Clive Fearon has been a personal trainer in Derby for more than 20 years. He explains how to get fit and stay fit and why he believes diets do not work.
DIETS usually fail and most make you fatter. Weight loss is seen as the panacea to cure all the ills in our lives but the majority of people go about it the wrong way and end up back at square one.
Before you shoot the messenger, let me explain why.
Most diets stress a strong reduction in calories for a given period of time. If this reduction is too severe, you're setting yourself up to fail.
This is down to your resting metabolic rate which is the number of calories you require per day to keep yourself alive and to perform bodily processes.
The theory is that if you only consume enough calories to maintain your resting metabolic rate, then you will burn more calories than you are consuming and weight loss will occur.
This approach is doomed to failure because our bodies are machines but are designed to adapt for survival.
When we consume fewer calories, the body slows down its metabolism. This begins to occur after about a week of dieting.
It is also around this time that the body becomes depleted of glycogen, this is the substance converted from food that the body uses as energy.
The average person has between 5lb and 8lb of glycogen in their body, equivalent to the amount that most people lose in the first week or so of a diet.
Now here's the sickener. While we may see fat as a bad thing, the human body loves it. Fat is energy-rich and is seen by the body as a back-up mechanism for when a calorie deficit occurs.
And there's more bad news for people wishing to lose weight: The body can't tell the difference between starvation and dieting, so will automatically switch into survival mode if your calorie intake is too low.
Survival mode slows down the metabolism, reducing how many calories your body needs per day to keep itself running. It also means holding on to those energy rich fat stores that want to get rid of for your summer holiday. The body keeps fat by using muscle for energy.
It is all about evolution. In hunter-gatherer societies, this calorie adaptation was needed to survive when food was short and they were starving. And it is why dieting can make you fatter. You might get lighter but you will have less muscle and more fat. Muscles are the engines of the body and we all know that smaller engines require less fuel than big ones.
Once your body has adjusted to getting by on fewer calories, it no longer needs to use its emergency fat stores to keep going. This is when your weight loss from dieting stops.
It normally takes between four to eight weeks for this to occur but that's not where the story ends. If you decide that you want to stop your diet and begin to consume more calories, the body will treat the extra intake as surplus calories and store them as fat. Diets are therefore a trap.
When you've lowered your calorie intake and altered your metabolism, it's much harder to lose fat unless you stay on your diet forever.
The holy grail is losing weight without slowing down your metabolism.
Healthy eating plans are an effective alternative to diets. The weight loss with healthy eating plans tends to be slower, between 1lb and 3lb per week, but they are more effective in the long run.
They also offer a better variety of meals to choose from, so reducing the boredom that many dieters experience.
In my experience, regular workouts with moderate to heavy weights combined with aerobic exercise and sensible eating is the most effective ways for both sexes to maintain their figure and muscle tone into your 40s and beyond.
Most people, particularly women, think that weights make you big and bulky and should be avoided at all costs. This is a myth.
Lifting moderate weights for muscle endurance gains both tones your muscles and improves the metabolic rate, this being the rate at which you burn fat. This means that your body will burn fat even when you rest.
For those people who want to add some muscle then fewer repetitions with more challenging weights are the answer.
Those worried about becoming too big – mostly women – need to know that to bulk up, you need to consume more protein, between 1.5g and 2g per kg of bodyweight. For example, if you are 70kg (about 11st) then your protein intake should be between 105g and 140g per day.
My tip to help you avoid piling on extra fat is to boost your metabolism by adding two or three weight training sessions into your weekly routine designed to improve your muscular endurance.
I use weights to help clients not only lose weight but also improve their muscular endurance with consistently good results.
If you're male or female and looking to lose weight then I'd encourage you to lift weights. My female clients lift weights like my male clients and the results are equally impressive for both sexes. Everyone loses fat.
The guys get that "hench" look they usually want because their bodies produce more testosterone, and the women get lean and look fit.
If you can't afford a personal trainer or prefer group training then I'd recommend that you do a class such as boxercise, involving a combination of toning and fat-burning.
Combining exercise with a healthy eating plan will help people produce a more effective weight lose and increased muscle tone without having to stick to uninteresting, restrictive diets as muscle requires more calories to maintain.
When you add muscle mass your metabolic rate increases. This basically means that the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even when you're resting.
You don't have to take my advice but if your current weight-loss regime is not working or getting you down then you might want to make a few changes.
For free exercise advice, see my exercise gallery and blog page at www.henchsports.com
