Sep

Want To Lose Weight? Monitor The “White Stuff”!

By Rita

whitestuff It’s true… you can lose weight simply by re-balancing your energy equation: Eat less calories and burn more calories you already have stored as fat.

It seems simple enough and if you track what you eat and count the calories, it’s a surefire way to lose some of those extra pounds. Tons of weight loss diets and programs have been teaching this for years… and it works. In fact at Genesis Personal Fitness, we teach this as a “Level 1″ Principle, particularly to beginners in our weight loss coaching programs.

After we determine the EXACT number of calories you should be eating according to the results of your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) Assessment, you follow a reasonable, real-food eating plan and voila… you lose weight.

But after awhile, losing weight by just keeping your daily calories close to your RMR-determined target alone can slow down. This can happen for a number of reasons too numerous to go into detail here, but what it is important to know that there is a “weight loss hierachy” that you must pay attention to and change your diet plan accordingly if you want to continue to see ongoing weight/fat loss and avoid a plateau.

If you look closely at the pyramid image to the right, you’ll see that after you hydrate your body properly and eat the number of daily calories according to your tested RMR, the “next level” upward on the pyramid is to start eating the right blend of protein, carbs, and fat… almost like a weight loss ”fuel mixture”. This Level 2 Principle is really what accelerates weight loss, and once you know how to eat accordingly, your body seemingly begins to change before your eyes.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle that arises when you reach Level 2 is the “white stuff” - knowing how and when to eat the white, starchy carbohydrates that many of us have come to make part of each meal and snack we eat. And the “white stuff”… potatoes, rice, bread, and pasta. By learning HOW and WHEN to eat these 4 foods, you can accelerate your weight loss up to 3X as fast – we know because we’ve proved it here at Genesis Personal Fitness from working with thousands of clients over 17 years.

Here’s two essentials to get you going in the right direction, once you reach Level 2:

1. Plan on eating low-starch meals at least 3-4 days per week. As long as you continue to eat meals that contain these high-density (little water content and a lot of nuttrients/calories) carbohydrate foods, your body will have no reason to dip into your stored body fat for fuel. Thus, you won’t lose the extra pounds you’re looking to lose.

You see, it’s easier for your body to digest and convert starchy “white stuff” to energy so your body can continue to work throughout the day. By having a continuous stream of carb-converted energy available, your excess stored body fat will never get used. And taken one step further, if you have all this “carb energy” available but aren’t active much throughout the day, your body does something you certainly don’t want it to do – store it as FAT!

The key is to reduce or avoid the “white stuff” at your meals and snacks for the full day… 3-4 days a week. Instead, substitute the starchy carbs for a bit more protein and “good fats” to make sure your daily calories remain the same.

2. Eat the “white stuff” only at specific times, such as right after an exercise session or after a few days of lower carbs. If you’ve ever wondered how certain clients get such great weight/fat loss results here at Genesis Personal Fitness, it is because they have mastered this. They’ve been willing to modify their eating lifestyle enough so they keep their metabolisms in a fat-burning mode almost all the time.

Starchy carbs such as potatoes, rice, bread, and pasta is “jet fuel” to the conditioned athlete. You know, the folks you watch every 4 years on TV at the Olympics or the professional athletes you watch on the weekends. Their bodies are so energy efficient that they can take just about any type of food, convert it, and use it immediately for energy, both while they are playing and while they are at rest.

Few of us have such a professional athletic-conditioned metabolism to be able to afford to eat “white stuff” without storing some un-used part of it as body fat. Yet, we tend to want to eat it without any boundaries or limits. Because we’re patterned to eat it and it tastes good, especially with warm, melted butter or sauces, our metabolisms change for the worse over time and we end up wearing the “white stuff” on our bodies just just makes us unhappy and at risk for big health problems.

If you’re going to eat “white stuff”, then it is wise to eat it when you have the best chance of burning it off. For example, after a Genesis Exercise Session, your body is somewhat depleted of some of its stored glycogen (sugar) and thus is “needy” to have its fuel tank refilled. Eating a baked potato or rice makes sense at your next major meal because you’re metabolism with absorb it like a sponge, leaving little to store… unless you go overboard in the amount you eat.

Further, on a day-to-day basis outside of exercise, it is best to eat “white stuff” earlier in the day (like at your lunch meal) and avoid it as much as possible in your evening meal. Eating starchy carb foods for dinner when you’re not going to use them in the 2-3 hours that follow is a certain recipe of converting them to body fat. It is probably the easiest and fastest way to gain excess body fat in our lifestyles today.

In the next few posts here on our blog, I’ll be going into a lot of detail how to find your “sweet spot” when it comes to eating these carbs and how to monitor it so that your weight loss can become almost effortless. Stay tuned!

Until next time…

Rita Bryan
President & Co-Founder
Genesis Personal Fitness of Newtown, PA
Tel: 215-504-0100