At some point in our lives, we all come up against what we deem to be an insurmountable task. We give it that label because when we look at it, we have no idea where to even begin. It seems absolutely impossible.
For me, that was my health.
As a young man, I was actually happy to be putting on weight. I was working out like mad, and attributed the gains to be my workout, working. I was ecstatic when I finally broke 200!
There was that beer gut that developed in the process… But when an older (probably in his 30’s at the time), male bartender told me, “A wise man builds a shed for his tools,” I accepted the gut as a normal part of manhood and pressed on.
It didn’t stop though. I increased the intensity of my workouts, and I got fairly strong, for a nerdy kid who weighed 135 throughout high school. Yet the gut kept growing.
Then it began to spread. Now it wasn’t just my gut that was expanding, fat was spreading into my face. My cheeks and neck began to swell. It got to the point where I felt like I didn’t really have “my” face anymore. There was now more of a generally round, “fat guy” face where mine used to be.
The legs and arms began to fill as well. It didn’t matter how much I worked out. I was still getting stronger, the muscles were still getting bigger; but, there were no “cuts,” no definition to anything. People started telling me, “you look like you used to work out.”
Ouch. No one who works out wants to hear that they look like they used to look good.
I decided that I had done enough bulking, it was time to cut.
So, how do I lose a bunch of fat, really fast? At the time, Dr. Atkins was all the rage, so I jumped on board. Zero-carb, high fat, all protein, all day. I made it about two weeks, but hey, I dropped 15 pounds!
And then 20 pounds crept back on throughout the rest of the year.
I kept thinking, “if only I could keep this up for longer…” so the next year I pushed harder, with about the same results.
I tried again the following year, same thing happened. Diet tech improvements came along. Now they have a powder that “gets you back into ketosis when you fall out of it.”
For the uninitiated, “ketosis” is the target state of the Atkins approach. This means that there will be “ketone bodies” present in the urine that can be detected by peeing on a special test strip. These ketone bodies only show up in the urine under special circumstances.
One of those situations is kidney failure, which we definitely want to avoid.
The other, is when we’ve exhausted our supply of available glucose for fuel to trick our body into thinking we’re starving so it switches to burning off our fat reserves.
If you’ve never done Atkins before, it takes a good 3 days for you to burn off your existing glucose stores before your body reluctantly switches into ketosis (fat-burning mode via simulated starvation). Once you’re in ketosis, your body is constantly burning up your fat reserves. But, any amount of carbs you ingest will throw you out of it, leaving you waiting for your body to burn those carbs off to get back into ketosis.
Ah! But now we have this Miracle Powder that will get you right back into ketosis! Of course I tried it. I don’t really know if it didn’t work, or if I used it as a means to sneak carbs in here and there, but the net result was that it was less effective than Atkins alone.
This is where the “low-carb” craze came from. The idea is that if you can just eat very low carbs, your body will choose to burn off fat. Except that, the body doesn’t work like that. If it has glucose to burn as fuel, it’s going to burn that glucose as fuel. And when it has an excess of glucose, it will store the balance as fat for later use.
Long story short: Atkins doesn’t work! Or rather, it is an effective tool at removing fat very quickly, for a short period of time. Which is exactly what Dr. Atkins intended! He pioneered this method as a means to reduce enough fat in people to allow them to safely undergo surgery.
Atkins was never meant to be used as a long-term approach to overall health.
Great 😧 now what? Looking for a more modern approach, I tried Intermittent Fasting.
Typically, this involves squeezing all of your eating for the day into a narrow window. For example, maybe only eating between the hours of 4 pm to 8 pm. If you’ve never tried this before, you’ll probably be cranky and hungry up until that four o’clock mark, then bloated as you try to compress 3000 calories into one reasonably healthy meal, after which you’ll probably go to bed hungry.
Now, I’m not saying Intermittent Fasting doesn’t work. There are many people who swear by it. And in fact, I found it an excellent means by which to maintain my body composition levels (meaning my lean mass to fat mass ratio.) It wasn’t very effective, for me though, at reducing my existing fat levels.
There are, of course, variations on this theme. I’ve described what many people call the OMAD method, or One Meal A Day. My mother uses this method effectively to maintain her health in her mid-70’s now.
You could also use a larger window and eat two meals a day. This is a great way to go for people who don’t feel hungry in the morning when they wake up. No problem! Skip breakfast and start with lunch.
I’ve done this before myself too, but not to effectively drop fat pounds.
Then there’s the complete opposite approach: Eating numerous, albeit small, meals throughout the day. I’ve done this one as well. The concept here is to not allow yourself to get hungry, keeping your body processing food all day long, and burning up the energy as you go so it won’t get stored as fat.
For me, this was eating small meals every three hours or so. When I say small, I mean a can of tuna fish and some crackers, or a pair of hard-boiled eggs and half a slice of bread. Just enough food to keep you going to your next eating window, spaced about three hours apart.
Basically, you’re eating all day long, maybe as much as seven times a day, depending on when you wake and sleep. It’s a LOT of eating. And if you work in an office, your coworkers may get annoyed with you and your stinky tuna cans. How effective was it? Well, I definitely bulked up, but still had a hard time cutting the fat.
And then I tried the “stupid” diets. You know the ones I mean. Where they sound way too stupid to actually work. Things like, “the all-cabbage diet,” or “the carnivore diet,” or even, the “paleo diet.” Did they work? Meh, they’re basically all variations of the Atkins theme. So yes, they worked in the short term, but were too hard to maintain to make a meaningful difference.
There I was, after literal decades of trying and failing every diet I could think of. My insurmountable task proving itself to be a formidable foe. What do you do when you’ve tried everything you can think of, and NOTHING has worked?
You get help.
In 2020, that’s exactly what I did. I decided to get to the bottom of what the heck I was doing wrong to my health. I paid money to learn how to get healthy.
And you know what? I found out it wasn’t a single really big mistake I was making. There were dozens of little ones. In fact, when I sat down and thought about all of the things that I’m doing now, that I wasn’t doing then, there were over 100 differences!
Now I’ve made it my mission to help as many people as possible to make these little changes in their lives, because it adds up to big results!
No more dieting! I have no need to go on a diet now, because I’m already at my ideal weight. All I need to do is eat and move, and my body composition takes care of itself.
Want to know if I can help you, too? Hit the link below and let’s find out!
Visit: https://www.eclecticwellbeing.com/Mark1-2-1
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