Ok, ok, ok I admit it, that title is a little misleading. I didn’t JUST discover the magic weight loss solution, I’ve known it for decades. I have screamed it from the mountain tops, I have drilled it into my clients, I have tried to live as closely to this concept as I can. Because I KNOW it works.

We’ve all heard the phrase, caloric deficit. Maybe not exactly in those words, but the idea here is that if you consume fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. So based on that premise, one would assume that eating a very low calorie diet and doing hours of cardio a week would cause us to lose weight. And for good measure, make that a low carb, low fat diet just because that makes sense, right? Because fat in our diets MUST make us fat, right?

But does it? Has that worked for you?

In most cases, no. It hasn’t worked, and in fact, have you ended up gaining the weight back (usually seen as fat around the mid section)? Have you tried losing again just to find you have to eat even LESS food and do MORE cardio?

This isn’t the way it works. You can only white knuckle through a diet for so long before you just can’t keep it up! It’s not because of your lack of motivation, or your lack of discipline. This is not how your body works and your efforts are actually causing your body to do exactly the opposite of what you want. Your body begins to store visceral fat around the mid section. Your body is actually causing you to be hungrier. And your body is slowing its metabolic rate down, causing you to gain weight by eating the same number of calories you always had. Yes, by eating the SAME number of calories you always had.

There are a few ways to combat this— here’s where the magic comes in.

Eating high refined carbohydrate diets, especially with a lot of sugar, even if you’re eating the appropriate number of calories…..let me repeat that because it’s important- EVEN IF YOU’RE EATING THE APPROPRIATE NUMBER OF CALORIES– a high carbohydrate, low fat, high sugar, diet that includes any processed foods, will cause you to store circulating fuel in the blood as belly fat, leaving the rest of your body deprived and craving nutrients. Belly fat is a special kind of anabolic fat that wants to build and grow, it is the source of many hormone processes that are involved with metabolism and fat storage. It is like a sponge and vacuums up the fuel in your blood. It ultimately causes you to be hungrier, it slows the metabolism and cycles back again by sucking up that food nutrients in the blood, growing the fat even more. You feel hungry- you’re body thinks you’re starving, so it over stores as fat. Overeating is driven by the loss of metabolic fuels that are sequestered in the adipose tissue.

So what do you want to do- you want to lower the anabolic drive of those adipose cells. In other words, lower the building mechanism and tendency of those fat cells. Lowering the anabolic drive will lead to automatic weight loss, increase energy expenditure (fat burn) and decrease voluntary food intake (hunger).

It is easier for us to control WHAT you eat, more than HOW MUCH we eat. So by creating a diet of plant based foods, low glycemic foods, whole unprocessed foods, low sugar, low refined carbs (but not necessarily low carbohydrate– remember that too!!), foods that help build up the healthy microbiome in the gut (think fermented foods like kimchee, kombucha and probiotics etc) and avoiding foods that destroy the healthy gut flora, we can focus less on counting calories and allow our bodies to do what it naturally does and let our metabolic process preform as it should.

Oh– and knock it off with the excessive cardio will ya already?!?! Strength training is where it’s at…but thats a blog post for another time.

This is all information gathered from research presented by Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Mark Hyman.