Everything You Need to Know About Fat Burning Diets

To build a lean, strong body, you need to do two things: burn fat and build muscle. In earlier posts, I showed you how to efficiently build muscle doing compound lifts that stimulate hormone secretion with the deadlift, the squat, and the press.

But what about the other part? How do you lose fat? The current paradigm in our culture is this: eat less and exercise more.

This idea is dead wrong.

To lose fat, you need to stop depriving yourself of food and forcing yourself to go to the gym for hours of cardio every week. The best fat burning diets are not the caloric restriction-type diets we have all been led to believe. (Hell yes I can back this up…)

The First Law of Thermodynamics

The idea that the calories you consume minus the calories you work off leads to weight gain or loss is based on the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed in a closed system:

Energy In – Energy Out = Energy Change

In the case of the human body, “energy in” is calories from food, and “energy out” is comprised of basal metabolic rate and exercise. Energy change is the accumulation or loss of either fat or muscle. If energy in is greater than energy out, weight is gained. If energy out is greater than energy in, weight is lost.

The Problem with “Eat Less, Exercise More”

I work as a scientist and spent plenty of time in my physics and engineering classes during school learning all about thermodynamics. And I gotta tell ya, there’s two things you are missing in this “energy in – energy out” equation.

The first is the assumption that “energy in” has no effect on “energy out.” In robots and computers, this may be the case, but in a complex system such as the human body, there are many systems all working and communicating with one another. Each effecting one another. This is known as homeostasis.

When you restrict your caloric intake your energy levels go down and it becomes much more difficult to work out. What’s worse, over time your body adjusts to this lowered caloric intake by reducing your basal metabolic rate. You are in a perpetual state of starvation and get little to show for it.

When you exercise more, you work up an appetite. Now that you are reducing your calories, you have two options: chow down and undo all that calorie-burning you have been doing, or use all your willpower to put yourself back in starvation mode, as described above.

The other problem is that there is nothing about the first law of thermodynamics that states that “energy in – energy out” is the CAUSE and “energy change” is the EFFECT. For example, when a child is growing, you don’t say that it is because they are eating too much and exercising too little. While these things must correlate with the child’s growth, it is not the cause. The causes are hormones and gene expression. The effects are growth and a smaller “energy in” relative to “energy out.” So why don’t we think that hormones and gene expression are causes when we are adults?

How to Lose Fat… The Long, Hard Way

Guess what? Restricting calories and forcing yourself to exercise has been proven to lead to weight loss. But what a miserable existence it is. In addition to being in never-ending starvation mode, you gain back more weight when you inevitably burn out on the diet, and you squander the majority of your willpower.

Studies have found that we only have a limited amount of self-control. Once it is used up, we go into instinctual and reactive mode. Now, I created this blog for guys who are busy with their lives. And if you have school, work, family, friends, etc. going on, they are all going to suffer if you are squandering your willpower on eating less and exercising more. Check out this video for more info on this phenomenon.

The Secret of Fat-Burning Diets

Feeling distraught yet? Like nothing you do can change your body composition? Well I have good news for you: Your body is BUILT to burn fat… you just need to relearn how to do it!

When was the last time you saw an obese wild animal? Sure, we’ve all seen fat cats, but wild animals never get overweight, despite always eating to satiation and only exercising as much as is necessary to get food and attract mates.

The biggest difference between them and humans is that they are eating food, and we are not.

Reclaiming Food

Instead of fat accumulation being the product of calories in minus calories out, it is primarily a hormonal response based on the food you eat. Wild animals are still, with few exceptions, eating the food they evolved to eat over hundreds of thousands to millions of years. We are not.

One of the biggest suspects of fat accumulation is sugars and other simple carbohydrates. Excess fructose damages our livers, leading to leptin resistance and an inability to tell when we are full. Fructose has also been implicated in causing insulin resistance, which is the state in which our bodies are constantly accumulating fat in our cells. The refined grains that are such a large part of our diets further lead to fat storage with their temporary insulin spikes in the bloodstream.

It wasn’t until very recently that such large amounts of refined carbs and sugars composed so much of our diets. Until the agricultural revolution, our diets were composed of lots of meat and vegetables, with some seasonal eggs, fruits, seeds, and nuts. Pretty hard to carb binge on that.

The Solution Isn’t Low-Carb, It’s Low-CRAP!

Now, I am not a “low carb” guy, even thought it may look that way. I eat a diet much lower in carbohydrates and much higher in fat than what is recommended by the “health authorities” based on my research into the evolutionarily adapted diet of humans, but many societies have thrived on higher carb diets.

The Kitavans are the best example. This modern hunter-gatherer society eats 69% of their calories as carbs, mostly in the form of starchy roots and tubers, and yet they are fit and healthy for the entirety of their lives.

The solution is clear, but it’s difficult to follow through on for most people addicted to sugar and white bread. Reduce the crap in your diet as much as possible. By “crap” I mean highly processed foods, filled with unpronounceable chemicals, that your grandparents would never have found in the grocery store.

Highly refined carbohydrates may be THE biggest determinant of fat accumulation in the human body, but with all the other garbage that’s in the “food” you find in the supermarket today, I wouldn’t say low-carb is the answer. Almost all of these “ingredients” are so new to the human diet that not enough scientific evidence has been gathered to show whether they are safe or not. But why risk it?

The “calories in, calories out” paradigm, although it technically does work, has led us to become undernourished and completely burned out. Why not make things easier and go to work on the root itself? Eating real food is the key of all fat burning diets, and the one that will give you the most results with the least effort.

Tagged as: calorie counting, confusion, low carb, pareto principle, real food, starvation, thermodynamics