Marching Into the Peace Corps, Pt 31: “lose 10 Inches and 10 Pounds in the First Week!”

As I get older, wiser, and perhaps cheaper, it bothers me to see any diet promising large amounts of weight and inches coming off in such a small amount of time. Some might think I’m jealous someone else is losing the weight and inches faster than me, but that’s not it at all – it’s about giving someone false hope that annoys me to no end.

People like me who are overweight are filled with hopes of quick weight loss, and the truth is it doesn’t work that way. Let’s take for example a woman who weighs 150 pounds, is 37 years old, and needs to lose 30 in order to be classified by medical standards at a healthy weight.

• Her basic metabolic rate (BMR) is: 1744 calories
• Her daily caloric intake should be: 1650
• She should never dip below 1200 calories; 600 is considered starvation
• In order to lose 10 pounds, she needs to drop 35,000 calories a week (3,500 calories = 1 pound)

If she takes in her BMR caloric rate of 1744 that amounts to 12,208 calories consumed over seven days. In order for her to drop 10 pounds in the quickest possible time, she must:

• Not eat for 20 straight days OR
• 7 hours doing conditioning exercises at the health club (2625 calories burned), PLUS
• 7 hours moderately pedaling on a stationary bike (3339 calories burned), PLUS
• 7 hours of circuit training (3815 calories burned), PLUS
• 7 hours on a stair climber (2870 calories burned), PLUS
• 7 hours of vigorous weight training (2870 calories burned), PLUS
• 7 hours on a ski machine (4536 calories burned), PLUS
• 7 hours of yoga (1911 calories burned), PLUS
• No food consumed for almost 8 days.

These numbers would be correct, assuming the body wouldn’t automatically throw you faster than a missile into starvation mode. Let’s assume there is no starvation mode for this scenario.

As you’re probably thinking, “That’s crazy! Who would do that?!” and you’d be correct. I perform at least two workouts a day and eat a strictly controlled diet of approximately 1,200 calories a day, plus I drink approximately 120 ounces of water and take vitamins. The most I have lost in a week is 2.5 pounds, which is what the recommended amount is for healthy weight loss. So how are these programs claiming you can lose 10 inches and 10 pounds in a week?

I have the “Slim in 6” exercise program, and I thankfully never threw away their prescribed diet plan. In the beginning, I started to have “inch and pound” envy, but not enough for me to change my own habits. My diet is pretty basic and quite healthy, as an average meal will consist of the following foods:

• Gorton’s salmon patty = 100 calories.
• 5 ounces of chicken breast = 288 calories
• ½ cup of zucchini = 13 calories
• ½ cup of yellow summer squash = 18 calories
• ¼ red bell pepper = 20 calories
• ½ portabella mushroom = 29 calories
• total caloric fish meal = 180
• total caloric chicken meal = 368

Breakfast is always 1 cup of oatmeal and a hard boiled egg white (179 calories), and my last meal of the day consists of carrots, tomato, celery, another hard boiled egg white, and cucumber slices (103 calories). Also what you don’t see mentioned in my diet, but are factored in are things like: the tiny bit of olive oil that I coat the bottom of the pan, goji berries, flax and sesame seeds, and bee pollen granules I consume.

The one thing the fitness exercise program dietary recommendations do is jump start your body into quick weight loss so you’ll see results fast. Don’t confuse this with healthy weight loss, as the two are quite different. The crash diet technique in the “Slim in 6” program has you consuming nothing but liquids for the first day or two, and then you go on a severely restricted caloric diet full of processed convenience foods. This is a bad idea, and the biggest beef I had with the new Bob Greene Best Life Diet – processed foods are bad for your body…isn’t this exactly the same way you gained the weight in the first place? It was true of my weight gain! If you crash diet, you will slow or stop your metabolism from releasing the weight, so what’s the point of making a bad situation worse?

These diets also do not take into account (or refuse to) the fact as the body becomes more adept at consuming food and exercise, it becomes harder for you to burn the calories. If you don’t think this is true, look at a body builder who is packed with muscles and has single digit body fat. This person has almost no fat to lose – in fact they can’t lose any more fat or else their internal organs wouldn’t be protected. You body needs some fats to build cell walls as well. Since their bodies are so well trained and are as low as they can go, they would need to double or triple their efforts to release that last bit of fat. This isn’t healthy, either! The point is, the body stops losing fat at a point because it has become so efficient of a machine. It’s also part of the starvation response that has been hard wired into your brain – your body will hold onto the weight as long as possible if you try and starve yourself.

So let’s look at this one more time from a high level overview: in order for you to lose 10 pounds in a week, you must starve for 20 days OR exercise 7 hours a day in the gym and then starve almost 8 days. I wouldn’t wish that on my friend’s worst enemy! Even if you could perform either feat, your body’s starvation response would kick in and stop you cold.

How can these diet plans with exercise claim you lose 10 pounds and 10 inches in a week then? It’s simple: you are losing water weight and lean body muscle. Keep this simple fact in mind when you’re playing the weight game: fat weighs LESS than water weight or lean muscle mass. If they are promising 10 pounds in a week, you are going to achieve those results through dehydration and lean body mass loss, not fat. There’s NO other way around this! As I talked about before, weight and fat are two different things, and until you understand that fact, you will always struggle with the scale.

To date, I have lost a total of 29 pounds and 9.75 inches over my body. You saw earlier in this article that I eat healthy and I work out at least twice a day, and it has taken me 13 weeks to achieve this. If I had learned how to use a pair of fat calipers, I’d have a more accurate rating than my scale, which says I have lost 7 percent body fat in the process. I have not sacrificed my lean body mass in the process, but it’s commonly believed if you lose more than 3.5 pounds a week, you are losing lean tissue. When I started, I fit into a size 18 and now I’m in a size 12; I fit into a medium sports bra and although I wear a size large workout short and windbreaker top, I really could fit well into mediums. How many 166 pound people do you know that can fit into a size medium? This is how I know I’m losing fat and not water weight or lean muscle tissue – my body is being reshaped and sculpted.

I was shocked to realize last night I’m developing great arm muscle definition even with the fat that’s still hanging around, and my endurance is allowing me to make it through an 80-minute workout. I’ve switched out several of my workouts and have begun Billy Blanks’ tae bo as well as Tony Horton’s P90X, so we’ll see what the next few months holds for me. I will count it a success if I can manage three chin-ups by May 1st! It may seem like a small goal, but you have to start somewhere if you’ve been out of shape for a long period of time.

If you don’t like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the appropriate site.

quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here

socyberty.com articles can be located here

relijournal.com articles are here

picable.com photographic images are here