note: I highly recommend buying this book if you're considering getting inolved in a weight training program. It's been an excellent source of knowledge and inspiration for me. Comments/corrections to: andrew@AmbrosiaSW.com
Most people use the word "diet" to mean eating to lose weight. Actually, the word just refers to a particular pattern of eating. If you eat correctly, and combine that with a sufficient amount of rigorous exercise, losing excess weight and maintaining a healthy body weight should not be a problem.
The public is so bombarded nowadays with conflicting opinions, claims and promises regard diet and nutrition that most people don't know what to believe. One expert wants you to eat a diet high in protein and low in carbohydrate, while another comes along and points out that this kind of diet can be too high in fats and cholesterol, and so he recommends just the opposite.
What I recommend is going back to the basics. We all tend to want to have our cake and eat it, but the fact is that basic nutrition is not all that mysterious, and most people need to follow the old tried-and-true rules that we all learned in high school about what makes for a balanced, nutritious diet, rather than trying to follow the latest fad diet.
But the body also uses food to build, maintain and repair tissue, as well as to provide the nutrients required for a variety of vital functions. These are rather complex needs, because physical systems are themselves complicated, and so it takes a variety of foods to fulfill these requirements.
The food we eat comes in three basic forms:
Vitamins and minerals are nutrients present in the body in very small amounts, because they usually operate only as catalysts, "triggers" that allow other processes to take place. When we don't have a sufficient amount of certain vitamins, deficiencies develop that can range from the very minor to the very serious.
A lot of people take vitamin supplementation these days. Ideally, the only reason to take vitamin supplements is to cure deficiency. Vitamins seem to operate in such a way that once you have enough, more doesn't do any good. But there is a controversy concerning just how much is enough.
Stress, processed foods, pollution, cigarettes, alcohol, and a number of other factors rob the body of vitamins. Some experts say that eating a balanced diet is sufficient to counter these influences, while others disagree and prescribe moderate to massive supplementation. There is no clear consensus.
The same holds true for minerals. Minerals are the stuff of which our planet is made, and we share the need for a number of minerals such as calcium, zinc, iron, and so on. Those who claim we should all be taking mineral supplementation, as well as extra vitamins, believe that too frequently the soil in which our food is grown has itself been depleted of minerals and is no longer sufficiently nutritious. Again, there is no general agreement.
Vegetables contain a variety of vitamins and minerals, and themselves are predominately carbohydrates. Carbohydrate has gotten bad press recently, because people confuse the general term with one specific kind of carbohydrate--namely, sugar. The complex carbohydrates found in broccoli, potatoes and other vegetables are high in nutrition, relatively low in calories, and far better for you than the simple carbohydrates such as table sugar.
Fruits are also carbohydrate, but are closer in nature to sugar than most vegetables. They lack protein, but they are good sources of a number of other nutrients. Fructose, the sugar found in fruit, is many times sweeter than processed sugar, so it gives you more sweetness per calorie than high-sugar desserts.
A US Government study recently made the following recommendations for balancing your diet:
Protein: 12%
Carbohydrate: 58%
Fat: 30%
Breaking this down into actual amounts, the suggestion is:
Protein: 1 gram per 2.2lbs of body weight Carbohydrate: minimum of about 80 grams, more with exercise
Most athletes, body builders among them, prefer larger amounts of protein, more like 1 gram for every pound of body weight. But there are experts who believe that we eat too much protein already, and not nearly enough carbohydrate. Everyone accepts that eating too much fat is harmful.
Carbohydrates are important to the body in many ways. It is, for example, the only energy source the brain can draw upon. Too little carbohydrate and the brain cannot function properly. When you exercise heavily, you tend to use up carbohydrates, so you need to eat enough to fuel both your exercise and your nervous system.
Carbohydrates also combine with fat in the biochemical cycle that produces energy to fuel the muscles. Therefore, very low or zero carbohydrate diets tend to be self-defeating, because they inhibit the metabolism of fat. But I'll get into that a little deeper shortly.
The important thing to keep in mind is that all of these nutrients are interrelated. They all work together to keep you healthy and functioning. When there is an overabundance of copper, for example, it will result in lower levels of zinc. So whether you are trying to gain, lose, or maintain weight, stick to eating a balanced diet and a variety of different foods, and avoid any advice that tells you different.
Individuals differ considerably in how efficiently they digest food. They also differ in how active they are, and in how many calories they burn up through exercise. But we can generalize and say that one pound of fat contains about 3,500 calories for more people.
Since calories are both a measurement of how much energy fat contains and the energy cost of various kinds of exercise, there are obviously to factors we can manipulate to product a negative caloric balance...
Some nutritionists avoid telling fat people they should exercise, because they believe that these individuals will tend to get discouraged, being forced into unfamiliar activity, and go off their weight-loss program. That may be true, but there is little likelihood of permanent weight loss without an alteration of exercise patterns.
Exercise doesn't seem to help much, many people feel. After all, if you run a mile, you only burn up about 100 calories. But do that every day--and it takes less than 10 minutes--and you are talking about the energy equivalent of 10 pounds a year. Add a moderate reduction in food intake, and you can easily lose 20 pounds a year on this program. Most people would be more than satisfied if they could lose that much that easily.
So exercise is invaluable in controlling weight, but only if it is kept up over a long period of time. The weight training I've given you in this program will help; so will playing sports, riding a bicycle and many other kinds of exercise.
Just remember, weight control is a matter of balance between intake and expenditure--don't try it using only half of the equation.
Trying to lose weight too fast is self-defeating and unhealthy. In most circumstances, a 2-pound-per-week loss is as much as you should hope for. Any more than this and it usually requires such sacrifices or simply alterations in your normal habits that you can't keep on with it for very long.
There are any number of charts and tables that will tell you what your optimum caloric requirements might be, but the best way to tell is to check and see if what you are eating is causing you to gain, maintain or lose weight--keeping in mind that changes in muscle mass can also affect the scale.
As you cut back from this equilibrium level, and increase your exercise, your body will dip into its fat reserves to obtain the needed energy. The trick is not to cut back so far that you deprive yourself of daily nutritional needs. At this point, all you need is patience. The body will go about its business at its own rate, and no use hurrying it.
But keep in mind that the body is a living organism, not a machine, and its processes do not always proceed at uniform rates. For example, you might go two weeks hardly losing any weight, then lose a whole lot in just a few days. One reason for this is that for every gram of fat your body metabolizes, more than 1 gram of water is produced as a by-product. This water stays in your system for some time before being cycled out, so the loss of fat is not immediately noticeable.
We all have a tendency to put on weight as we get older. The metabolism, for example, slow down by 10 calories per day per year after the age of 25-30. This means that the average man could expect to gain 10 pounds between his 30th and 40th birthdays if he made no other adjustments.
Also, age tends to make us sedentary. We get involved in family, business, social obligations and the like, and we don't automatically get out and exercise as much as we did when we were kids.
But we can alter that pattern, and exercise more. We can acknowledge that it is necessary to adjust our caloric intake to reflect our lifestyles. When we do this, our weight will tend to drop to acceptable levels and stay there.
Each person has to decide for himself how much fat is acceptable on his own body. If you can pinch a large layer of fat around your waistline, then it is probably time to do something about it. Also, as you begin to train with weights and become more conscious of your body, you may well decide that you don't want to be "average," that you would rather be in above-average condition.
At that point, by using your knowledge of exercise, diet and nutrition, you can take steps to recreate yourself in whatever image you decide is desirable.
A way around this is to write down everything you eat and, if you have the patience, actually look up the caloric values of your daily food intake and add up the total.
This can become very tedious, so it is hard to do every day, but keeping a diary even once or twice a week can be extremely valuable in helping you learn to modify your eating behavior.
Many young boys who are skinny are in such a hurry to gain weight that they overeat and end up becoming quite fat a few years later. If your slenderness is due to a lack of body fat, be grateful.
The cure for painful skinniness is to increase the body's muscle mass. This, however, takes time, as I have already pointed out. And it is probably likely, unless you are very young, that your lack of muscle mass is genetic, so that you will put on mass more slowly than most. But hard training will change the shape, contour and look of your body, even before you have gained a significant amount of muscle, and I think you will really like the way that makes you look.
.....