The Trouble with Conventional Weight Loss

The typical low-fat diet is high in carbohydrates and low in calories. And for the most part, this is the traditional fat-loss and fat maintenance recommendation echoed throughout the medical community. The Dietary Guidelines recommend 20-30% of daily calories come from fat, approximately 10% from protein, and 60% - 70% from carbohydrates. Physicians and other fitness professionals are pressured from sanctioning government agencies and managed health care to support these guidelines. Statistically speaking, however, following these guidelines has provided no benefit in the area of fat management.

The premise behind low-fat/low-calorie dieting is based on the assumption that when calorie intake is reduced, excess fat is burned for energy. This premise is oversimplified and flawed.

To your body, low-calorie dieting is the equivalent of a primordial famine. When deprived of calories, the body initiates a sequence of innate preservation responses to maintain equilibrium between calorie [energy] intake and calorie expenditure.

One of the responses is to reduce lean muscle mass. Lean muscle burns more calories per day than any other tissue. On prolonged calorie-restricted diets [more than three or four weeks], studies show that close to 50% of the weight lost comes at the expense of lean muscle. One lb. of lean muscle requires an average of 35 calories per day, in contrast to the mere 8 calories required to maintain an equal amount of fat. Since maintaining muscle requires more calories than fat, muscle is destroyed when there is a lack of calorie intake. In other words muscle is destroyed to reduce metabolic overhead. As a result, your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) may be decreased by as much as 25-40%. Accordingly, the decrease then causes fewer calories to be burned and more to be stored as fat (a significant factor contributing to weight gain after a diet). In spite of this known occurrence calorie reduction is still the customarily recommended approach to fat loss.

Fig 1-1 Lean muscle is destroyed on prolonged diets
50% of the weight lost on a diet will come from fat
50% will come from muscle

Figure 1-1 illustrates the difference between losing weight and losing fat. In the first picture, our person (whom we’ll call Mr. Yellow Fellow) has 24% body fat, weighs 250 lbs., and wants to lose 30 lbs. If Mr. Yellow Fellow chose to lose the weight simply using a low-calorie diet (Incorrect Weight Loss), he would lose 15 lbs. of fat, 15 lbs. of muscle, and end up gaining 1% body fat. On the other hand, if Mr. Yellow Fellow chose to lose weight using The TrainChange Approach to Fat Loss (Correct Weight Loss), he would lose the entire 30 lbs. from fat, maintain his existing lean muscle, and decrease his overall body fat by 11%.

Another problem caused by low-calorie dieting is known as entering starvation mode. While in this mode, energy expenditure is decreased further by reducing things like energy level, skin temperature, digestion, and fat-burning hormones. In an attempt to replenish overdrawn energy reserves, alternate hormones are released that work to conserve energy and increase calorie storage. Once in this mode, nearly every calorie consumed is immediately stored as fat. In short, the dual combination of decreased metabolic activity and increased energy conservation creates the ideal environment for rapid fat storage.

This article is a revised excerpt from the book
TrainChange: A Unique Step-by-Step Analytical Approach to Fat Loss
By Al Smith, Jr., The Fitness Specialist®