Keeping It Off: The Science of Weight Maintenance by Jerry Brainum 1/24

 

Successful dieting consists of two parts. The first part involves losing weight, which consists of maintaining as much lean mass or muscle as possible while losing maximum excess body fat. Although there are many diets, compliance is the most important aspect of any diet aimed at body fat reduction. Unless you can stay on a diet for an extended time, or at least enough time to reach your fat loss goals, the diet will fail simply because you can't stay on it. I have tried just about every popular diet known over the years and often experimented with different diets during my bodybuilding competition days. Some diets were unsuitable for me, mainly because of hunger. What that means is that I was voraciously hungry on some diets and wound up on a food binge shortly after I began the diet. The worst diet in this respect was the type most often recommended by various self-styled experts: a low-calorie, low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. After trying numerous diets, I finally found one that worked because I could stay on it long enough to lose excess body fat. That diet was a low carbohydrate, high protein diet. My hunger remained under control on that diet, although the first few weeks were tough because my body had to switch from a primarily sugar-burning machine to a fat-burning machine, which took about 4 to 5 weeks. After that, it was more or less smooth sailing. What I especially liked about the low-carb diet was that it seemed also to help me maintain more muscle. I always used resistance training, which is known to help maintain lean mass while dieting, and that, plus the higher protein intake featured on the diet, maintained most of my muscle mass while I kept losing body fat. 

However, consuming another diet may be more comfortable for others. Those who are not insulin resistant (an estimated 25% of people are) can consume a high-carb, low-fat diet and get excellent results. The truth is that any diet will work as long as you can stay on it long enough to lose excess body fat. Most "experts" repeatedly point out that when it comes to body fat reduction, exercise plays only a minor role, and what is important is a reduction in total calorie intake. That is an idiotic point of view for several reasons. For one, it's been repeatedly proven that maintaining muscle while dieting will help preserve resting metabolism, which promotes steady body fat loss. Also, the exercise burns calories and thus aids in body fat reduction. Critics often point out that exercise tends to burn a paltry amount of calories. While that is true unless you engage in extreme exercise, the fat loss induced by exercise is gradual when combined with dieting. Indeed, studies . . .