Weight Loss: What Women Get Wrong

If you Just want to get to the Basic Facts then Jump to the bottom of the article where you will get a point by point version.

The Madness of it all…

How Many diets does it take? How many classes do you have to take and how many miles do yo have to run before you realize you never seem to get to far with your weight loss. How many Rebounds, how many cabbage leaf stews, how many DVD’s and TV sure thing fixes. How many low carb meals, high carb meals, high fat meals, low fat meals, Zero fat meals. How many T-Plans, Z-Plans and walking around with misshapen shoe plans, does it take, before you to finally realize that you need to learn how and why the body looses fat in order to finally and forever get into the shape you have spent the last few years desperately throwing yourself towards but never quite landing at.

When it comes to trying the latest Class or Dieting Fad ,Women, are particularly susceptible, although i am seeing more and more men also heading down this same road to failure. In fairness to all you ladies out their, at least you are trying, most lads don’t even do that… But that is an a story for a separate Article…(coming soon).

But why is this so?

Why do Women keep trying new diets and hyped up classes?

The answer is easy.

It is because all the Fad Diets and hyped up shiny new classes they have tried in the past have failed…

Perhaps it is time to stop repeating this pattern of fail and repeat and start doing something that works, not just for a few weeks but for ever. Yes you will have to learn some new skills, like actually learning what it is you are putting in your mouth each day… and how what you are eating is affecting you and your body, and not some imaginary statistical body. And you also need to learn how to train right and track your training progress, but these are things anybody who trains should be doing anyway…Right?

Programs like our Own IRON CAST: 12 Week Transformation program for Women will teach you these skills and i urge you to check them out. In fact all Dynamic Identity’s Online coaching programs teach these skills as standard. But for those of you who wish to still go it alone then these next few rules will set you on target to getting your weight and physique right not just for a shot time but for the rest of your life.

Pay attention: The fundamentals for Weight Loss for women is about to be reveled to you.

Do you know how much food you should you be eating?

Here is a quick question for you. How many calories can you eat today and still lose weight? And by you i do mean you… and not some mythical statistical you. You who is reading this Article right now?

Not Sure?

Let’s get one thing straight right from the start, if you don’t know the answer to that most basic of questions then what hope have you got? (Don’t get discouraged, i’m about to show you the easiest way to find this mystery starting point). Sure, you may know a dozen different ways of dropping a few pound or kilos in a hurry. I have never met a woman who didn’t have a t least a few tricks they can call on when a special event is approaching. But i’m not talking about dropping a few Kilos, i’m talking about continued fat-loss and conditioning which will get you to the shape you have always wanted and keep you there.

Diets from magazines and TV hyped products almost never take into account just how much food an individual need to eat to loose weight. And of course the amount differs from person to and from weight to weight and there are some very well tried and tested methods involving calculating your Basal metabolic rate and your resting Metabolic rate, and you exercise levels. Or you could use methods that have you first calculate your body-fat percentage and Somatype… And these are all very good and and if you are a a personal trainer easy enough to calculate.. But if you are not a personal trainer then you need an easier way of knowing where to start. So here it is.

1. Weight yourself.

2. If you weighted yourself in pounds then multiply your weight by 13

3. If you weighed yourself in Kilos then Multiply your weight by 28

So if you weight 200 lb then you can eat 2,600 kcal per day and lose weight.

And if you weight 80 kg then you can eat 2,240 kcal per day and lose weight.

That’s it. Easy wasn’t it.

These numbers can now be revised up or down depending on whether or not you are losing weight to fast or to slow. And yes, you can lose wight to fast and if you do it will just accelerate you into plateau remarkable fast. But more on that later.

Do you know how much food you are eating?

Having established in the last section just how many calories you need to be eating, the next big question has to be… exactly how much are you eating, on a day to day basis and on a week to week basis. And yes this is where the real work begins, and don’t be giving me any guff either. Remember, the reason you have not been able to get into the shape you have always wanted is because you haven’t been getting things right. Well here is your opportunity to change that habit once and for all. And what’s more, with today’s technology even this step could not get much easier. The App that most of my clients use is, My Fitness Pal.

You need to keep a diary of everything you eat for a whole week. Be as accurate as you can with amounts. My fitness pal is a good app that removes a lot of the hard work. It will add up all foods entered and give you a break down of what you eating. Now these sort of apps will fire quite a lot of information at you but there are only 4 attributes that you will be paying any attention. Carbohydrates, Protein, fat and Calories (or kcals)

At the end of each day you will know just how much you have been eating. Don’t panic if your numbers are over or under for a given day, the spread over the full week is far more important that a single days readings so record everything each and every day and then average your numbers out over the week. Next we are going to look at what those calories you are eating should be made up of.

Are you eating enough Protein?

One of the greatest mistakes women make when it comes to losing weight is their poor consumption of Protein. If i could offer only 1 piece of advice to women who are having trouble getting in shape it would be… EAT MORE PROTEIN!!! No, you will not get big and muscular. No, you will not get butch and masculine and, no, you will not get an uncontrollable urge to crush empty cans of beer on your forehead, develop an unhealthy fetish for power tools or burp out out the alphabet to the amusement of your friends. What you will more than likely get is a leaner more toned body, more energy, more strength, a greater ability to burn off fat, a greater ability to use carbs for energy and a dynamite ass. Pretty cool eh…

Okay if i have finally sold you on the whole protein thing lets look at amounts. There have been quite a lot of studies done over the years which look at the optimal amount of protein needed by people but only a few have looked at the relationship between weight loss and protein needs in the diet. In order to make this article reasonable length i am not going to go into those studies here though i will be posting an article on exactly why the amounts needed are needed, in another article coming soon. So if you don’t want to miss it go to the subscription entry at the pot of this article and fill in the boxes. But for now you only need to now that for maximal fat loss you need to eat about 2 grams of protein for every Kilo of Body weight or or about 1 gram for every pound of body weight.

Balancing your MACRO’s

MACRO’s are your macro, or large food elements; Carbs, Proteins and Fats. Together with your Kacl’s they are all you need to know about your food to become a Lean, Mean, Beach Bod Queen.

From the previous section we already have our method for calculating our protein needs and now we need to look at our fats and carbs. There are a couple of different ways of combining these two remaining factors in the framework of our diet but and they all have their advantages and disadvantages depending on Training style and volume as well as some genetic factors. So i’m just going to pick the one that i find works best for just about everybody and which can most easily be followed. So i suggest that you add about 40-60 grams of fat to you protein and make up the rest of your Calories from Carbs.

One other small thing before we move on. In order to work out our MACRO’s it is important that know how many calories we need to assign to Carbs Proteins and Fats.

Carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram

Proteins have 4 calories per gram

Fats have 9 calories per gram

Using our 80 kg and 200 lb example people from earlier lets look at how the MACRO’s stack up.

Our 80 kg person (total calories = 2240)

Protein = 160 gram = 640 calories

Fat = 50 gram = 450 calories

carbs = 287 grams = 1150 calories

Total calories 2240

And for our 200 lb person (total calories = 2600)

Protein = 200 gram = 800 Calories

Fat = 60 grams = 540 calories

Carbs = 315 grams =1260 calories

Total Calories = 2600

I will add just the one Caveat to these calories and MACRO levels. These are for active people who exercise or plan to exercise as part of their plan to get… Super Girl on The dance Floor Fit… I don’t care how big or heavy you are, this plan will work, not just sometimes but every time as long as you are willing to get up off your arse. But… if you are a couch potato and plan to stay that way… well please come back when you are ready to get a bit more serious.

Now back to the plan

But what happens when after a month or so when you hit the dreaded Plateau and you weight loss slows or stop…?

Let’s cover that in the next section.

The Dreaded Plateau.

Sooner or later we all hit the dreaded Plateau, where your weight loss just grinds to halt and stops. For magazine and TV diet and exercise plans this usually happens somewhere in the 4 to 8 week bracket. And it is usually accompanied by a complete lack of enthusiasm for either the diet or the training.

There is a reason this happens and the reason is that almost all plans and Programs out there do not account for progression or for your body’s adaption to the diet and training. As a general rule quick Loss programs throw everything they have at you so that you will see big weight losses quickly and you will tell everybody about their wonderful product and they will get even more sales. But what all these…quick methods do is cause your body to crash and burn shortly after you are starting to see the best results. It is always a mistake to approach weight loss or more specifically fat loss in this quick loss way. Let me just repeat that last sentience IT IS ALWAYS A MISTAKE TO APPROACH WEIGHT LOSS OR MORE SPECIFICALLY, FAT LOSS IN THIS QUICK LOSS WAY.

And what is worse is that this sudden halt in progress and enthusiasm is usually followed by a big bounce back in weight and FAT. And you think it is your Fault because you’re just not strong enough or genetically gifted enough to have seen it through RUBBISH. IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. It is in fact the fault of the people who designed the program for you and sold it to you. They knew this would happen but they also knew that you could be sold on the idea of quick fat loss because lets’s face it we would all love easy quick fat loss.

The reality is that the body does not like to loose weight fast, it does not like it all. And given the first chance it gets it will smother the body in as much fat as it can, particularly after a period of what it sees as a starvation episode. You have to remember you body gets fat for a reason. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have though it that it should be storing as much fat as it can for times when food is scarce. 70 or 80 years of having fridges in our homes and a few hundred years of having a local shop just down the road is just not enough time to have any sort of genetic impact on the body’s fuel storage systems.

And anyway, what is the big rush to loose body fat for in the first place. If you have spent 5 to 10 years of yo-yo dieting and getting nowhere, why would you have a problem with spending 1 to maybe 2 years, depending on your size, getting really good and lean and staying that way for the rest of your life. Surely you have wasted enough years all ready messing about with rubbish that just does not work in the long term. Isn’t time you just stopped arsing about and just do it right?

The simplest way to beat your Plateau is to just take 20 grams of carbs away from your current Kcal allowance per day.. I know this sounds too easy to work… but it does. But only is you have been eating as much as you could while loosing weight in the first place, like we discussed earlier. If you have been starving yourself then it won’t work well or not at all, because you have already crashed your system and the body would rather just make you more tired and less likely to use calories than let you burn off even more precious fat reserves.

Training for fat Loss

Good Idea Bad Idea

Now i’m not going to spend a huge amount of time insulting people who take a lot gym studio classes or the classes themselves. I firmly believe you should never tell someone not to do something the love. And i also believe that any exercise is better than none… BUT… and i know you were waiting for that…BUT… if the plan is to lose fat and get lean and the plan is to stay that way then it is just never going to happen if you are reliant on studio classes to get you there, even if some of those classes are the really tough ones like Cross-fit.

Can you have classes as part of your solution? Sure you can, they can be fun and help motivate you and they can burn of some calories too and Cross-fit is one of the best forms of them. But if spin or playing football with your mates is your thing, well then go for it a couple of times a week and peddle you little heart away or kick that ball around a muddy field all day long. In fact i make that very point in our own transformation courses,IRON CAST: 12 Week Transformation program for Women and STEEL CUT: 12 Week Transformation program for men that it is important to keep doing thee exercise you all ready love.

But at the heart of every true weight loss or transformation course there should be heavy lifting. And by heavy, i mean heavy for you… not heavy by strength athlete standards. The training should be challenging and focused with goals and targets. It should progress and adapt as you get stronger and leaner as it guides you towards your ultimate goal of a lean and more importantly, healthy body.

If nothing else remember this… nothing else in your body burns fat for fuel except muscle…! Nothing!!! So even if you don’t have a lot of it you should be learning to use the muscle you do have and to use it at it’s maximum ability. They way it is using your fat stores to it;s highest level. And that too much spinning or running around muddy fields with a ball and not enough heavy lifting causes the body the shed muscle. And every little bit of muscle your body gets rid of is one less bit you have to burn the fat yo are so desperate to get rid of. and don’t make the excuse that you don’t know how to lift weights. Learn! Get a coach or buy a book and just start. They are plenty of free strength programs here on Dynamic Identities home page… for you to check out and we even have a full Video Exercise Library here on site so you can see how the many different lifts should be done.

So get lifting and moving and loose that fat, even the stubborn stuff that has been hanging round for years and have some fun while you are doing it too.

The really quick Version…

Calculate the max calories you can eat and still loose weight.

If you weight yourself in KG then multiply your weight by 28.
If you weight yourself in pounds then multiply your weight by 13.
This will give you your weight loss calories starting point.
It can be adjusted up or down over time if needed

Assign your calories to the 3 specific macro’s.

Carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram.
Proteins have 4 calories per gram.
Fats have 9 calories per gram.
Multiply you weight in Kg by 2 or your weight in pounds by 1 to get the correct amount of protein you will need.
Multiply the answer by 4 to know how many of your calories will be coming from Protein.
Assign yourself a daily allowance of around 50 to 70 grams of fat.
Multiply that number by 9 to know how many of your calories are coming from Fat.
Add you fat calories and your Protein Calories together.
Subtract the total from your overall daily calories. This is how many calories from carbohydrates you can have each day.
Divide your Carb calories by 4 to get the card grams allowed each day.

Training

Train up to 5 times per week
3 of these sessions should be heavy lifting
The other 2 sessions should be classes or sports you like or some types of cardio.

See. Noting to it… So get at it