Fit Communications

Do you find yourself saying or thinking, "I want to lose weight"? In fact, what you want to lose is fat.

But how do you know whether what you’re losing is fat or muscle? When calorie restriction (especially extreme calorie restriction) is your only weight-loss strategy, a good percentage of what you lose may be lean muscle. When that happens, you’re actually getting fatter even though the number on the scale may be going down.

Today I read an e-book (The Secrets Of Fighting Female Flab Over 40 With Master’s Fitness Champ Maxine Johnson, available free on Tom Venuto’s Inner Circle) in which Anja Langer and Gladys Portuguese were mentioned. I hadn’t thought about them in forever, but after seeing their names, I spent some time googling for images. Quite a few are available on Anja Langer’s website. Her story is intriguing because although she had a bodybuilding career in the 1980s, she is still stunningly fit. Check out the shots from 2001.

I couldn’t find a single image of Gladys. She was a beautiful competitor as well.

Here’s a site with photos of a number of female competitors from the ’80s and ’90s. See what you think.

Images can be highly motivating.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever read an article in a women’s fitness magazine that recommended a daily weight-loss diet that provides around 1,300 calories. Yeah, I thought you had.

This afternoon I paged through the latest Oxygen magazine—or maybe it was Oxygen’s annual glutes special—and found sample menus for such a diet. Keep in mind that Oxygen promotes intense physical activity—both weights and cardio. Keep in mind that these far-too restrictive diets are often said to be the food plans followed by female fitness athletes.

That is simply impossible unless the women in question are anorexic.

Here’s an old post, resurrected because I need it and my fitness buddy needs it.

I know I sound like a broken record when I rave on about Tom Venuto’s e-book book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. But at the moment I’m especially gung-ho about Tom because I’m liking the zig-zag calorie rotation he describes in chapter 6 of the book. For one thing, it makes the whole calorie-counting thing more interesting and tolerable.

Here’s how it goes:

First you figure out your basal metabolic rate–how many calories you need just to sustain life. If you know your lean body mass (LBM), the Katch-McArdle formula is best and works for both men and women:

BMR - 370 + (21.6 x lean mass in kilograms)

Hint: divide your LBM in pounds by 2.2 to get kilograms.

If you don’t know your LBM, use the Harris-Benedict formula, based on body weight:

Men: BMR - 66 + (13.7 x body weight in kg) + (5 x height in centimeters) - (6.8 x age in years)

Women: BMR - 655 + (9.6 x body weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in centimeters) - (4.7 x age in years)

Once you’ve got an estimate of your baseline calories, below which you should never go when counting calories, multiply the number by an activity factor:

Sedentary: use 1.2
Lightly active: use 1.375
Moderately active: use 1.55
Very active: use 1.725
Extremely active: use 1.9

So, given my LBM of 109 pounds (49.5 kg), my BMR, using the Katch-McArdle formula is 1,440 calories.

I use the activity factor 1.55. Multiplying it by 1,440, I get 2,232 calories per day.

I suspect I probably burn a few more than that, but I’m being conservative.

Okay, so what’s the zig-zag rotation all about? The idea is to spend three days on a moderately reduced-calorie diet (15 to 20 percent below maintenance), then one day at maintenance level.

Why zig-zag? To prevent the body from reducing metabolic rate in response to reduced intake. By eating at maintenance level a couple of days a week, so Tom says, you help prevent the body from thinking you’re starving. The other plus, of course, is that not every day is a restricted day. Nice.

The key reason to zig-zag is that it works. In 30-plus years of caring about this sort of thing, the ZZ is the fastest, most-effective, most muscle-preserving method of fat loss I’ve ever seen.

And I’ve seen it work wonders for people I know as well. Usually women who tell me, “Well, I’m eating right, but nothing is happening.” Sad but true: if nothing is happening, you need to change the equation. Alter the food plan. Increase the activity. Try the ZZ.

I’m back to counting calories, having fattened up by about five pounds over the past six months. What’s different? I let my gym habit slide, simple as that.

The past few weeks I’ve been working hard in the garden (see my other blog, Easy Roses), but once those planting and mulching duties subside, I need to be in the gym. Walking six days a week may do it for some people, but it isn’t enough for me.

In any case, I tried to do Atkins again for a few days and realized–duh–how foolish that was, given that I was doing strenuous physical labor in the garden (on my vacation week!). I simply can’t function on nearly zero carbs.

But calorie counting, a la Tom Venuto’s method (use the search function on this blog [search term zig] for an explanation of the zig-zag method and the sidebar at left for info on ordering his e-book), works very well for me. The hard part used to be keeping track between home and office. I kept e-mailing myself an Excel spreadsheet that I had designed to track daily calories and grams of protein.

Now that I have access to Google docs, it’s a piece of cake (should I say “it’s a toasted pita”?). I just work in the Google doc via my browser with whatever computer I’m on. If you haven’t signed up for gmail and Google docs and all that stuff, I recommend it. I don’t work for Google, I just love their (free) offerings.

I gotta love Tom Venuto for introducing me to the zig-zag concept of caloric reduction. It really, really works, and as empirical evidence, I have two new fat-loss stories to tell you.

But first a little digression about counting calories. Why do people resist this idea so vigorously? Maybe part of it is that we’re so easily suckered by the latest bestselling diet book and the idea that there’s a secret, magical method for weight loss. Bottom line is, any plan that works does so because you’re taking in fewer calories and/or expending more calories through activity. End of story. Calorie counting may be dull, but it works, and once you get the hang of it, it’s easy.

So here are the success stories. Both involve women near my age (one’s 50, once’s in her mid-50s) who have been working on weight loss for more than a year. One had stalled out completely, one had actually gained back a few pounds. Broken record that I am, I keep preaching calorie counting and the zig-zag.

Part of my spiel: Unless you’re counting calories, you have no idea how much you’re actually taking in. And if you’re not losing weight (despite exercising and eating healthy foods), you’re eating exactly as much as you need to maintain rather than lose (barring a genetic or metabolic disorder).

Lo and behold: Both women recently started zig-zagging. Both started losing weight–including my good friend who honestly didn’t think she was eating more than 1,300 or 1,400 calories a day. Guess what? She was.

I have to crow a little because after needling her for nearly a year to try the zig-zag, her plateau (of more than a year) is a thing of the past, and she’s lost nearly 10 pounds in about six weeks.

As for me, I’m working out, maintaining my weight loss pretty effortlessly, and have lost another couple of inches over the past six months. Most my skirts and trousers are size 6 now, with an occasional size 4.

I had breakfast with a good friend this morning, and the conversation turned to weight loss and exercise: specifically, why do people who know what they need to do not do it–and how can they motivate themselves to do it?

Well, it was a long conversation, and I recommended Tom Venuto’s e-book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (see a description under the heading Books for the buff in the left frame), as I’ve so often done. My friend and I talked about the importance of setting goals, how to carve out gym time, how often to eat, the importance of protein, the necessity of healthy carbs for people who exercise, how to cultivate satiety (see Barbara Rolls’s book Volumetrics, also briefly described in my book list), and so on.

My friend knows more or less what she needs to do; she just needs a little help in getting started again.

When we talked about calories, I was horrified to hear what she thought a low-calorie daily intake should be: about 700 calories. That’s terrific if your goal is to reduce your metabolism, slow your weight loss, burn off muscle tissue, and guarantee that the rebound weight gain that follows leaves you fatter than ever, with less lean body mass (and thus a reduced ability to burn calories).

Never, never, never reduce calories more than 20 to 25 percent from normal unless you’re doing a medically supervised fast.

Okay, I’m off the soapbox now.

Very brief post: I’m closing in on my three-month goal, set just before Thanksgiving. As I’ve mentioned before,  the goal was very modest–a six-pound fat loss. Note that I don’t say "weight loss": I’m interested in losing fat, not merely "weight," which could be lean body mass (muscle). I shudder to think.

In any case, I’m now more than 70 percent of the way there. Woo-hoo!

Would’ve gotten there a lot faster if I’d started counting calories sooner.

But that’s not a failure, as Tom Venuto would say: It’s a result. In other words, a "learning experience."

I know I sound like a broken record when I rave on about Tom Venuto’s e-book book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. But at the moment I’m especially gung-ho about Tom because I’m liking the zig-zag calorie rotation he describes in chapter 6 of the book. For one thing, it makes the whole calorie-counting thing more interesting and tolerable.

Here’s how it goes:

First you figure out your basal metabolic rate–how many calories you need just to sustain life. If you know your lean body mass (LBM), the Katch-McArdle formula is best and works for both men and women:

BMR - 370 + (21.6 x lean mass in kilograms)

Hint: divide your LBM in pounds by 2.2 to get kilograms.

If you don’t know your LBM, use the Harris-Benedict formula, based on body weight:

Men: BMR - 66 + (13.7 x body weight in kg) + (5 x height in centimeters) - (6.8 x age in years)

Women: BMR - 655 + (9.6 x body weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in centimeters) - (4.7 x age in years)

Once you’ve got an estimate of your baseline calories, below which you should never go when counting calories, multiply the number by an activity factor:

Sedentary: use 1.2
Lightly active: use 1.375
Moderately active: use 1.55
Very active: use 1.725
Extremely active: use 1.9

So, given my LBM of 109 pounds (49.5 kg), my BMR, using the Katch-McArdle formula is 1,440 calories.

I use the activity factor 1.55. Multiplying it by 1,440, I get 2,232 calories per day.

I suspect I probably burn a few more than that, but I’m being conservative.

Okay, so what’s the zig-zag rotation all about? The idea is to spend three days on a moderately reduced-calorie diet (15 to 20 percent below maintenance), then one day at maintenance level.

Why zig-zag? To prevent the body from reducing metabolic rate in response to reduced intake. By eating at maintenance level a couple of days a week, so Tom says, you help prevent the body from thinking you’re starving. The other plus, of course, is that not every day is a restricted day. Nice.