The Importance of Moderation

One of the biggest reasons people tend to never make (permanent) progress in terms of dieting is because they're so set on seeing results that they can't see the forest for the trees. I don't like the word 'diet' too much, it sounds too short-term and paints an immediate picture of anorexic-looking Hollywood celebrities with the 'ideal' body image. (As a side note, I'm talking a lot about dieting lately because I'm on one right now - Look up Lyle McDonald UD2.0 if you're interested). Losing weight is not just a physiological process; there's a psychological component to it.

We live in a society of quick fixes, immediate results, and zero patience. I for one have pretty close to no patience. When a webpage takes more than 3 seconds to load I immediately give my modem an evil look, as if looking at it will change anything, and assume that something's wrong with the internet in my area. The point I'm trying to make is that weight loss, weight gain (yes, this is a goal for many athletes), overall health improvement among others is a slow and non-linear process. It's important to take a couple of steps back when trying to move forward so you don't crack later on down the road.

After intentionally putting on weight for the first year or so since I started working out, I tried to shed some of the fat that had inevitably come along with the muscle. I failed the first time. I didn't know what I was doing and I thought that if I went on a strict diet for a short period of time, things would just fall into place. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I pretty much gave up not long after and decided that maybe I was just 'meant to be' a bigger, fuller person. I've always been broad-shouldered, so I took the easy way out and blamed it on my genes.

About 6 months ago I decided to give it another go. I weighed 200 pounds at Christmas of 2009 and decided enough was enough. At that point I was lifting well, I ate a very balanced diet, but at the end of the day, healthy or not, calories add up if you don't count them. And excess calories are stored as fat (fat doesn't make you fat, excess calories do, but I'll talk about that another day). Although I've never been one to count calories or macronutrients (protein, carbs and fat), I seem to have a good intuitive sense about how much I eat. I say this because until last month when I really started analyzing my diet, without counting a single calorie I've managed to drop 30 pounds since last Christmas and conserve the vast majority of the muscle I've built over 2 and a half years. If you're not careful, it's easy to lose muscle on a diet if you aren't conscious of your protein intake.

I think a big reason for my success is that I've come to realize what the phrase 'everything in moderation' means. I probably eat out once a week and believe it or not you can still enjoy the majority of things out there if you do so in moderation. People tend to think that if they've been watching what they eat for one month and they've seen the scale go down, then one junk food meal is going to destroy their progress and send them back to fatville. It doesn't work that way. Not allowing yourself to indulge every once in a while will only hurt you in the long run once you've reached your goals. It makes the rebound weight come back much much quicker.

One last point, and probably the most important, is that people usually fall into the habit of thinking that they can over-indulge in some kind of junk food or 'cheat meal', because they're going to burn it off later by running for 52 hours or something ridiculous like that. What's important to keep in mind is that exercising in general does not burn as many calories as you think it does. Let's say someone eats a fast food meal worth 700 calories. One gym session, say on the treadmill, will not burn that amount. Cardio equipment doesn't give you an exact measurement of calories burnt. Lyle McDonald sets out a really nice and much more thorough article than the one I'm writing explaining this in more detail.

www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/exercise-and-weightfat-loss-part-1.html