What makes a successful diet? For me, losing weight is as hard as it was to give up smoking.

A significant difference is that when you give up smoking there is one very simple fact – you smoke no more cigarettes at all. Whereas you do have to eat, so when you get to the weight you want you have to carry on eating without letting the amount drift upward again. So eating well is something you have to keep an eye on for ever.

So we’ve got two aspects of dieting; losing the weight and maintenance. This post is about the weight loss aspect, I will do another post if I am successful as following a maintenance plan.

So, what is the difference about the two times in my life where I have been able to lose the weight versus the many, many other times where I fell off the wagon after a few weeks?

This post explores several key factors in my recent diet. As it is a very long post (for me), I have split a part of it away from the front page…

Motivation

Fairly obviously it’s not going to work unless the motivation is there. To try and kick an addiction just because someone else is telling you to, your partner, doctor, the news, the government, is not enough. You truly need to want to do it for your own reasons. For me it was getting fed up with growing out of another set of clothes that finally pushed me over the edge and made me decide that enough was enough. Another trigger was seeing a photo of myself from holiday that I was disgusted by. Other people may have a health scare, or catch sight of themselves in a mirror.

Calorie Intake

I firmly believe that you can only lose weight by using more calories than you consume. It’s as simple as that. Other diet techniques are either attempting to cheat this simple fact, such as Atkins where eating low-carb is supposed to force the body to burn fat, or they are variations on the theme. Weight watchers is calorie counting in disguise.

Limiting intake of fats, as a diet technique, only works because fats are high calorie foods. But, get the fat intake too low and it isn’t good for medium term health.

What I am trying to do is keep a healthy mix of the main nutrients, while keeping the total calorie intake low enough to lose weight. How much is low enough? Well, there are several ways to estimate your daily requirement and if you eat less than that amount by between 500 and 1000 calories then you will lose weight.

Don’t be tempted to cut back too much, as an extremely low calorie diet can be damaging – most recommendations say don’t go below 1000 calories less than your daily requirement, which would lead to a 2lb per week loss.

My calorie budget comes to about 1100 calories per day to lose 2lb per week. That isn’t much, really. If all I was doing is controlling my calorie intake I would find it very, very hard to eat only 1100 calories every single day. I would probably have given up after the second week.

Body fat

What you really want to lose is body fat, not just weight. If you diet with controlling your food intake alone then you won’t just be losing body fat. Your body actually finds breaking down your muscle for nutrients easier. It is not unusual for someone dieting to lose a good amount of weight, but end up with a higher body fat percentage at the end of it – and be less healthy.

Body fat is what really matters, but it is impossible to measure directly. Your weight is much easier to find out, but it isn’t that good an indicator of how well a diet is going. Simply measuring your waist each week is a better indicator than weight, or if the budget stretches far enough some body fat scales, such as the Tanita range are worth getting.

Exercise

So, how do you lose fat and not muscle? Well, I’m not sure that relatively fast diet (around 2lb per week) can burn just fat. All that you can reasonably expect is to maximise the fat loss. To do that then an exercise program to go alongside the diet will help.

Now, most people would recommend a cardiovascular workout such as walking briskly, or even running as a way of burning calories quickly and helping with the weight loss. But, a typical 10 minute jog will only burn about 100 calories, less than a Mars bar. Worse, the body needs to find the energy, and if you are eating a low calorie diet it will just as likely burn muscle as fat – not what we really want. (There are some benefits here though, which I’ll cover later).

That leaves anaerobic exercise, typically weight-lifting. Now weight-lifting burns a reasonable number of calories too (which could come from some muscle breakdown, also), but it induces muscles to rebuild, and given sufficient nutrients (especially protein) this growth will counteract the muscle wastage of being on a low calorie diet.

Remember that I said that I would find it impossible to keep to a diet where I could only eat 1100 calories per day? Cardiovascular exercise is a way of improving overall fitness while making that low-calorie budget achievable. Every 100 calories burned is an extra 100 calories that you can eat. So, on a day with a heavy workout I might have 500 calories of exercise that I can add to my budget, giving 1600 calories — much more liveable with.

Put it together

If you combine the thoughts regarding calorie intake, body fat and exercise (both cardiovascular and anaerobic) together it can seem quite confusing, and that it can’t all work together, but it can.

To reiterate, what are our goals? Lose weight. Lose body fat. Maintain muscle. Improve fitness. And we want to be able to eat enough food not to feel hungry all the time.

Here is my way of losing body fat….

1. Work out your daily calorie budget. A deficit of 500 calories per day gives about 1lb per week. Don’t go over a 1000 calorie per day deficit. This is the engine behind the weight loss.
2. Do three purely cardiovascular workouts per week, aiming for around 400 calories of exercise, so on those days you can eat 400 calories more. This makes it possible to eat more, and feel more satisfied as well as contributing to your overall fitness level.
3. Do three mixed workouts, 50% cardiovascular and 50% weight lifting, in my case this gives around 500 calories that I can add to my daily budget. Again, this makes is possible to eat more, but also helps to ensure that the weight loss is more fat than muscle.
4. Eat extra protein on days with weight lifting, so that the muscle regeneration has something to work with. But, don’t forget to take it out of your calorie budget!

That’s it. To make it work, you need to be able to fit in 6 bouts of exercise per week. Not easy for everyone, but a sure-fire way of making weight loss work. It might not be as hard as you may think, a friend has started cycling to work, a 20 minute journey each way which is the cardiovascular exercise taken care of.

Tracking

A key factor for success is recording your calories, and your weight loss progress.

I weigh myself daily, and use a program (Diet Power) to analyse that and the food that I am eating. The program smooths out the daily fluctuations due to salt, water and waste content which enables me to see my progress over time.

Quite a few experts recommend against weighing daily, and suggest a weekly weigh-in. I disagree. Daily fluctuations can be as much as 2 lb, so take a worse case scenario. On the first week you are on a low fluctuation and read 139lb. The next week you are on a high fluctuation and read 140lb. Oh no, what am I doing wrong? I’m gaining weight and I’m hardly eating and working out. Nothing works, I have a weird metabolism, I’m quitting. You really lost 1lb, but the infrequency of weighing compared with the daily “noise” makes it look like you’d gained a pound.

Daily weighing and the help of a program like Diet Power to “analyse away” the fluctuations makes it possible to see what your real weight loss is.

I also smooth out my body fat percentage readings from my Tanita scales to be able to see how much of my weight loss is fat.

Persistence

The final piece of the puzzle is persistence. Losing 50lb at a maximum safe rate of 2lb a week will take 6 months. This is a long time to be following a strict regime, and it is not possible for most people to do without the occasional wobble. In fact, how many meals out will you go on with friends? Or special events, such as Christmas or birthdays? Parties? Or even days where that Chinese takeaway is too irresistible to ignore?

My advice is based on damage limitation. The worst thing you can do is to give up entirely, so the main damage limitation is to restart the diet the next day. Simply get up, brush off the dust, and get back on that horse!

The next bit of damage limitation is to counteract the damage, if you can. If you can then restrict your calorie budget by a couple of hundred calories for a couple of days in advance and a couple of days after or have an extra workout. Don’t try too hard here, 2000 calories blown on a takeaway can’t be wiped out by an extra workout session after all, but it helps.

If you do wobble, don’t get too disheartened. Instead get focussed again and try and avoid wobbling again for at least a couple of weeks!