As a personal trainer, I have encountered many clients of all shapes and sizes, looking for one thing: fat loss. One particular client here at Fitness Transform, came to me when she found she could no longer deny what her lifestyle was doing to her body.
At 260 lbs, she was constantly in pain from the arthritis in her knees and frustrated with herself. After all, she was not living the life she had intended for herself. Her turning point came when she was going on vacation and needed a bathing suit; trying them on in the dressing room was her “moment of truth.” She immediately resolved to do something about her weight – she came to me.
We began working together twice a week on her fitness and fat loss journey. Of course, it was not until she fully addressed her dietary habits that she began to see real progress. By keeping a food journal, she was able to stay on track with her new low-carb diet, and in doing so, her fat cells opened, allowing her body to use her fat as a source of fuel. She began losing 10 lbs a month!
Two years down the road, she lost 100 lbs and thanks my Primal Body Program for her success.
In my twenty plus years of experience, I have never once come across a client – whether struggling with hormonal imbalances, major stress and elevated cortisol levels, or who had been sitting on the sofa for the last forty years – who could not lose the weight they wanted!
How have all of my clients done it? They followed these two key concepts:
The first is the low-carbohydrate diet. With the onset of civilization and a shift to an agricultural way of life, the human body was challenged to adapt to a new diet and metabolize large quantities of sugar and starch. With that change came corresponding high levels of insulin, the hormone responsible for regulating glucose and storing fat. Simply put, when we overeat carbohydrates – sugars and starches – we cause our bodies to automatically store fat.
Thus, the low-carbohydrate diet for most people means bringing their carbohydrate intake below 50 grams per day. We may easily achieve this by enjoying small portions of low-glycemic vegetables at every meal, eliminating dairy and most nuts, and skipping fruits until we have reached our fat-loss goal.
In doing so, we allow our fat cells to open and for our bodies to use our stores of fat as a source of fuel.
The second key concept: creating a caloric deficit. To get our body to burn fat efficiently, we must create a need for fat as fuel. If we’re already eating enough food to meet all of our energy requirements, our bodies have no need to call up their fat reserves.
To lose weight, we must create a caloric deficit, which is a shortage of calories from food. This gets our body burning its own fat reserves for energy, an optimal situation for weight loss. How do we create a caloric deficit? We must determine the level of calories it takes to maintain our current body weight, and then eat to drop below that.
By combining a low-carbohydrate intake with a caloric deficit, we turn our bodies into fat-burning machines! All it takes is knowing a little bit about how our bodies work.