How To Lose Weight Fast Through Nutrition

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A Disaster By Inches…

Can a tragedy 30,000 feet in the air show us how to lose weight fast?

“In 1979 a large passenger jet with 257 people on board left New Zealand for a sightseeing flight to Antarctica and back.”

“Unknown to the pilots, however, someone had modified the flight coordinates by a mere two degrees.”

Often a few degrees can change everything in the flight path of your health.

“This error placed the aircraft 28 miles (45 km) to the east of where the pilots assumed they were. As they approached Antarctica, the pilots descended to a lower altitude to give the passengers a better look at the landscape.”

“Although both were experienced pilots, neither had made this particular flight before, and they had no way of knowing that the incorrect coordinates had placed them directly in the path of Mount Erebus, an active volcano that rises from the frozen landscape to a height of more than 12,000 feet (3,700 m).”

“As the pilots flew onward, the white of the snow and ice covering the volcano blended with the white of the clouds above, making it appear as though they were flying over flat ground. By the time the instruments sounded the warning that the ground was rising fast toward them, it was too late. The airplane crashed into the side of the volcano, killing everyone on board.”

It was a terrible tragedy brought on by a minor error—a matter of only a few degrees.”

Obesity and Diseases Are a Matter of A Few Bites

Often eating well can come down to a matter of a few calories daily or more importantly a few calories daily from the wrong type of foods.

A couple hundred calories a day eating crappy food, or eating that one donut you have been debating about for an hour can literally be the difference between wash board abs and a beer belly.  It isn’t as simple as addition and subtraction of calories or energy (law of thermodynamics). This is because there are biochemical aspects involved with what we eat. We won’t get into the details, but understand that glucose created from sugar and flour can spike your insulin levels making you more susceptible to adding fat.

It snowballs from there with sugar and wheat.  Both foods, which exist in most common American’s diet, only make you more hungry with every bite.  You eat more and more until you get to the point that you feel you will crash either from exhaustion or your gut imploding.  Why do we have this addiction? The scary truth is that the same brain receptors that are triggered by crack and heroine, also triggers our addiction for wheat and sugar.

Pretty sobering when you think about it, huh?  Now you see how hard it is to change course when you have gone down a dangerous path.

Over years of making small consistent food choices, good or bad, you can either direct yourself down the path toward a heart attack or a fulfilling lifestyle.  So yeah…each meal matters! You can’t make major impact whether you take any diet pills or supplements.  All of the nutrients you need can come straight from fresh non-processed food.

Before we get into how you can make some tweaks here and there for success, we need to establish where you are at. Because there is no way to know where you are going, unless you first know where you are at.

Starting Point

First you have to figure out your body fat percentage.  Throw away the scale because it won’t matter.  You want to focus on how to lose body fat instead of weight loss. I recommend that you measure your progress with the bod pod or calipers.  At the very least you can also measure using a measuring tape.  Get the measurements of your:

• flexed biceps,
• resting waist at the naval,
• hips at the widest point,
• thighs at their widest points, and
• big toe at it’s widest point.

You may ask, “Why the biggest toe?”.  Because it will give you satisfaction no matter how heavy you are. Do these measurements weekly and the goal is to see progress, not a certain number by a certain week.

Ideally once you have established your body fat percentage, measurements and have your goals, it is time to eat healthy.  There are a few things you can do in order to make noticeable differences in your fat loss.  These ten ways can help you learn how to lose weight fast and safe.  These principles will have you feeling great with more energy in days and maybe weeks.  Depending on your genetic make-up or body type you could see physical differences in weeks or months.

1. Cut out White Flour and Refined Sugar

This is a picture of the devil and he goes by the name: Sugar

If there is one thing you do out of all of these suggestions, this is the one.  It will also be the hardest when you consider all of the foods you eat that either are loaded with sugar or white flour. When I first found out, it was like I realized this mass conspiracy against me.

White flour and refined sugar does so many bad things to your body.  We already talked about the high level of addiction that it causes and the lack of satiation (or not feeling full). Not only are these culprits stored as fat, but they slows down your metabolism.  Both of these foods spike your blood sugar levels causing hypoglycemia.  This destroys your energy.  Stay away from white flour (or honestly any flour) and refined sugar at all cost. Replace white flour with almond meal or other non wheat products.  Replace refined sugar with fruit if you get that urge.

2. Lean Protein and Complex Carb every meal

You can’t just focus on not eating sugar and wheat.  It is like telling a smoker to stop smoking by talking about it all day long.  You have to have distractions or other options that are more productive.  This is why you should focus most of your meals on Lean Protein and Complex Carbs like vegetables.

Lean Protein and complex carbs are so important for numerous reasons.  There are countless nutrients and essential amino acids necessary to keeping up your energy and maintaining your lean muscle mass.  It is important to maintain your muscle when losing fat or else you run the risk of again becoming a skinny fat person.

Another significant reason is that as you peel away the addiction of sugar and flour, you can start to feel satiated or full when eating lean protein and vegetables.

Always make sure your are eating fresh non-processed food.  Eat your food as close as you can get it to what it would look like in the wild.  I say that with hesitation for animals and please make sure they are dead first.  Yuck!

The point is try to eat as much of your food without it going through a factory and getting processed.  When food gets processed it looses a good amount of the nutrients it once had.

3. You can shift dairy calories to lean protein calories

Dairy is more thermic dense, meaning when you eat dairy, less of the calories burn when you digest it compared to protein. Dairy also has similar challenges that sugar has in that it can cause insulin spikes to increase fat and reduce energy. Just like grains, dairy can damage the gut lining, which causes leaky gut issues.  That sounds pretty gross and it is.  It makes you wonder if cows are trying to get revenge or something.  This is a key step to take in helping you to figure out how to lose weight fast at home.

4. Eat unsaturated fats and possibly avoid saturated fats

Unsaturated Fats are essential fatty acids like Omega 3 and Omega 6 found in nuts, plant oils like olive oil, seeds, and fish.  People often ask me how to lose weight fast without pills and my response is that Essential Fatty Acids are a big boost.

What are the right type of “fats”?

I don’t know how many people I have heard said that, “I didn’t get into an ideal shape until I included more fats in my diet.” They are as effective as any drug.  They should consist of at least 15-20% of your diet. Since they naturally occur in foods, they improve your overall energy for better workouts and increases you ability to cut fat. A lot of your necessary fats you can even get from meats.

Essential Fats slow down carbs being released into the bloodstream, which helps to prevent blood sugar spiking. It also prevents against hormonal food cravings or binge eating.  There is a great deal of debate (along with most of these other items) whether saturated fat is good or bad for you.  People like Gary Taubes argues that with the proper amount of unsaturated fat, it actually works to cancel out any of the negative impact of the LDL (bad cholesterol) coming from saturated fats.  Also in certain “saturated fat foods” like coconut, there seem to be a lot of redeeming value according to folks like Robb Wolf to fight against leaky gut issues and auto immune diseases.

At the same time others argue to avoid saturated fats because they can lead to cardiovascular, heart problems, and an increase in bad cholesterol levels.

I am more partial to limited saturated fats because it is hard to fully avoid.  I would emphasize unsaturated fats heavily in anyone’s diet.

5. You can shift fruit consumption to vegetables

Vegetables are very similar to lean protein in that there is a higher thermic effect in vegetables which causes a faster metabolism.  It is also less calorie dense and higher in nutrients compared to other carbs.  You can replace fruit servings, which have fructose instead of sucrose, which is like a lesser evil.  For most people that struggle with leaning out, then I would say limit your fruit to a piece or handful a day or none at all if you can’t handle it.  While it has many nutrient redeeming values, you can get the same nutrients in vegetables and fruits.

6. 5-6 meals a day

People often think that eating less will help them lose weight.  Unfortunately your body doesn’t act that way.  As you starve yourself, your body counters by actually trying to hold onto the fat to preserve itself and gives up more water weight and lean mass.  Your body will eat the lean muscle tissue and then start going after your organs before eating the fat.  How gross is that crap!?!?

You might lose weight, but all you do is become a skinny fat person.  By eating meals every 3 hours or so, and 5-6 a day, you are getting your metabolism moving and burning fat at a faster rate.  This isn’t absolute.  A lot of people get healthy eating 3-4 meals a day with the right type of foods, but this is a way to kick start your metabolism and also build in good habits so you are never hungry.

7. Smaller meals as the days progress

Smaller meals are always better.  You body can only take a certain amount of calories and nutrients and then it stores the excess as body fat.  Also as you progress through the day you burn less and less calories until finally you go to sleep.  Eat the calories earlier so you can work them off.  Stick to 200-500 calorie meals.  The better way to do it is to measure by the palm of your hand.  usually allow for your protein to fill one cupped hand, maybe two.  Allow for your vegetables to fill two cupped hands and include variety.  Then allow for a hand full of fruit and a hand full of nuts one time out of the day.  Some may be able to do more or less.  Much of the calories per meal will depend on your current body weight and composition.

There is nothing wrong with even doing some intermittent fasting once or twice a week.  People like Lean Gains guru Martin Berkhan suggest that you should fast 8-16 hours, but no longer than that.

8. Never let your overall carbs go below 25% of your daily servings

I tend to focus on a “paleo diet”, which emphasizes some of the aspects I talked about above.  The whole idea is that you are doing the type of diet that our ancestors have done.  Often when you cut out sugar and flour, people then assume you mean low or no carbs.  That isn’t true.  In fact, there is a high emphasis on carbs, coming from vegetables.  People have a tendency to go crazy over high protein or high fat diets.  Carbs have become the enemy.  It is actually one of the worse things you could do.  Carbs should consist of 30-50% of your diet.  If you do go down to 30-40% carbs, you shouldn’t do it for more than a month.

Carbs are necessary for energy with the amount of daily exercise you will need to lose fat.  In fact, many runners and elite athletes will raise their carbs to 60-70% during training to help lose even more weight.  Now again that goes back to the amount of energy they are exerting, their genetic make-up, and other factors.  With that said, make sure that you get a substantial amount of vegetables, especially if you are the type to easily put on fat.

9. Zig-Zag your food sources or establish variety

If you do a high protein diet where protein consumes 40-50% of your nutrition, it is important to keep your body guessing when it comes to calories and the type of foods you are eating.  Raise your carbs every 3-4 days, emphasis on veggies, to

Mix in a lot of colors when you eat vegetables

replenish glycogen levels or have 2-3 days of higher protein intake to create a zig-zag effect.

While you can find success building habits and eating the same healthy meals again and again, it is important that you allow for some variety.  Eat other vegetables besides broccoli.  Don’t always eat chicken.  Keep mixing it up. Each protein and carb provides unique nutrients that helps to fulfill our daily needs.  When you think of vegetables, think of eating different colors of vegetables often.

When you spice things up with herbs and spices, it can add a whole new level of excitement. (You are probably thinking I am crazy and that fun is Hi-Chews, Cheetos, and a six pack.)  This is definitely going to be a paradigm shift, but I promise you that you will find a greater appreciation for foods that were once bland to you, that now rattle your taste buds.

Sometimes I feel like eating sugar and flour desensitizes the same way media does to our threshold for violence, sex, and countless other things.  I am not trying to get on a soap box, but sugar can wear our insulin resistance down over time and make us more susceptible to diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. Fight back.  Your body wasn’t meant to be in that condition.  We weren’t built that way.

10. Make it Easy!

One of the hardest challenges that people have is finding the time to cook food.  I always recommend to find a professional food service if at all possible.  Counter to what people think, it can be fairly inexpensive.  For my meals I spend about $130/week for lunch, a snack, and dinner.  It saves me money on eating out and gas to go get food.  More importantly it saves me hundred of hours a year to make my life more effective.

We eat not only based on what we are craving, but what is convenient.  If you can make healthy food convenient, then there is a higher chance you will eat it.  This in turn also saves a great deal of time in the gym trying to make up for eating crappy food.

I whole heartedly believe that 80% of health is nutrition and 20% is fitness.  Maybe more…well at least it is for me.   You will have to tell me what works best for you.

If this doesn’t fit into your plans for whatever reason, then it is important that you cook ahead of schedule a week in advanced.  Life gets crazy and try to simplify it by cooking all at once and carrying meals with you on the go.

Conclusion

While I believe nutrition is the foundation and most significant part, all of this doesn’t matter unless you include a well thought out fitness program.  It is the ying to your yang, the Abbott to your Costello, or the Michael Moore to your Glenn Beck.  That might have actually caused more confusion.  Anywho…here are several tips you can include in your fitness routine to help lose weight fast. If you can include muscle confusion, eat healthy, and get 8-9 hours of sleep in a pitch dark room, then you are on your way to fast body fat loss.

There are numerous other steps you can take in nutrition, but these will make a huge impact.  The truth is that there is really no way how to lose weight fast and easy.  It will take effort and time for you to understand your body.  Be patient because healthy habits don’t happen overnight.  Keep measuring your results and look for ways to make adjustments in your nutrition plan to continue to find success.

Most importantly enjoy your steps in this process and come back and share what is and isn’t working.

About Cade

Cade is the founder of Know My Body. Sorry...no doctor degree, fancy gym, multi-million dollar fitness program, or label as a self-proclaimed health guru of biblical proportions. He is a common guy just like you. Maybe that helps him get you a bit better.

He has worked the past several years trying to get a grasp of "health knowledgeries" from the perspective of a person working a 9 to 5 job and dealing with the normal and not-so-normal challenges that life gives. Visit our About Page to chew on some more knowledge about Cade and how we want to help you at Know My Body.