There are too many “diet rules” to follow. It is almost intolerable. So where does Intermittent Fasting fit in? As part of a strict short-term diet, it has the potential to deliver fantastic results. But without implementing it in a sustainable way, the results won’t last either. Here we are going to discuss how to leverage the power of intermittent fasting in a sustainable way, so you can achieve the results you want and keep them.
“Giving yourself a window of time to get your food in helps you control and manage your food intake.” — David Minishian
Implementing A Fasting Diet
An 8-10 hour window, alternating days, and the 5/2 method are just a few of the ways to implement intermittent fasting. However, we find that an 8-10 hour window is the most practical method with daily consistency of implementation. Depending on your daily schedule, you may choose to start breakfast at 10am and finish your last meal at 6pm. By practicing this eating window, your mental barriers can help you stave off mindless eating and late night muchies.
Behavioral & Health Marker Benefits
Arguably the best outcome of intermittent fasting is learning the self discipline necessary to manage your food intake. As this discipline is mastered, common health outcomes you may experience include weight loss, reduced inflammation, improved blood sugar, and in athletes, even raised growth hormone levels.
Ready to build the body you want with a sustainable lifestyle?
David is the owner and head coach at Sculpt Fitness in Long Beach, CA. He leads the mission at Sculpt to educate, equip, and empower the local community to make the best decisions for their health. For over 10 years he has coached exercise and nutrition, helping clients create sustainable lifestyle to build the body they want. When he's not training, coaching or cooking, David is on an adventure with his wife and kids or teeing up his next shot on a golf course.
The Episode: The Magical Low Carb Diet and Why It Stopped Working
Have you ever tried a low carb diet and felt like it was working until it didn’t? You aren’t alone. The immediate gratification of seeing the scale go down on a low carb diet has tricked many people. But this seemingly magical experience isn’t that special and learning why it happens will reveal the key to staying on track with your weight loss mission. I’m going to take you behind the magical façade and show you what works and doesn’t work about a low carb diet.
[2:35] – Effects of Psychological Stress on Consistent Results
[3:32] – Suffering or Thriving With A Low Carb Lifestyle
[4:07] – Low Carb Vs Practical Changes With A Balanced Diet
“A low carb diet isn’t magical because it just works. It helps people stay at a much lower calorie intake, because they cut out the processed foods.” — David Minishian
Potential Benefits of Eating Low Carb
A low carb diet may help you replace processed junk food with whole food alternatives. This will reduce your overall calorie intake and make it easier to maintain a healthy weight. When weight-loss is your primary goal, a low carb diet may also provide a psychological side-benefit of seeing “fast results” on the scale that encourages you to continue. This occurs at the beginning of the diet, because reducing your carbohydrate intake reduces the amount of water your muscles retain. This change in weight is quickly seen on the scale. However, this can a double-edged sword that later knock you off track.
The Difficulties With Eating Low Carb
A low carbohydrate intake may prove difficult to maintain day to day as a sustainable way of eating. The weight fluctuations caused by an increase or decrease in carbs can cause an obsession with the scale and this fixation on the short term outcome hinders the long term goal of living a lifestyle that supports a healthy weight.
Ready to build the body you want with a sustainable lifestyle?
David is the owner and head coach at Sculpt Fitness in Long Beach, CA. He leads the mission at Sculpt to educate, equip, and empower the local community to make the best decisions for their health. For over 10 years he has coached exercise and nutrition, helping clients create sustainable lifestyle to build the body they want. When he's not training, coaching or cooking, David is on an adventure with his wife and kids or teeing up his next shot on a golf course.
Meat and Vegetables are not the only foods without carbs.
Foods without carbs are becoming extremely popular. As the ketogenic diet gains traction, food products are lining the shelves advertising No-Carbs, Low-Carbs, keto-friendly, and high-fiber. More food manufacturers are removing carbs from foods to promote healthy alternatives for consumers.
However, to produce these alternatives the food must be processed and manipulated to create these new dietary macro-nutrient profiles. This raises several questions:
Are these alternatives healthy?
Are the sugar alcohols and isolate fiber that replace the carbs safe?
What is better the unprocessed or processed foods?
Let’s take a deep dive into the world of low to no carb foods to discuss the IF and HOW we should include these in our diet.
IF (You Should Eat Foods Without Carbs)
There are a multitude of food options without carbs. Each one is unique and manufactured to maintain a palatable taste, physical structure/consistency, and nutrient profile.
But not all foods without carbs are made equal. Some incorporate sugar alcohols that are known to cause digestive and GI issues. Others include high concentrations of isolated fibers from oats, wheat, or are made synthetically.
I’m not going to cover each and every possible sugar alcohol and isolated fiber, but the “best” sugar alcohol to consume would be Erythritol (in my opinion). This sugar alcohol causes minimal digestive issues, if any, and has been well-researched as safe for consumption. It doesn’t promote tooth decay, helps control blood sugar, and is low in calories. Plus, erythritol is naturally occurring in foods you probably consume already.
When you consider consuming foods that have been processed and manipulated to be no carb or low carb, remember this: MODERATION IS KEY. Stick to this mantra and eating foods without carbs are usually a non-issue.
How (You Should Eat Foods Without Carbs)
Experiment with the low carb tortillas. Try the no carb protein bars. Test out the keto pancake mix. Just don’t do it all at once. In general, you want a balanced diet based on whole foods, but that diet can also have any of these options in moderation.
Including these foods without carbs in your diet doesn’t mean you have to eat keto. You are just taking the best parts of the diet and adding it to your own diet.
By approaching your diet this way, you can incorporate low carbs foods to help decrease your caloric intake for the day or fill that sweet craving without the added sugars. When you eat these foods without carbs strategically, you can more consistently reach your goals without sacrificing the foods you love.
If you are struggling with your diet and it’s holding you back from building the body you want, you may want to check out the Nutrition Coaching. It’s our nutrition course to help you build the body you want with a sustainable way of eating.
Subscribing to a diet is not the right solution. It could be hurting your chances of success.
Diet Subscription
Starting a new diet is like a temporary subscription. You try it for awhile. See how it feels. Tell your friends and family about it. It’s fun at first, maybe even a little exciting as you figure out new recipes and flavors. After a couple weeks you’re seeing results (down 5 lbs!). The diet is working and you feel incredible!
Maybe you’ve been there and had that initial feeling of success. Well you aren’t alone. Many have seen immediate “results” on a diet and have been quick to share their success. Others hear the diet works, get inspired, try the diet for themselves and have the same experience. The cycle repeats.
But fast forward 3 months and you’ve gained the weight back. The success didn’t last. So…what happened?
You were victimized by the Diet Subscription Trap.
This is a nasty trap that has been used for decades to SELL DIETS. Why sell diets? Because no one makes money telling people to eat fruits and vegetables, reduce processed food intake, and consume smaller portions. Although this is great health advice, it doesn’t sell. However, if the nutrition information is packaged into a specific diet that is easy to follow, it can be sold as a “cure” by savvy individuals who write books. Consumers buy the books, subscribe to the diet, share their results, and promote the diet.
The truth is: it’s all hype. Anyone who restricts their food intake and makes healthier choices will get results. In this way diets are not unique or special. Don’t be a victim of someone’s Diet Subscription Trap. I know several diets look promising. They are backed by science, testimonials, and professionals who advocate for the diet claiming it’s better for XYZ reasons. But none of that matters.
Why?
Because it’s not your diet.
Your Diet
Your diet is the way you eat. It includes the foods you most commonly consume. Everyone has a diet they currently adhere to and depending on the person that diet can fluctuate drastically or be very limited in scope.
Your diet is uniquely yours. It is tailored to your likes and dislikes. For this reason, trying to subscribe to someone else’s diet is like attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole. It doesn’t fit. It was designed by another person who has their own likes and dislikes. Taking their diet won’t work for you.
You have to create your own diet tailored to your goals.
Your “goal oriented” diet will include the foods you enjoy eating. It will also take into account:
Required preparation times
Willingness and ability to cook
Food availability
Take out options
Nutritional knowledge
These numerous factors won’t be taken into account with someone else’s plan. This is why I advocate for creating your own personalized plan, an ideal diet.
Creating your ideal diet is a great place to start, because it provides a diet framework to follow that isn’t food exclusive, but inclusive. This framework is at the core of our Nutrition Coaching to continuously improve their personal diets.
Our Nutrition Coaching is designed to address diet fluidity, because our diets constantly change over time, as the contributing factors I described above change. (This is why rigid diets like meal plans don’t work long-term.) Your ideal diet can be developed in an afternoon, but it requires time and effort to prepare, considering all the factors involved.
The sure fire method to lose weight is reducing calorie intake. The scale proves it true every time.
But you know this already. It’s nothing new. The issue is that it’s not as easy as it sounds. To address the difficulty we’ve come up with countless ways to reduce our food intake: meal prepping, using smaller to go containers, buying off the fit menu, etc. It’s an endless painful struggle of eating less and checking the scale to see if it worked.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. Weight loss doesn’t need to be a terrible relationship with the scale.
For example, athletes manipulate their weight with ease all the time: wrestlers, boxers, body-builders, sumo-wrestlers, etc. Changing their weight is commonplace. In fact, it’s a requirement for their sport. When they step on the scale, it’s not a question of whether they lost or gained weight but by how much.
How do they do it?
The answer is they’ve spent time with food. They have studied how to use food as medicine, as a means to an end. They are educated on what food contains and how much they need to eat. In short, they count their calories, but it’s not the kind of counting that requires meticulous measuring and weighing before every meal. No, that would drive any person insane. Instead, they estimate their food intake at each meal and ensure it fits certain parameters. These parameters keeps their intake in check, almost guaranteeing success. I say almost because they need one critical skill to make it work that I’ll discuss below.
Is Counting Calories Practical?
Calorie counting is a widely known method of controlling food intake, but the methods used to do it effectively are not. Looking at calorie counting objectively we know it works, but from a practical standpoint many deem it too time consuming and tedious to fit into a normal lifestyle. This is where counting calories gets a bad wrap and is not properly understood.
Hard Way: The hard way is to count calories is tracking everything with exact precision. This is unnecessary. We aren’t in a lab. This isn’t a research study. The foods we eat change daily. Don’t fall into the trap that calorie counting is impossible. There is an easy way.
Easy Way: The easy way is to keep a rough running tally. At each meal estimate how many calories are in the meal and write it down. To determine the number of calories you should eat at the last meal of the day (dinner), use the following formula:
This method takes 30 seconds per meal to implement. That’s not a lot of time for results. However, there is one piece to this puzzle still missing take enables you to implement this method quickly and that is the skill I mentioned above. The skill required is mastering the ability to accurately estimate the calories in food. This is an invaluable skill that makes calorie counting quick and easy, and I’m going to divulge exactly how to develop it.
Developing the Skill: Calorie Counting
For two weeks, pick 1 meal a day to weigh on a food scale. A bathroom scale will not provide the accuracy needed to do this. Our objective is to learn how many calories are in each portion of food using the weight of that food. Going through this process of weighing food will reveal an accurate picture of the calories in food. Continuing this process for 2 weeks will strength your ability to accurately estimate the foods you eat most often.
To properly practice this method, weigh each food individually and raw. Look at how many grams that portion weighs and compare it to the nutrition facts online. Nutrition label usually have two forms of measurements including volume and weight. Use the weight in grams to determine how many calories are in the portion weighed. Continue this process for each ingredient in your meal.
At the end you will be able to add up all the calories and make sure the meal fits within the calorie goal. Remember this process is about developing a better grasp of the calorie content in food, not weighing every meal for life. However, you should brush up now and then. It keeps you sharp.
Note: Some foods like grains or nut butters should be comparatively measured in a measuring cup or utensil and weighed. When you measure both ways, you’ll discover how to accurately use measuring cups and utensils. Also, don’t forget to try weighing oils. The difference between 80 and 140 calories is an easy mistake to make with a tablespoon.
The Aftermath
Once you’ve mastered the skill of estimating calories on the go, staying within your caloric goals will become second nature. The skill of estimating calories is worth its weight in gold, but it does require effort to learn. You need to practice or your goal of 1700 calories could end up to be 2200 calories with inaccurate estimates. In the long-term this method will help you maintain your weight and empower you to change it at will. This is how you use the scale to change your weight.
Want to lose weight using proven nutritional strategies? Check out our Nutrition Coaching.
Right now I’m teaching high school students in a health academy class, and they are throwing nutrition questions right and left.
“What type of diet is the best?”
“What should I eat to lose weight?”
“Should I avoid carbs?”
Tons of questions just like these are being asked….
I’m extremely excited to share and teach these young health professionals, but I’m slightly dismayed at how much confusion there is around eating. I’m going to be honest…nutrition is not complicated.
It is not rocket science and you do not have to be a doctor to understand it.
Let me break it down for you…
What is a Diet?
A diet is what you eat. It’s that simple.
Some people eat overwhelming amounts of fast food; some only eat plants.
There is no perfect diet made for every person, but there are bad diets. Diets most people should never touch~ even with a 10 foot pole.
Like the McDonald’s diet…I’m sure most people have heard of Supersize Me and the catastrophic effects fast food had on the participant’s body. Albeit this is an extreme example, this is a type of diet.
Diets also include…
Low Carb, High Carb, High Protein, Low Fat, High Fat, Low Calorie, High Calorie, Vegetarian, Vegan, Omnivore, Carnivore….heck there is even Fruitarian (they only eat fruits and some nuts/seeds).
Which diet from this list do I advocate for? Which diet is the best?
The Best Diet
NONE…Yes I said none…
In most cases, a BALANCED DIET is the best diet; however, an honest and knowledgeable nutrition professional will tell you that some people have better results with different diets.
No two people are the same. Even twins have differences.
How do you know which diet is best for you? Well, that depends on your goals and your genetics…
Since genetic testing is a bit extreme and won’t make a huge difference. I base my advice on a balanced diet tailored to a specific goal and a specific person.
Are you a runner?
Are you seeking to build muscle?
How much do you weigh?
Male or Female?
Lean Body Mass?
Body type?
…Etc….
There are numerous factors that can influence which diet is best for you.
However, a balanced diet is a good place to start.
