Fit 261 Food to increase your metabolism and help your body lose fat
Alter your body’s lean muscle to fat ratio and keep your metabolism burning all day long! Topics include Starvation mode, muscle vs fat, the perfect meal combination, meal timing and more!
Eat to lose
The first thing we are going to discuss in this podcast is how to eat to lose weight. It’s true, you can actually eat more and lose weight if you are eating the right foods. Every time you eat your metabolism actually speeds up a little bit to help your body digest and that’s just one of the many reasons why eating several meals throughout the day helps the body lose weight. When You keep your body nourished correctly, your energy levels remain high and your metabolism will increase.
You may have heard about blood sugar levels being important to health and weight loss. I know past podcasts have touched on this subject. As your body starts to utilize your food and break it down, it gives you fuel in terms of blood sugar levels (that’s being simplistic) and the effects will diminish over time. Kinda like putting fuel in a car and using it…eventually the fuel gets low and the card starts to sputter and quit unless you refuel it. Your energy may go down if your blood sugar levels drop due to lack of refueling. For example, you might get tired, drowsy, lightheaded or dizzy and that’s why it’s important to nip that in the bud and to actually eat before you get to that point.
The best structure for meals is to eat every two to four hours and definitely don’t try not to go more than five or six hours without eating something. That’s how “feedings” get divided into five to seven small meals through the day. And when you think about that it sounds like a lot but it’s not. That’s your three meals and two snacks. See now it’s not so scary. It’s breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner and maybe another snack. When you are choosing the right foods you can have more of them. When you are choosing the wrong foods you are not going to feel as good and you can’t have as much.
Meal timing and the starvation mode
Keeping a schedule of eating every several hours throughout the day will also help your body let go of fat. It will let go more easily when you are eating throughout the day because your body will expect food frequently and it won’t go into the starvation mode. Starvation mode it what can really damage your metabolism and make it hard to lose weight. Its what happens during the diet cycle.When the body hits the starvation mode which is going without food for more than six hours and I am not talking about nighttime when you are sleeping because your body is not using as much energy then, when your body hit starvation mode it will hold on to fat for long-term energy and it will use protein stores for current energy needs. Now you may think that sounds okay but protein your muscle, muscle is your metabolism, the more muscle you have the higher your metabolism will be and that’s why most men usually have a higher metabolism than women, they carry more muscle.
But as women, if we increase our muscle to fat ratio then we will actually have that faster metabolism and be able to eat what we want and still look great. And I know that for fact because I struggled with this almost all my life and finally found the secret and you know what, it’s having more muscle. And once I switched that ratio now it’s a piece of cake, a little bit of a pun intended, to keep my weight where I wanted to be. I don’t even think about it anymore whereas it used to be a major obsession and that’s one of the reasons why I am doing this now to help everybody else see that you know what it’s doable, it really is. I am not any different than anybody else, I don’t have any special qualities or anything like that I just kind of keep plugging away and learn everything I needed to know that would work and not work. So I am trying to share that with you believe me it works. Now anyway, so let’s go back to the starvation mode.
The starvation mode goes back to caveman days when the body was programmed to hold on to fat for long-term energy storage and what that means is that in the caveman days they didn’t know if they were going to have food or not, it depended on what they found or killed that day. They couldn’t run over to McDonald’s and they couldn’t go to the grocery store. They weren’t sure if they were going to get food the next day, the next week or the next month, so the body automatically learned to hold on to fat as a long term energy source so it could survive at the same time it would deem the muscle as non-essential because that wasn’t going to keep them alive for a long period of time if they went without food. Again there is whole scientific process, but we’re not going to get into that. Suffice to say, the body got programmed this way and we are stuck with it today. So it’s very important that you understand that when you go too long without food your body is going to eat your muscle for energy and you don’t want that because the more muscle you have the higher your metabolism will be. higher metabolism means easier weight loss and easier permanent weight loss or easier maintenance, whichever way you want to put it.
Damage to your metabolism
So if the body slips into that starvation mode it is very damaging to the metabolism and it will make fat storage easier and it will make almost make your body gain fat more easily, not because of the fact that it wants to hold on to fat but also because of the fact that the metabolism is being reduced. You see this quite frequently when people go on a crash diet or they lose weight very quickly. So when these people drop weight quickly, they are losing muscle, it lowers their metabolism, they go back to their regular eating and they gain twice as much because now the metabolism is slower and the body wants to hold on to all the fat. So you see, it can be a vicious cycle and that’s why we always say don’t step on the scale, it’s about how your clothes fit and the inches that you are dropping. It’s really funny how many people will admit that, yes muscle weighs more than fat, but when they get on the scale and they don’t see the numbers are not dropping, but they are losing inches, they still say “I am not losing any weight, I am not losing any weight I am getting fatter” and in actuality, it’s no you are likely gaining muscle. However, don’t assume that just because you started working out and you are not losing weight it is because you are increasing muscle. It could be from extra food intake, especially if you are not monitoring what you eat.
Just to back up a second and return to the muscle weighs more than fat. I’ve heard this argument before-a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat. Sure….but… a pound of muscle takes up less space, less volume than a pound of fat. In other terms, muscle is more dense than fat. A pound of muscle will take up much less room in your body than a pound of fat. Would you rather be 130 pound of lean, tight muscle or 130 pounds of fat? Do you think they look the same? Of course, not!
Muscle really does weight more than fat!
So most of the time when refer to muscle weighing more than fat, we really mean that if you took the same amount, for example one cup of muscle would weigh more than one cup of fat. For some reason its an understanding we seem to have until someone gets nit picky about the verbiage. However, a little research uncovered that muscle does in fact weigh more! On average, the density of fat is 0.9g/ml. And the density of muscle is 1.1 g/ml. So, things being equal, 1 liter of muscle weights 1.06 kg or 2.3 lbs., while 1 liter of fat weights .9 kg, or 1.98 lbs. So, yes, muscle does weigh more than fat!
The most important about lean muscle tissue, not necessarily bulk, it increases your metabolism burns calories while you do nothing! So don’t be tied to the scale! Don’t use it as your gauge for progress, instead use your measurements! When you think about the fact that if you lose, say, two inches of your body that’s a lot, isn’t it? Well that may correspond to only one pound. So if you are focusing on the pounds you are not going to think that you are really accomplishing anything, but when you use measurements and see it corresponds to a couple of inches, that’s a lot.
Increase your lean muscle to decrease your bodyfat.
Now our goal is to change your metabolism by increasing your lean muscle and decreasing your body fat, ie-changing your,lean muscle to fat ratio. You may have heard about this recently, I’ve seen some trainers advertisements using that exact phrase and the funny thing is I’ve been saying this since the 1990s (yikes when some of these trainers weren’t born yet!). Obviously, I’m not the only one to have ever said this, but its interesting that it hasn’t really been mainstream until recently. That tells me that our society has not progressed very well in terms of understanding fitness, weight training, weight loss and metabolism. Too many still looking for the magic pill, special diet, or some exercise contraption.
Keep in mind that the goal is to alter your lean muscle to fat ratio. Doing that would give you the tone, tight body you want instead of jiggle arms and a shaky belly! In order to get more lean muscle tissue, you have to use the three components-exercise to stimulate muscle growth, nutrition to rebuild the muscle and burn fat, and mindset to keep you on track when things aren’t moving fast enough and you body isn’t totally made over yesterday! More about that when we cover the mindset makeover!
Meal Structure
To prime your body for altering your lean muscle to fat ratio, we need to begin with meal structure. You know you want to have several meals throughout the day, but what should they be? Each meal should contain a combination of foods. Diets that dictate- don’t have any carbohydrates or don’t have any this type of food or that type of food, are not going to work the best. Anytime you rule out the whole food group, there is something not quite balanced there. Your body does need carbohydrates, it does need protein and it does need some fats. It’s impossible to go a completely low-fat, no-fat diet because fat is in all sorts of things that are very healthy for us. For example, Oatmeal has a little bit of fat, chicken breast have a little bit of fat, even some fish have a little bit of fat and there is nothing wrong with that. We need the fat to keep our skin nice, we need the fat to help our body release more fat, because we want the body to think that the fat is non-essential and it’s okay to let go of it, to use it as fuel. That’s why eating throughout the day works, since your body says “hey I am getting food consistently. I don’t have to worry about holding on to this fat anymore.” With a consistent flow of food, your metabolism kicks up and then you drop the weight.
Balanced Meals
What constitutes a balanced meal, you ask? You want to have some protein, some carbohydrate and some vegetables and then a little bit of fat depending on the other foods you have chosen. If you have a fatty protein like a beef or even salmon, then you don’t need to have any extra fat. But if you have very lean protein, like egg whites, or maybe some chicken, then you might want to add a little bit of fat. You want to have a protein about the size of your fist, a carb about the size of your fist and vegetables as much as you want. Now I say the size of your fist because everybody’s fist is a different size, everybody needs a little bit more or less as far as nutrients go and that’s an easy way to judge it.
We get into that with much more detail in the weight loss workshop seminar and in my one on one consultations and programs because generating the specifics requires calculations based on your bodyweight, goal weight, body fat, history and a lot more! So if you want the specific nutrient and meal layout for your goals, set up a consultation with me-at FitnessMakeover.com
Your nutrients
Now if you are wondering what are proteins, what are carbs I think I hope we all know what vegetables are, but proteins examples are chicken, fish, lean beef, turkey, egg whites. Carbohydrate examples are probably the things that you have always been told to avoid, starches, grains, such as oatmeal, potatoes, rice. Now the reason why bread, which is a carbohydrate, gets a bad rap, because yes it does make some people gain weight easily, but the major issue is that most breads are not very nutrient dense. When eating to change your lean muscle to fat ratio, you want to choose foods with the most nutrients in them, give us the biggest bang for our buck. Those are the ones that are going to make you feel better, help you burn fat and lose weight, plus these are the foods that give you more energy…. and if you have more energy, it’s a lot easier to do your workouts along with chores, work and everything else that you have to do every single day!
Vegetables
The best vegetables to alter body composition are the dark green ones that are very fibrous. These fill you up so and add to the slowing down of the blood sugar release. they are very important in any weight loss program. They also work as natural a diuretic so if you tend to hold water it’s even more important that you get these foods in your diet regularly.
When I create nutrition plans for my clients, they are surprised at the amount of carbs they can have. Carbohydrates are definitely misrepresented in the diet and weight loss world. They aren’t evil! They are important to brain function and to fat burning! The only problem comes when carbs are eaten by themselves because they will increase your blood sugar levels rapidly which is not what you want! You want sustained blood sugar levels, nice and steady is what lets your body release fat for energy. Carbs, starchy or sugary will be digested very quickly and spike your blood sugar levels and drop them quickly too. When hit the low in the afternoon, usually around 3 or 4 pm and you want to fall asleep that’s your blood sugar running out of fuel!
Combine foods
Here’s the interesting part…. when carbohydrates are eaten with a protein it makes all the difference in the world, because the protein slows the absorption of the carbohydrate for a more even keel blood sugar level. Now when you throw in a vegetable which is a fibrous carbohydrate along with the regular carb or starchy carb and your protein that changes it even further. The slow absorption means you have a longer energy and stable blood sugar levels and that’s what you need in order to let the body let go of fat.
Multi-faceted attack on fat! With food, we are attacking the whole fat loss thing from several different angles, we are feeding the body frequently so it realizes that it doesn’t need the body fat to live, it can let go of it. We are proportioning the meals with amounts of protein, carbs and vegetables so that your body will have a stable blood sugar levels, allowing your body to let go of fat. Once again, when doing the right plan, you eat more and speed up your metabolism while and enabling your body to hold on to lean muscle tissue and lose fat, thus changing your lean muscle to fat ratio and your metabolism for permanent weight loss.
Next episode: Diet myths, Which fast foods are better bad choices and how food labels fool you!
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