5 Reasons Why You Can’t Lose Fat (Blog)

[Mehdi]

Use this thread to discuss the next post from StrongLifts.com's blog:

5 Reasons Why You Can’t Lose Fat

[rafaerusan]

* Whole grain foods are rarely 100% whole grain. Check breads & pasta.

Rule of thumb: if a caveman couldn’t eat it, neither should you.

Cavemen didn't eat grains.

[Mehdi]

I'm not sure about that. And I won't go into details about that since I haven't looked up all info yet, and I'm not pro or con paleo in either case.

[Bman1]

good article Mehdi. Glad to see the emphasis on a calorie defecit.

Couple of thoughts to add -
1. I think a lot of people not only underestimate how much they eat but also underestimate or forget to count entirely the calories that they drink. So if you are going to track calories, make sure you include not just food but all drinks as well.
2. Should be clear that the 8 nutrition rules don't necessarily create a calorie defecit, they just make it much easier to create a calorie defecit by limiting carbs to post workout. Just like forgetting the calories in drinks, many people don't realize how calorie dense carbs are, and will tend to underestimate the calories from carbs. That's why the 8 nutrition rules help. Nonetheless, you could definitely create a calorie excess following the 8 rules if you eat enough high fat foods.
3. Though not really that important, Michael Phelps himself said that he doesn't normally eat anywhere near 12,000 calories per day and that he diet during training is more like 8,000 calories per day (still a heck of a lot.)

[MazdaMatt]

Well put, very simple.

One thing that you're missing, and I've been trying to find an answer for this for a long time, is why you stop losing fat when you eat too little?

A friend was over 230lbs and she ate VERY little. She started eating more and she began to lose wieght. (She started jogging and she dropped 90lbs!)

Is it due to an affect on resting metabolism or something?

[Mehdi]

@Bman1
Great points.
1 => yeah drinks too agreed.
2 => people can actually over-eat overtime with the 8 nutrition rules. In the future there will be a calorie method (draft is ready). Basically: start with 8 nutrition rules, when you see fat loss plateau/stop, use calorie method combined with 8 nutrition rules.
3 => I also think NY post was overdoing it, and I hope for Phelps he's not really eating that crap daily. But you get the idea.

@MazdaMatt
Your body has natural way to regulate body-weight. When your caloric deficit is too big (either through starvation or excess cardio or worse both) your metabolic rate slows down, hunger increases, etc. Body does it to force you to eat more. That's why extreme low calorie diets (think 800kcal/day and stuff) often lead to yo-yo dieting: you end up binging because of hunger, go back to old habits, but now regain everything + more because metabolic rate is slower.

So never cut calories by more than 20%. One way to avoid the metabolic slow down is to include rest weeks (think deloads like with training), where you stop your diet and eat at maintenance for a week or something. Then get back to dieting.

[engineer]

Hmm, I use to totally agree with this until I started looking reading Good Calories Bad Calories in part because of the recommendation on this site. Problem is, nothing along these lines every works for my wife and I suspect many others. She has no way of knowing when she's cut by more than 20% because she never loses weight period. And Fitday doesn't lie on how many calories are being consumed. And as Taubes suggests, I suspect her reduction of calories is a big factor in her chronic fatigue. So as a super finicky eater what does she save her calories for? You got it, carbs. That is now changing for both of us.

[gantengx]

According to http://stronglifts.com/5-reasons-why-you-struggle-to-lose-fat/ Mehdi said that to lose fat you have to burn calories (ie. calorie deficit). I'm just curious though, isn't it calorie deficit means weight loss and not fat loss? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Cheers

[thefinalsql]

Priority of fuels used in your body.

Alcohol
Carbohydrates
Fat
Muscle

There is some overlap.

It is very hard to burn muscle, especially if you have a lot of fat stores.

I would say though the lower the BF, the better chance you have in burning muscle.

[gantengx]

so if a skinny+fat person who does strength training have a calorie deficit diet, will that person lose weight or lose fat?

[nburge]

Great article Medhi, very well laid out and hopefully simple enough to get the message across. Couple of thoughts:

Rafaerusan wrote:

Cavemen didn't eat grains.

Some research has come out showing caves in Mozambique where early man was consuming grain; see the following (Mercader J. Mozambican grass seed consumption during the middle stone age. Science. (2009) 326(5960):1680-3.) It probably didn't fill up a large part of their diet though.

@ engineer - I used to think that too. Couldn't understand why I didn't lose weight after changing my diet. Point is you need to weigh the food she eats and ensure that she's not scoffing junk and not recording it. If she's not losing weight at 20% deficit then cut some more. Fitday won't lie but it will only tell you the number of calories for the food YOU have told it you ate. If she's really finnicky about food then that is likely the reason she's struggling to lose weight. Good calories, Bad calories is another populist myth to be sold to people who don't want to believe what Medhi says here - they need to eat less, eat less junk and exercise more to lose weight.

[nburge]

You'll lose fat. Check the latest blog posts. Basically if you go about 20% under your maintenance calories whilst ensuring you eat enough protein you should shed the fat and keep your muscle.

[MazdaMatt]

I have read that a sedate person on a calorie deficit will lose 25% muscle and 75% fat. I can only imagine that exercise reduces the muscle loss because your body still needs it.

[gantengx]

so if a skinny+fat person who do strength training has a calorie deficit it will only burn fat? If so, will the weight still the same? I'm still not sure how it works, calorie deficit means that the body burns more energy than consumed, doesn't that mean the person will also lose weight as well?

[MazdaMatt]

Yeah, i'm pretty sure that calorie deficit = weight loss. The import part that we're emphisizing is that you can choose what type of weight to lose - fat or muscle - based on diet and exercise.

Are you trying to lose fat only? Or stay at the same weight and lose fat? Or get larger and lose fat? I recently gained 3-4 pounds while losing approx a pound of fat. My girlfriend has recently lost many pounds of fat while staying the same weight.