How you control your food intake depends on your personality.

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Episode #5: Ways to Control Your Food Intake  

The ability to control your food intake determines your success at losing weight and building muscle. What and how much food you eat will either support or hinder results. Has your nutritional intake has been preventing you from reaching your goals? Here are the two main methods you can use that will make a difference you can see in the mirror.

In This Episode 

• [00:35] – Methods for Counting Calories
• [02:25] – The Mindful Eating Approach

“Intentional (mindful) eating is really powerful, because you’re able to consume a certain amount of calories without having to think about the numbers.” — David Minishian

Method #1: Counting Calories

Monitoring your calorie intake helps you quantify how much food you are consuming and can increase the likelihood that you will reach your goal. However, implementing this approach accurately and effectively includes a learning curve as you need to become familiar with how many calories are in a serving for each food group. Recognizing the number of calories and servings in a portion will enable you to correctly balance your plate to either increase or decrease your caloric intake. By manipulating the proportion of your meals, you can have more control over your results. What method works best for you, whether choosing to count every calorie or estimate via serving sizes, depends on your personality.

Method #2: Mindful Eating

Mindful eating emphasizes the practice of listening to your body. Becoming familiar with your body’s cues allows you to make better nutritional decisions. We eat for reasons beyond satisfying our hunger, but hunger and nourishment are the only necessary reasons to eat. When you can recognize the difference between hunger and thirst, various levels of fullness, and the reasons for cravings, mindful eating will help you intuitively learn what you need to consume.

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Losing weight quickly is not easy or sustainable long term.

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Episode #4 -Trying to Lose Weight Quickly? Stop Wasting Time

Short term, rapid weight loss strategies don’t deliver the best results. If they did, we would be teaching you the quickest ways to lose weight in 30 days or less. The truth is that trying to lose weight quickly ends up becoming a major waste of time. Unanticipated life barriers end up getting in the way and the strategies don’t work long term. Also, the quick results, if any, won’t necessarily make you look better. I’m going to show you why a weight loss plan designed for quick results is not worth your time and energy. 

In This Episode 

• [00:37] – Sustainability of Rapid Weight Loss
• [01:19] – Developing Long Term Skills
• [02:02] – Impacts on Muscle Tone & Definition

“When people try quick weight loss techniques they don’t learn much, they never develop the long term skills they need to keep the weight off, falling back to old habits.” — David Minishian

Sustainability of Rapid Weight Loss

Rapid weight loss can be defined by trying to lose 2+ pounds a week. This rate of weight loss is not easy to do, and it’s not sustainable. To accomplish this, you will need to be in a calorie deficit of 1000 calories a day. This large deficit will cause your hormones to “fight back,” in the form of cravings to say “I need more food.” If you’re struggling to stay disciplined and control your cravings now, imagine what it would be like when your body goes into overdrive, pumping out the strongest cravings.

Long Term Skills

When people try quick weight loss strategies, they do not practice the long term skills necessary to maintain their results. Instead, they revert back to their old habits and regain the weight just as fast, if not faster. Since all the strategies are short term so are the results.

Muscle Tone & Definition

Toned arms, legs, and abs, etc. more accurately means having muscular arms, legs, and abs. When you build muscle tissue at a healthy weight, you’ll see the muscle definition without necessarily being bulky. However, rapid weight loss includes the loss of fat and muscle. Popular rapid weight loss strategies do not support muscle tissue growth but cause muscular atrophy, which has the opposite effect of toning. It is better for most to lose weight at a slower rate, implementing more resistance based training for muscle, not just cardio.

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A low fat diet may shift your focus to whole foods, but beware of possible unintended consequences.

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The Episode: Low Fat Diet – Pros and Cons 

Ever wonder why the push for a low fat diet died? The health and fitness industry goes through cycles pushing the next best thing for your health. Well the low fat cycle didn’t last and for good reason. Before you decide to cut back on fat, here are a few things to know about the low fat diet, the good and the bad.

In This Episode 

• [00:30] – The Power of Paying Attention
• [01:35] – The Impact of Whole Foods
• [02:56] – The Dangers of All or Nothing Mentality 
• [03:45] – Demonizing Fat Rich Foods

“What is really beneficial about going on a low-fat diet, or any diet, is that you become more aware of what you’re eating, being conscious about food choices and how they’re prepared.”  — David Minishian

The Power of Paying Attention

Any diet you adopt will make you more aware of what you are eating. By forcing you to make conscious nutritional decisions, you won’t automatically eat everything in front of you. As you shift your eating patterns to a low fat diet, you will naturally begin to reduce your consumption foods that are higher in fat, like dairy and meat. Instead, you’ll be more aware of your consumption of whole foods like fruit, vegetables, legumes, and grains that have a lower fat content.

The All or Nothing Approach

Restrictive diets, like a low fat diet, prove difficult to adhere to long term. They make social activities like dining out with friends or family cumbersome. If you’ve went out to dinner during a diet and felt like you can’t eat anything on the menu, it sucks. Being forced to break your diet makes you want to throw in the towel and eat whatever sounds amazing. This all or nothing approach is a product of a restrictive diet.

Bad Relationships With Food

Avoiding fats in your diet can be detrimental to the way you see foods, because you start to view foods as low-fat or high-fat, good or bad. The truth is that there are no bad foods, only foods you should eat in greater or smaller amounts and higher or lower frequencies. Some high fat foods that you should eat often like nuts and seeds are important for your overall health. But when you completely cut out foods for non-medical reasons, it does more than create nutritional imbalances. It creates a bad relationship with food.

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The benefits of intermittent fasting can be credited to a sustainable eating window.

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The Episode: Does Intermittent Fasting Work?    

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.

In This Episode 

• [00:30] – Different Methods of Fasting
• [01:10] – Leveraging The Power of A Feeding Window
• [02:29] – Benefits of Fasting
• [03:15] – How To Implement Intermittent Fasting

“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.

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Lowering your carb intake can help reduce your consumption of processed foods.

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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.

​In This Episode 

• [0:45] – Removing Processed Foods
• [1:22] – Relationship Between Carbs and Water
• [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.

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