#3 SSR: Calories & Fat Loss

Reasons or

Results! 

Fitness Nutrition Training

Sovereign Michael Valentine

SPN, CFT, Eft, Yft, Cft, SSc, GFI, CMCht, Reiki Master

206.225.9647

email: sovereignmv@gmail.com

web: bnbbs.myshaklee.com

Special Report #3

Part of the

“I see you to succeeding"

series

What about calories and fat loss?

The quickie answer: If you don’t eat enough calories, you won’t burn fat. You might lose weight in the short run (6 weeks to 3 months), but it won’t be healthy weight loss…you’ll likely be trading one problem for another and risking your health...ultimately quitting before you reach your goals.

The complete answer:        Oh, man…what an emotional topic this can be. Especially for people who want to burn fat, either in conjunction with building lean mass or all on its own. The bottom line is that you have to eat enough calories in order to burn fat and keep it off…the body depends on calories to keep the body healthy and keep the basal metabolic rate running fast enough to burn unwanted fat for energy (body composition greater than 20%).

I know, I know, many people have an aversion to counting calories…and for good reason. A lot of the out-of-date diet programs have co-operatively created some negative associations with keeping track of what we eat. Many programs use all sorts of ineffective, yet emotionally manipulative tactics in an attempt to modify our behavior and association to food, and to add credence to whatever weight-loss program of the month is being promoted.

But, my training style is different and you may have already experienced that difference. In my experience I have found it works really well to educate you so that you can make informed, educated, mature decisions about what you choose to eat or not eat as well as how much you eat so you learn what the real cause and effect of your daily eating actions are, so you can get what you want once and for all. I have found that “no-failure, just feedback” works well. In other words, most people are who have done the weight loss / dieting thing are already beating up on themselves enough as it is, you don’t need a trainer to amplify any negativity associated with nutrition and exercise.

Additionally, I am not interested in the number of calories you eat in order to tell you what you did wrong, but rather to begin the process of helping you become aware of how the amount and frequency of the food you eat either helps you burn fat or prevents you from burning fat, in the cases when someone does not eat enough calories, which is really common.

There are enough negative associations and self-esteem issues with weight loss/ dieting, it makes no sense to compound the problem by counting calories in order to tell you ate too much.

Contrary to that old technology, the point is to learn how much you are actually eating, so you can develop your instincts which you will rely on in the future. I have found that telling someone what to do rarely works, while demonstrating always works better. Often, when I first start training someone everything is so mixed up in terms of when, how and how much someone has been eating that they are bouncing back and forth from eating too many calories, followed by feeling bad and beating up on themselves, then trying to balance it out with eating too little followed by a drop in physical and emotional energy and the cycle starts all over again, without being able to see their way out of the cycle long enough to successfully interrupt it...that’s where I come in.

In my fat-loss classes I talk about considering your first six months a learning experience. When you DO the guidelines I give you the, you’ll start burning fat the first couple weeks and at the same time we give you the opportunity to stick with the program even when the old triggers that preceded eating too much and  / or too little occur. Hint, hint, life is going to keep happening, but you will now have to tools and behaviors to prevent life from causing body fat from climbing aboard your frame. You'll be able to navigate life's ups and downs and stick to your program.

If you are used to gaining fat it can take six months for many people to comprehend that the reason they have gained so much body fat was more from eating too little food, too infrequently and often exercising so much that the body went into rationing mode, adding a pound or more of fat each month. Once you practice knowing what a certain amount of calories looks like in practical terms and link it with how you look, feel and perform you’ll need to actually count calories less. So in the beginning, you’ll be actually counting your calories in order to develop your fitness instincts but as time goes on the reasons for incorrect calorie consumption will get addressed one-by-one and your reasons for eating become more functional then emotional.

Often, people who are simply eating too many calories to even burn fat while exercising don’t realize that they have been living-to-eat. Once they know that what they need to do is fill their life up a little more with activities, their calorie consumption naturally decreases…they get engaged with life. Even people who eat for what they call “emotional-eating” soon realize that those “eating-emotions” balance out when their lifestyle takes on the characteristics of a fitness-oriented lifestyle. They begin to accessorize their life with fitness friends and toys and activities and clothing and what seems liked insurmountable emotional mountains seem to just shrink…along with their clothing size. Anything we focus on grows and emotions are no different. Emotions are part of being human, but they are just part of being human. If we put all our attention on the emotional aspect without enough physical activity for balance, well...let's just say it doesn’t work.

Once a person begins to eat in relation to their emotions, the actual nutrition level tends to drop off and then the body begins to eat rather compulsively because the nutritional level is not in place to signal to the brain that enough or too few calories have been consumed. That is one place where the B.N.BB.s come into play.

You see, that saying, “a body that is in motion, tends to stay in motion,” is not just cliché. When a person has an emotional experience or experiences, nature wants the body to move…get active…that is how the body integrates experiences and emotions…MOVEMENT…activity…exercise.

BUT, if the person was unable to, or believed they were unable to move away from the initial emotional upset (like we are designed to do), or if the emotionally charged situation occurred again and again a sort of learned helplessness kicks in and in order to cope with the stress the person may stay in the emotionally stressed environment and self-medicate with excess calories. The more S.A.D.C.R.A.PPY the calories, the more likely they will spin out of control, gaining a lot of fat, before becoming conscious of what is going on and asking for professional help because the S.A.D.C.R.A.PPY  type calories have some addictive effects themselves and they deplete the B.N.B.B.s …until the B.N.B.B.s are taken consistently enough to successfully interrupt that chemically addictive aspect of S.A.D.C.R.A.P.

In other words, it would be difficult, if not impossible to eat enough healthy food calories to gain excess body fat. Its do-able, but it would take so much work, without any weird chemically addictive effects that most people would get too tired in the first couple days to be able to keep it up. With healthy food choices, the more you eat, the more fat you burn. One example of that is when I was eating 6,000 calories a day and my body fat was 4%. Unbelievable to the dietician I hired. She simply did not understand how that could be, because she believed calories are more important than nutrition (calories in - calories out).

In short, you want to figure out how many calories you need to eat each day. In order to do this you can have a professional do it for you or you can go online as there are many free programs that ask you questions about your current body statistics and your goal statistics, e.g. where you want to be, eventually giving you a pretty good idea where you should start out.

After all, your body fat level today is the result of your average calorie intake and activity level up until now…too few calories = too much body fat and too little lean mass which is different than the people you see on TV who weigh hundreds of pounds and do no exercise at all.

The number you come u with to begin with is only the best guess. The only way to know for sure how many calories you need is to check your body composition the first of each month. Those numbers will tell you if you gained or lost lean mass and fat.

Any time you calculate your calorie requirements, the number is only relevant for one month since as you get more fit and burn off the fat your caloric requirements also increase a bit. If you don't adjust your calories each month, then you'll star losing the lean mass and gaining the fat back.

I use this program to calculate calories both for myself and my clients:

www.dietitian.com/calcbody.php#.UhrpfWS9Kc0

 

I don't agree with all the articles on the above link (many are outdated), but the calorie calculator is my favorite.

Basal Metabolic Rate refers to how many calories your body requires just to be alive each day. Any activity like resistance-training and cardiovascular increases the amount of calories you need each day. Not eating enough based on your activity level will result in some “weight” loss, during the first six or so weeks, (like a lot of franchise chain gyms and commercial weight loss systems promote), but part of it will likely be a loss of lean mass…which in turn makes the basal metabolic rate slow down, (meaning you can be working out consistently, yet still gaining about a pound of fat per month), while simultaneously losing lean mass…because if you don’t eat enough calories, your body will often use the muscle tissue for energy, further decreasing the basal metabolic rate similar to the effects of yo-yo dieting.

Whenever you hear or see claims about how much weight someone lost on any given program ask, “What changes in body composition were there?”
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Remember, weight-loss is different than fat-loss. Weight-loss bad…Fat loss good. If we jump on the scale it only tells us what we weigh. It does not tell us how much of what we weight is healthy, health-building tissue. Neither does our body fat percentage is tell us the whole truth. The truth lies in:

1) Multiplying current body weight times the current percentage of body fat,

2) The number you get from multiplying those two tells you how many pounds of your body is actually pounds of body fat and

3) Then subtract those pounds from total body weight and you know how many pounds of your body is lean mass, e.g. muscle, bone, immune system, organs, etc….

It looks like this:

Body weight lbs x body fat percentage = pounds of body fat

lbs of body weight - lbs of body fat = lean mass

The point here is that as your lean mass increases, so may your calorie requirements, because lean mass requires calories where as body fat does not. In practical terms, that means that as a person shrinks, from fat-loss the calorie requirements may increase and if you do not adjust your calorie requirements as you go you will likely hit a plateau in fat loss as well as begin to add fat back to your body a little at a time.

The first of each month check your numbers again and if you are training correctly and your nutrition (whole foods + functional foods + B.N.B.B.s) is correct, your body fat lbs will have dropped significantly and your lean mass lbs will have increased…thereby increasing your basal metabolic rate…that’s what you want and are working toward!

So regardless of how you calculate your calories in the beginning, it's an educated guess at best, based on averages, finding the best place to start and that is the point of checking body composition once per month…to personalize your course as you go along, refining and dialing it in as you learn more and more about your body and how your body responds to the training and nutrition.

How do you know what information to pay attention to?

First, if you have attended my class or mini-seminar, it's likely you received an attendee note pack. That pack is the outline of what you pay attention to [what works] and does not include the stuff that does not work…in other words, the hype and mis-information which confuses and complicates fat-loss is absent. These notes are also available in book form entitled, "If I were Her trainer" and "If I were His trainer", soon to be released on Amazon Kindle.

Second, the information in the training packs is critical…not optional. That information you receive in your training packs and during your training sessions is what it takes for you to reach your goals as fast as possible without getting hurt or having down time that could slow you progress. As I touched on earlier, there is a lot of information out there and knowing which information to pay attention to is critical and makes the difference between getting good results from the beginning and struggling, floundering and ending up frustrated from lack of results. If you have a good trainer, they’re going to effectively eliminate the learning curve so that you are doing the right actions even before you know the why and how of what you are doing, so that by the time you understand what it is you are supposed to be doing you are already burning fat and building lean tissue.

Third, wrap you mind around the idea that  most people who have more body fat than they want have been unconsciously eating in ways attempting to “starve the fat,” (which effectively lowers the basal metabolic rate), while those who get lean and stay lean are eating to “feed the muscle,” (which effectively raises the basal metabolic rate), turning your body into a fat-burning machine.

Until you have the actual evidence that this works (improvement in body composition), it may be difficult to fathom that you are going to be having more good food to eat than you can comfortably finish each day and you are burning fat faster than you ever did starving yourself…but until you do the correct actions you won’t have the evidence it works, so start right now…today…and keep doing it from here out.

Have faith…it works when you work it. Knowing this information is not enough for you to get what you want most and when we check your body composition in thirty days we’ll know what your average eating and activity habits have been for the previous thirty days.