and during this time you work out twice a day. You’ll never see that mentioned in the ad or else people would say, “NO SOLID FOOD FOR HOW MANY DAYS?! Heck with that!”

Your body needs solid food – it burns more calories by having to work to break it down for digestion, whereas a liquid diet has nothing to break down. This means your body is not burning calories doing what it does best, and why not take advantage of every place you can burn a calorie or two?

I’m currently using a bit of a “home made diet”, but I’m using foundational basics from an e-book called “Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle” by Tom Venuto. I don’t agree with everything he says or the contents of his recipes, but he’s right on with a lot of no-nonsense material every person should know. This isn’t your average diet book – I sniffed around it and read some reviews online before I said to myself, “Ok, let’s give this diet book a chance.” If you’re looking for a “how-to” with pictures and other fodder to fill space, this isn’t it – this is a long, hard read that can tie your optic nerve into knots, but I’m generally sold he’s got the answers no one likes to hear. You might want to visit his site and give it the sniff test for yourself, but I’ll keep you updated as to my own personal progress.

When I began to apply information from his book, I was stuck in the fastest plateau I’d ever run into. I was shifting between ten and twelve pounds lost, and now I’m almost twenty pounds down. The one thing you won’t do on this diet is eat like a bird – for women, you eat five times a day, and men eat six times a day! I admit I’m sick and tired of eating that much food, but you’d be amazed at how fast your metabolism starts to kick in. I eat every three hours, but I feel like I’m starving around two hours; I don’t eat small birdseed sized portions, I’m eating a couple of cups of veggies and chicken breasts or salmon filets. Hunger is a sign your body is starting to work efficiently, and best of all I have no cravings on this approach.

If you start experiencing cravings, it’s because your blood sugar’s too low and your body’s survival mechanism is kicking in and trying to “force” you to eat. Of course when we feel sluggish, we automatically grab for the sweet treat for the fastest sugar spike to return our energy back to normal. You can beat it first thing in the morning with a cup of oatmeal and a liberal dose of your best weapon: cinnamon. Turns out this wonderful and under-utilized spice has the ability to regulate blood sugar levels, which means your sugar won’t drop and you won’t crave. I use it a few times a day in assorted foods and all you need is ¼ teaspoon of it to work, so use it early and often and you’ll be able to drive past Krispy Kremes without biting the steering wheel.

If you don’t like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the socyberty.com site.

quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here

socyberty.com articles can be located here

relijournal.com articles are here

picable.com photographic images are here