The appetite solution : lose weight effortlessly and never be hungry again

343 Pages·2015·11.43 MB·English

by  Colella

Dedication
To my glorious sons Joey and Luke. No father could be more blessed.
Contents
Dedication
Introduction: I’m Always Hungry, and I Can’t Lose Weight
Part I: Why Am I Always So Hungry?
1 The Calorie Trap
2 The Metabolism Mystery
3 Your Secret Sugar Saboteurs
Part II: Your Six-Week Appetite Solution
4 Eat Your Fill for the Next Six Weeks
5 Your Appetite Solution Meal Plans
6 The Exercise Bonanza
7 Your Appetite Solution Fitness Plans
Part III: Hungry No More
8 Solutions for Every Situation
9 Appetite Pitfalls
10 Pushing Past Plateaus
11 Enjoying the Metabolism of a Teenager
Recipes
Resources
Measurement Legend
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I’m Always Hungry, and I Can’t Lose Weight
I
t’s January 2 and Naomi is ready to start keeping her most important New
Year’s resolution: Go on a diet and lose weight! She’d like fast results to keep
her motivated, so she picks a low-carbohydrate diet that a friend has
recommended, one that has her cutting her food intake to 1,000 calories a day.
Just as her friend has told her, Naomi loses ten pounds in two weeks, and she is
ecstatic.
Of course, she’s hungry all the time—but she knows the weight loss will be
worth it, and with an iron will, she sticks to every detail of the diet. When the
two weeks are over, the diet plan becomes less restrictive, and Naomi breathes a
sigh of relief. But she’s still always hungry; and then, suddenly, she stops losing
weight.
Frustrated and disappointed, Naomi toughs it out on this new diet for another
few weeks but then finally gives up in despair. She goes back to eating the way
she did before, continues to feel hungry—and by April 1, she is actually five
pounds heavier than she was on January 1.
Shana also has a New Year’s resolution to keep—in fact, it’s almost the
same as Naomi’s: Start a diet and fitness plan and lose weight! Shana normally
consumes about 2,000 calories a day, so she goes on a low-fat diet that is
somewhat less restrictive than Naomi’s—down to 1,500 calories. At the same
time, she joins a gym, signs up with a personal trainer, and begins a vigorous
fitness program.
Shana notices that she, too, is hungry all the time, but during her first week
on the diet, she loses five pounds, which motivates her to keep going. A few
days later, however, she hits a hard plateau and the weight loss grinds to a halt.
Frustrated and hungry, Shana cuts her calories back to 1,300 per day and
steps up the exercise. She manages to lose another two pounds—and then, again,
a plateau. Her fitness instructor encourages her to tough it out, but the following
week, Shana has actually started to gain back some of the weight she’s lost. By
April 1, she is just about three pounds less than the weight at which she started
her diet and exercise plan, and she’s more frustrated and hungrier than ever.
Greg would also like to lose weight, so on January 2, he works with a
nutritionist to follow a super-healthy diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables,
no grains, and no starches—about 2,000 calories a day. He hasn’t been able to
make time for exercise, but his nutritionist assures him that this diet will work if
Greg sticks to it faithfully.
For breakfast, Greg enjoys a protein shake with fresh blueberries buzzed in,
or perhaps a hard-boiled egg and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. For
lunch, he eats a salad with salmon or turkey and low-fat dressing. For his
afternoon snack, he has a nonfat vanilla yogurt and a skim decaf latte. For
dinner, he broils some chicken with barbecue sauce or simmers it in some of his
mom’s homemade tomato sauce and steams up a big bowl of broccoli. All day
long he drinks water flavored with a couple of lemon wedges, or maybe has
some decaf coffee with nonfat hazelnut creamer.
Greg began this diet on January 2, and he sticks it to faithfully every day,
never exceeding his allotted 2,000 calories. By April 1, he’s lost just over three
pounds, most of which he dropped during the first month. To make matters
worse, he feels hungry all the time. What’s going wrong?
Do any of these scenarios sound familiar to you? Have you been starving
yourself on a diet, running yourself ragged at the gym, or eating an apparently
healthy diet, yet you either can’t lose weight or can’t keep the weight off—plus
you’re hungry all the time? Have you been blaming the problem on your lack of
willpower? Your “fat genes”? Your “big bones”? Your lifelong lousy
metabolism? Does it sometimes feel like you’re the victim of a conspiracy to
keep you overweight and hungry?—that everywhere you look you see desirable
food you’re not supposed to eat, and yet even when you resist it, your weight
stays on?
Believe me, I understand. I’ve helped thousands of people who feel exactly
the same way dealing every day with hunger and frustration. I know I can help
you, too. I’m going to show you how to beat each of these scenarios—how to
lose your excess weight and keep it off, without being hungry.
Does that sound too good to be true? I promise you, it is true. The Appetite
Solution can be your solution: steady, significant weight loss without feeling
hungry, until you ultimately achieve the metabolism of a teenager. You can keep
eating many of your favorite foods, you’ll never feel like you’re starving, and
when you do achieve a teenager’s high-powered metabolism, you can even
indulge periodically in some missed treats.
If that sounds good to you, stick with me. Let’s start by taking a closer look
at why so many diets fail.
A Dieter’s Three Pitfalls
Three major pitfalls prevail with dieters, and most people fall into one, two, or
all three:
They begin a diet by cutting calories, and by default, their protein
intake.
They start a diet and a fitness program at the same time.
They don’t know how to recognize simple sugars, especially the
hidden ones, versus complex sugars, which occur naturally in fruits,
vegetables, and grains.
Naomi, Shana, and Greg each fell into a different pitfall, but they all had one
thing in common: Each of their diets left them feeling hungry.
In the world of dieting, that should be your first clue:
Any diet that leaves you feeling constantly hungry is almost certainly
doomed to fail.
Why do I say this? Well, first, of course, the hunger often means that you
simply can’t stay on the diet. It’s very difficult to keep denying yourself the
foods you enjoy in the face of a punishing hunger—especially if you’re not
losing weight.
But even if you do stick to your plan, a diet that leaves you hungry is
messing with your metabolism. Anything more than a mild hunger after the first
two or three days of a diet is a sign that a process known as adaptive
thermogenesis has kicked in. And adaptive thermogenesis is going to make it
virtually impossible for you to lose weight. It always wins.
The Perils of Adaptive Thermogenesis
Adaptive thermogenesis is the mechanism that your body has evolved to keep
from starving to death or wasting away when you can’t get enough to eat or have
to exert yourself more than usual. Adaptive refers to something that has adapted
in response to circumstances. Thermo means “heat,” that is, energy, or calories.
Genesis comes from the Latin for “generation”; so thermogenesis is the
generation, or production, of heat in the body.
Put that all together, and adaptive thermogenesis means that when your body
perceives that you aren’t getting your usual amount of food, for example, on
your brand-new diet, it will do everything in its power to adapt by conserving
energy—to stop burning calories and to force you to seek out more calories.
Likewise, when your body perceives that you are exerting yourself more than
usual, for example, with your brand-new fitness program, it will again adapt to
conserve energy, ensuring that your new vigorous activity burns as few calories
as possible.
Note that adaptive thermogenesis kicks in when you aren’t getting your
usual amount of food and when you are exercising more than usual. That’s what
makes it adaptive. Even if you are switching from an unhealthy level of calorie
intake to a healthier one, even if you are finally getting some much-needed
healthy exercise, your body still responds (“adapts”) to the change, not to the
absolute level of your diet or activity.
As a result, any decline in calories and any increase in exercise sends your
body straight into panic mode, terrified of starvation or exhaustion. Adaptive
thermogenesis always does its darnedest to hold on to every possible ounce of
weight.
Now at this point you might be wondering: “Then why does my diet seem to
work at the beginning? How did I lose that first five or ten pounds?”
Great questions. Although some diets, like Greg’s, never do get going (and
in a minute I’ll tell you why), Naomi and Shana did lose weight initially, even
though they gained some of it back or hit a plateau fairly early, after only a small
loss. Why?
Well, here’s the dirty little secret that most diet books won’t tell you. That
initial lost weight is almost always muscle mass and the water that goes with it.
Cutting calories and starting a diet-plus-fitness plan at the same time does not
induce your body to get rid of fat—instead, it causes you to lose muscle.
Don’t Let Your Body Eat Itself for Breakfast!
Most of us think of “losing weight” as “losing fat”—but that’s not what happens
when you are hungry. Eating a low-calorie diet might help you shed a few
pounds, but when your body thinks it’s starving, fat is the last thing to go.
Maybe you, in your twenty-first-century culture of plenty, would like to lose
those extra fatty layers, but your ancestors, back in the hard times, clung to that
fat for dear life—literally. Body fat kept those ancestors warm. Body fat was a
source of stored energy. Body fat was what a woman needed in order to
menstruate and to get pregnant and to carry a child. Body fat was what people
lived on all winter long.
Muscle, by contrast, is a luxury. Yeah, muscles are nice for pushing boulders
and chopping trees and other types of vigorous activity. But if food is scarce,
you don’t want to be burning up calories running around exerting yourself. You
want to conserve energy, not expend it. If your body believes that it isn’t getting
enough food, it would much rather eat up its muscle than burn off its fat. So
when you start most diets, that’s exactly what it does, devouring muscle to make
up the difference between the amount of calories you usually eat and the amount
you just started eating.
So after your first week on a reduced-calorie diet, you look at the scale and
think, “Great! I lost five pounds!” You don’t realize that that was the five
pounds of muscle which your body ate to compensate for the food that you didn’t
eat, plus the water that your muscle contained.
Then, within ten to fourteen days, adaptive thermogenesis helps your body
reset. It jiggers your metabolism to burn fewer calories with the same amount of
exercise and to hold on to more calories with the same amount of food. At this
point, you’re still eating up your own muscles even though you’re not losing
weight. Your body is keeping things as much the same as possible, using your
muscles to make up for any reduction in calories. It’s an ingenious system, and it
might have saved your life back in the Stone Age, but it can sure drive you crazy
now.
This is why I say that hunger should be your first clue that a diet isn’t
working. Hunger is a sign that adaptive thermogenesis is at work, ensuring the
following outcomes: