Weight Mangement Part III: Start Easy, Build on Success

Anyway, today we’re gonna continue our post series on Weight Management, and in case you missed out, here’s part 1 and part 2.

So here’s a question. How many of you have a friend** that, in a conscious effort to lose weight, decides to:
– Cut dietary carbohydrate consumption in half
– Immediately cut total caloric consumption to half of what they normally would eat
– Start taking L-Carnitine, or other metabolism boosting supplements
– Increase exercise training volume from 45 minutes 3x/week to 90-120 minutes per day, 5x/week
– On top of that, add in an ADDITIONAL hour a day of cardio 3 days a week, you know, because double sessions are badass and more is better, right?

** (this friend may or may not include you too ;).)

Any way you chop it up, this is not an effective means for most people to set themselves up for long term success.

In fact, this is an EXCELLENT recipe for disaster.

We as human beings, are creatures of habit. We have routines that make it easier for us to get through our days, and we get accustomed to those routines because they don’t require as much mental and/or physical exertion to stick with them, when compared to actually making a positive change within your routine. And unfortunately, positive changes tend to be a lot harder to make happen than negative changes (it’s a hell of a lot easier to clean house on a pint of ben and jerry’s ice cream vs. eating an organic salad with various vegetables, low calorie organic dressing, with lean protein fixtures, right?).

So think about all of the positive changes (harder, more resistant to make-a-habit-forming changes) that your “friend” is trying to embark on:

– cutting carbohydrates consumption in half for alot of people (who have a much-too-high consumption of carbohydrates) can be a great idea to START OUT making changes with. But, when we combine them with…
– Also cutting total calories in half,
– Also supplementing with Fat burners, and,
– ALSO adding additional exercise (whether its aerobic, cardiovascular-based or resistance-based), ESPECIALLY adding in twice or three times the amount of what your body is normally accustomed to…..

All of these things added up will not equate to anything good in the long term whatsoever.

In fact, it will most likely send your body deep into the abyss of sympathetic overdrive that we all need to be very conscious of when attempting to make any type of body composition change.

In the end, what this all means is that you will be left feeling:

– Overly Tired
– Hungry as hell
– Not operating in a good mental, physical, or emotional state whatsoever, due to:

– the drastic imbalance of catabolic/anabolic hormones in the body stemming from a lack of much needed calories (total QUANTITY calories AND total QUALITY of calories) in the diet.

– The addition of fat burner supplements. Although maybe effective in the short term in achieving weight loss, they tend to over-tax your sympathetic nervous system in addition to the stress that’s already been placed on it (carbs cut in half, total calories cut in half, more cardio), stress out your endocrine system (responsible for hormonal regulation), and, once you get off of them, will eventually result in you falling right back to where you started again.

Bottom line, any long-lasting change does not happen overnight. Sure, you maybe successful for a couple weeks, or if you’re real hardcore, possibly a couple months. But is that really what you want? Temporary success? Work hard, put your body through hell and back, just to fall right back to square one because you didn’t focus on mastering smaller, permanent changes, then building on success?

Forget that, people. Focus on the basics first, do it consistently, master it, then move on to your next challenge. And to find out what constitutes “the basics”, in my opinion, stay tuned for our next installment on weight management.

Have a great weekend folks!

MG