How to Set a Target Body Weight to Improve Your Chances of Diet Success
Everyone knows that losing weight is difficult. However, the biggest challenge is to keep this weight down. Knowing your target body weight and then eating the way you would at that body weight can help you create an action plan that will allow you to make sustainable progress. That’s why.
To understand some of the issues surrounding the traditional view of diet, we spoke with two experts, Alan Aragon and Lou Schuler, the authors of The Lean Muscle Diet .
NEAT tutorial
To understand why most diets fail, Aragon and Schuler say, we must first understand the concept ofNo-Exercise Adaptive Thermogenesis , or NEAT for short:
Rapid weight gain is rarely the subject of high-level research. With a few exceptions, this territory has long been given to school football coaches, bodybuilding gurus, and self-taught endocrinologists, also known as steroid enthusiasts. We assume some overlap between these three groups. In one classic study, James Levine and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic deliberately overfed non-obese men with 1,000 calories per day for eight weeks. This is the equivalent of adding four McDonald’s hamburgers to your diet every single day without any changes. A pound of fat contains 3,500 calories of stored energy, so basic math tells you that adding 7,000 calories a week without extra exercise should result in two pounds of fat. In eight weeks, that’s £ 16.
This is not what happened. Many calories were burned through a previously unnamed process that Dr. Levin called Non-Exercise Thermogenesis, or NEAT. NEAT can be any type of movement, conscious or unconscious, including tossing during sleep. Thanks to NEAT, volunteers put on an average of only £ 10.
And that’s only half the story. The NEAT assortment was huge. One volunteer burned 692 more calories when overeating. He turned into a hummingbird. His body did everything except spontaneous liposuction to maintain his original weight. If you think you are resistant to weight gain (in the bodybuilding world, the art is called a “hard gainer”), this is probably not your imagination. There’s a good chance you are an UNUSUAL freak. Another volunteer burned 98 fewer calories. His body actually slowed down, as if to make it easier for the calories to find a comfortable resting place.
So how does NEAT compare to diet? Lu explains that this has to do with the pitfalls of the traditional diet approach.
Take a fictional character named Dan, who weighs 240 pounds and decides it’s time for a change. Dan buys a bestselling book (that is, a book not written by us) and decides to follow the book’s diet pattern exactly. He doesn’t know that the typical diet is only 1,300 calories a day, or less than half of what he usually eats. Nor does it have a solid target weight. He just wants to lose weight – the faster the better.
At first it seems like the kilos fly off Dan’s body – 24 pounds in just six weeks. His wife jokes that he loses a pound every time he takes a shower. Within a month, Dan calculated that he would be under £ 200 for the first time since his first year of college.
But there is one thing Dan doesn’t know: his diet has already let him down. Since he is hungry all the time, his adherence deteriorates slightly every day. And since he has weighed over 200 pounds his entire adult life, Dan’s metabolism is struggling. His NEAT had already dropped, and with the loss of muscle tissue, his resting metabolism also decreased. By the time Dan finally admits that he is no longer on a diet, he has partially gained weight and his body is ready to put on the rest, as well as a few extra pounds. This is what happens when you throw a firecracker into the hornet’s nest of homeostasis.
Eating as if you are meeting your target body weight means your diet is automatically sustainable. As we mentioned earlier, sustainability is the key to success .
How to avoid a drop in NEAT
Instead, Dan can set a target body weight to do better, Schuler and Aragon explain:
Let’s say Dan started out with a specific goal of 216 pounds – an ambitious but realistic loss of 24 pounds, which is 10 percent of his starting weight. Let’s say he gave himself six months to get there, instead of getting there by accident in just six weeks. Let’s say he started out on a diet that’s precisely calculated to maintain his target weight after reaching it. Weight loss will not be linear; Dan would probably start to lose a few pounds a week and end up losing less than a pound a week. But once he reaches 216 pounds, there is a big chance that he will stay there. His metabolism will adapt to his target weight as he gets closer to it. Would Dan be happy with £ 216? We hope so. A 10 percent drop is a big deal. Weight loss in the 2 to 5 percent range has been shown to help lower blood pressure, blood sugar, and triglycerides, which are part of metabolic syndrome. And there is nothing that would prevent him from losing weight even more. But before he can worry about losing more, he must meet goal # 1: make sure that the weight already lost remains lost.
Creating a plan based on your target body weight
So how do we make a plan based on our target body weight?
- First, determine your target body weight and target body fat percentage.
- Insert these numbers into the calculator to determine how many calories you will maintain at your new body weight.
- Now set a realistic time frame to get there. Lou and Alan suggest giving yourself 6 months for every 10% of your body weight you want to lose.
Losing weight is only part of the battle; you also have to lose weight, and this is where many people fail because their diet has already let them down. If this is similar to your past weight loss experience, show a little compassion for yourself and then try again on a smarter schedule this time. By following the instructions above, you will be able to achieve a new body weight and maintain it permanently.