Just a hair over the 2-week mark now! Total weight loss is 16.8lbs :) That's fantastic news to me, and I'm starting to see results myself (we're always the last to see it). That also includes a 1 pound gain in lean body mass, so I must be on the right track.
Anyway, I wanted to share something with you all that came to me in the mail today. A very nice, glossy pamphlet from **. Weight Loss Clinics. It reads across the top - 50 Overweight People Needed - and goes on to tell you to arrange a no-obligation consultation. All good so far. Now, normally, I'd just throw the thing in the trash, but I felt compelled to learn their secret, to see if they would put it in their flyer. To my surprise, they actually did! Under a the nice and enticing looking heading - How and Why It Works - they lay out their plans in 5 easy steps. Let's take a look at them, but in reverse order - you'll see why in a moment.
5. Structured Meal Planning
Your **. Weight Loss IPN (Intelligent Prescriptive Nutrition) meals will be structured according to your personal tastes and lifestyle. You select your food choices from an appetizing and varied menu. The portions, calories and macronutrient value of each food you choose will achieve your fat loss goal.
- Ok, so they give you a menu of things you can eat... I'm assuming they give you training or something, so that you don't over do it on one thing or another. It's supposedly doctor monitored, but seems really easy to cheat to me.
4. Water Intake
- I'm just going to summarize - they say that you will have to drink from your 64-ounce water bottle 6 times a day. Wait - 64 OUNCES?! That's almost 2 Litres... that's a lot of water. Not that it's bad for you or anything, but it's a lot more than most people drink in a day. No wonder they can say you won't feel hungry - you're always full of water.
3. Interval Eating
The timing and quantity of the food you eat at each meal will determine whether any calories will be stored as body fat. Therefore, your daily meal plan will dictate the total number of meals you will eat each day ant the juantity of food you will consume at each meal.
- Did I read that right? Each meal can store body fat? I wonder if these guys actually attended biochemistry? Yes, each meal can and will store calories as fat under certain conditions, but I'll get to that later.
2. Macronutrient Composition
**. Weight Loss IPN program is comprised of a macronutrient composition of 50% carbohydrates, 30% protein and 20% fat. Using the caloric requirement determined to achieve 2 pounds per week of fat lass, each patient will pick their food choices for each meal.
- There it is...50/30/20. That, probably spread out over 5-6 meals a day. Each "meal" would HAVE to be very well balanced to show weight loss. And that to me says it's very restrictive - it would have to be. I have too much to say about this here - I'll sum it all up after I go over #1.
1. Determining your daily Base Metabolic Rate
- Summary: They calculate your BMR, and use that to determine how many calories you need to eat to loose 2 lbs of fat per week. The biggest flaw in this idea is that your BMR changes constantly - no air conditioning in the summer - up it goes, not eating can make it go down, activity levels make it fluctuate a LOT. So unless they're going to recalculate it every hour or two I can't see how on earth they can guarantee 2lbs per week.
So it seems to me that they still believe a calorie is a calorie, and that if you burn more calories than you consume, you lose weight. It's true enough in and of itself but with all tho now apparent restrictions to the diet, I'd be very surprised to see anyone lose weight if they tried this on their own.
I really have to do some math with you here. OK, they want 50% of your calories to come from carbs. If you're eating 2000 calories per day, that's 1000cal of carbs. Since all carbs are sugar, we can calculate just how much sugar that is. According to http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5592/2 granulated sucrose has 387 calories per 100 grams. 1000/387=2.58 or 258 grams of sugar. One tablespoon of sugar (more than double what the body requires at any given point) has 12.55 grams of sugar. 258/12.55=20.56 tablespoons - that's about 1.25 CUPS of sugar per day.
But "WAIT", you say. "What about the glycemic index - If I eat complex carbs they're good for me, right?" Wrong... biochemically ALL carbs are broken down to glucose, which is sugar in its purest form, necessary for human life. Low glycemic foods just mean your body has to work harder to convert it - that's all. Sugar is sugar - your body can't distinguish.
Moving on to the protein - If I was eating 2000 cal per day, and 30% came from protein, that's 600 calories, which works out to about 150 grams. More than enough for most people, actually too much. Excess protein is converted to sugar and stored as fat if it's not used. My lean mass requires roughly 95 grams of protein a day, and sometimes that's a challenge for me to eat.
The 20% fat is very troubling...fat is pure energy, and incredibly healthy for you in the right forms. The myriad restrictions of this diet would make this tiny bit of fat really really easy to overdo. What happens to fat energy when your body has all this wonderful sugar to easily digest? You guessed it - fat stays as fat.
From what I can see, this supposed diet can only work if you are VERY careful about what you eat and when, and how much how often. Seems to me that it would be damn near impossible to fit this into a lifestyle change and make it permanent. What happens to us all when the doctor isn't looking anymore? We cheat, and start our old habits, because they're EASIER.
My advice: don't do it - save your life. My way is easy, healthy, and better. This **.Weight Loss crap seems to be designed to always have just a slightly elevated insulin level. While this is a better thing than having your insulin ping-ponging around, wouldn't it be better not to really need your insulin at all? The doctors almost never talk about insulin's opposite – glucagon. Glucagon stimulates your fat cells to empty their energy reserves, and therefore lose body fat. Glucagon also enables your body to manufacture its own sugar from protein through a process called gluconeogenesis (literally new sugar). That way, your body has only the sugar it requires, never extra.
Human beings are biological carnivores, we were never designed to exist on plant matter alone. Cows have FOUR stomachs to process grasses. Other herbavores have other adaptations, usually in the form of much longer intestinal tracts to allow their bodies to process the plant matter. Yes we can eat it, but show me a healthy vegan that's been doing the diet for 20-30 years. Gorillas are vegetarian, but they can eat meat – but will die if that's all they eat. A mountain lion can eat grass, but will die if that's all it eats. Humans are the same. Eskimos eat nothing but meat and fat, they're generally skinny and have almost no cases of obesity and heart diseases. I can site stories of overweight people that go on trips eating nothing but animal products and return healthier than ever.
I do ramble on – if you want specific references, I can and will provide.
