The Most Popular New Year's Resolutions
With the New Year upon us, I’m sure you’ve given great thought to your New Year’s Resolutions and the changes you would like to make in 2014 to live longer, stronger, happier, or healthier. If you are like most Americans, you have probably chosen to either exercise more, or eat less to lose weight. These are the two most commonly chosen resolutions not just this year, but EVERY year.
These resolutions are so commonly chosen and re-chosen because we never seem to get long-term success with either one. Maybe that’s because the underlying premise regarding effective weight loss and healthy exercise is faulty.
We’ve been led to believe that by continually cutting calories and increasing our exercise that weight loss will naturally follow. Unfortunately, it doesn’t – at least not long-term.
The more we calorie restrict, the more our metabolism drops to ensure our survival. Also, the more we eat the wrong foods that destroy our natural fat burning ability, the more we store fat instead of burning it. The end result when the diet is over and we resume our old eating patterns, is rapid weight gain and an even slower metabolism!
So if calorie restriction doesn’t work, then what does?
Eating a whole foods diet, (not processed foods...like THIS) with loads of healthy organic fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, lean protein, and fermented foods (probiotics) to support a healthy metabolism, combined with just the right kind of exercise.
Both eating less and exercising more have consistently been proven to FAIL more than 95% of the time. This horrible track record is because starvation and stairstepper are rooted in calorie myths that tell us if we can force ourselves into a "calorie deficit" (AKA we burn off more calories than we consume) we will burn fat. If that were true, why is any individual with excess fat on their body ever hungry? According to calorie myths, even if an over-fat individual ate no calories, they would not be in a state of caloric deficit as they are still surrounded (literally) by calories. Sure the calories are stored on their hips versus passing through their lips, but the fact is, calories are available, so why would an over-fat individual ever be hungry?
Because weight regulation is about so much more than the quantity of calories we take in or exercise off! Hint: Think hormones NOT calories. Over-fat individuals get hungry while carrying around hundreds of thousands of calories for the same reason eating less and exercising more almost always fails…it’s not about calories!!
For example, in each of the following studies, all the study participants ate precisely the same number of calories (these are called isocaloric studies), but one group was eating more hormonally helpful foods than the other:
A review completed at the University of Florida analyzed eighty-seven studies and found that those people who ate more hormonally helpful calories lost an average of twelve more pounds of body fat compared to those who ate an equal quantity of less hormonally helpful calories.
Researchers at Cornell University split people into three groups, each eating 1,800 calories per day, but at different levels of hormonal helpfulness. The most hormonally helpful group lost 86.5 percent more body fat than the least helpful group.
A review published in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism covered nine additional trials demonstrating that people who eat hormonally helpful foods lose more weight than those who ate the exact same quantity of less helpful calories.
People continue to be as hungry as they’ve ever been despite having plenty of calories already in their bodies because low-quality calories (starchy, sugary, processed edible products) make our brain, gut, and hormones “believe” we need to store more fat on our body than we really need to. This is called an elevated “set-point weight” or hormonal dysregulation. Why else would our body continue to tell us to eat more—aka “you don’t have enough fuel”—when we in fact already have too much!
The modern metabolic science of long term fat loss and robust health has nothing to do with eating less, nothing to do with exercising more, because these approaches only matter if conscious control of calories is key, and it is not.
Every single scientific study that has ever tracked calories and weight gain has proven convention calorie math wrong. And so does common sense. Nobody outside of the scientific community knew what a calorie was let alone counted them prior to the obesity and diabetes epidemics, so how could counting calories be required for long term fitness and health?
It can’t.
Fortunately, the last forty years of metabolic research has given us an infinitely more effective and empowering approach: eat more, exercise less—smarter. By eating more—but higher-quality—foods, and doing less—but smarter/more intense—exercise (like THIS), you can make your brain, gut, and hormones, believe that you should have less fat on your body, and they will work to keep you slim just as reliably as they are now working to keep you struggling.
XOXO,
Christy
