Is there something wrong with me or with my program?

So, you’ve been trying to lose weight but can’t. In fact, you’ve lost track of the number of times you’ve tried to lose weight, or thought about trying again. But it doesn’t matter. It never happens. What’s wrong with you?

When asked this, many people respond by blaming themselves. They say: "I like food too much." "I don’t like to exercise." "I can’t find the time to eat better and exercise." "I’m just not disciplined."

Are these valid answers? Maybe, maybe not. Your lack of results may not lie in you, your personality, your likes, or dislikes, but in the weight-loss programs or methods you’ve tried.

Most programs focus on achieving weight loss in the most obvious way—getting rid of pounds, reducing the figure on the bathroom scale. But there’s more to healthy weight loss than weighing less. Body mechanics to which we are blind are also affected. When you simply get rid of pounds, you are in effect getting rid of a symptom. This is similar to taking a cold medicine and saying that your cold is gone when in fact, you still have the cold, you’ve just masked the symptoms.

The act of losing weight seems to be simple, but it isn’t. It involves more than how much you eat and how much you exercise. It is what you eat, when you eat, and how you eat as well as what kind of exercise you perform. It involves what’s going on in your life. If we don’t consider these aspects, we don’t lose weight, or we lose it only to gain it back. It’s that simple.

AIM’s SlimMetrix Weight-Loss Partnership breaks down the act of managing your weight into a few key points and then provides a way for you to manage your weight that is not overly restrictive or complicated. And, most importantly, it works.

The equation: calories in, calories out

When we take in more calories than we burn, we gain weight. It’s that simple. We take in calories through eating, and we burn calories through our base metabolism and our activities, which include exercise. If we examine how many calories we consume and how many we expend, it’s easy to see why we gain weight.

An average person burns about 1,800 calories through base metabolism—the energy required to breathe, digest food, and so on. The energy we need for our activities is added to this—about 700 for an average North American. This adds up to about 2,500 total calories per day. If we take in more calories than our average, we gain weight. If we don’t expend more calories than our average, we don’t lose weight.

Now let’s look at food. A typical North American fast-food meal contains about 1,500 calories. So, in one meal, we have already consumed more than half the calories we need for a day! A typical North American meal prepared at home—meat and a few vegetables, and maybe a salad—contains about 1,000 calories. So, in two meals, we have consumed what we burn in a day. Anything more that we eat—a third meal, snacks, sodas, other drinks—translates into weight gain. No wonder so many of us is overweight!

Understanding the mechanics of weight loss

Metabolism

Although "base metabolism" is a complex functioning of physical and chemical processes, it’s really quite simple. Just think of it as the energy you expend to keep your body working. As noted, an average person expends about 1,800 calories through heartbeats, breathing, digestion, and so on. In our quest to lose weight, having a well-running metabolism is important.

Of crucial importance in metabolism is a healthy thyroid. This gland, which wraps around the front part of the windpipe just below the Adam’s apple, helps determine our metabolism and thus how many calories we burn when at rest. If it is not functioning well, our base metabolism falls, contributing to having more calories come in than go out.

As many as 5 to 13 million Americans may suffer with hypothyroidism, and the problem is more prevalent in women. Up to 10 percent of women have it, and possibly one in five women have some degree of it.

The other key in metabolism is exercise. When we exercise, we increase our metabolism. So when we exercise, we really do three (at the very least!) things: we expend calories; pump up our metabolism, which expends more calories; and lose fat while gaining muscle.

Lose fat, not weight, and build muscle

Although we talk about "weight loss," weight is not what we want to lose. We want to lose fat. In many diets, you are not losing as much fat as you think—you are also losing water and lean muscle.

This is important because lean muscle is one of our "motors." It helps us burn fat. The less lean muscle we have, the less fat we can burn. The amount of muscle you have also affects your metabolism. Ideally, you want to lose fat and gain muscle.

One "quirk" in losing fat and building muscle is that you don’t initially lose weight. This is because muscle weighs more than fat, so when you lose fat and gain muscle, the bathroom scale remains at the same weight.

In AIM’s SlimMetrix Weight-Loss Partnership, the first thing you notice may not be fewer pounds, but a physical difference, a "reshaping." As muscle replaces fat, the contours and lines of your body may change. You may notice that your clothes feel looser here, a bit tighter there, and fit better overall. But don’t worry, the actual pounds will come off soon!

You are what you eat

You were anticipating this part, weren’t you? But we’re not going to say what you think.

Starve and gain fat

Many people believe that the primary way to lose weight is to dramatically cut back on calorie intake through limiting food consumption—through low-calorie diets. This is not true and can actually make healthy and long-term weight loss more difficult.

Our bodies are smart. When we dramatically cut back on what we eat, our body thinks, "uh oh, there’s a problem with the food supply. That means I better start storing the little energy I’m getting so I have it when I need it."

To conserve energy, the body does two things. First, it becomes more efficient by reducing the function of the thyroid gland, which results in a metabolism that burns fewer calories. Second, it focuses on fat-saving, not fat-burning—fat is stored energy.

When we diet through dramatic calorie restriction, we lose weight, but the wrong kind of weight. Since it is storing fat for its perceived energy needs, the body searches for a way to produce energy and begins to burn protein—lean muscle. And as we already saw, when we lose muscle, we reduce our ability to burn fat.

Worse yet, the body can make a habit of fat-storing and muscle-burning—our eating habits create a pattern by which our body remains in this starvation and fat-storing mode with a permanently depressed metabolic rate. The result—a lifetime of struggling with a bulging waistline.

Severely restricting calories is not the answer to losing weight!

High blood sugar isn’t sweet

If we don’t want to restrict our diet, what do we want to do? The popular "no-fat, high-carb" or "no-carb, all-protein" diets may help us lose weight quickly, but they have potentially serious health risks, and in the long run, we usually gain back the lost weight.

Perhaps the largest misconception about diet is that carbohydrates are good and fats bad. Carbohydrates are the preferred source of energy for the body, and dietary fats most easily become body fat. If this is the case, why are people gaining weight when carbohydrate consumption is up and fat consumption is down?

This is because although we differentiate between simple carbohydrates such as sugar and complex carbohydrates such as bread, we often don’t differentiate between low-glycemic and high-glycemic carbohydrates.

"Glycemic" describes how a food affects blood sugar levels. A carbohydrate that is high-glycemic (such as breakfast cereals and breads) pushes blood sugar up quickly; low-glycemic carbohydrates (such as beans, grains, and vegetables) are absorbed more slowly and have a small effect on blood sugar. High-glycemic foods are often refined and processed carbohydrates.

When we eat simple carbohydrates or high-glycemic carbohydrates, we receive a quick, intense, but short-lived burst of energy due to the increase of blood sugar. This causes an insulin reaction—a large burst of insulin enters the bloodstream. Insulin removes blood sugar from the bloodstream and stores it in muscle cells. But when we consume a large amount of carbohydrates, we have more than enough blood sugar for our muscles and the rest of it is converted to fat and stored in the chin, upper arms, belly, hips, buttocks, and thighs.

The release of insulin also tells the brain that the energy is gone and that we need more. The body thinks we need to eat and we feel hungry again. The result is a cycle of intense energy as blood sugar rises, a letdown as insulin is released, the storage of excess glucose as fat, and then a feeling of hunger again. The cycle repeats itself and we gain weight.

Three squares aren’t always cool

In North America, the tradition is to eat three meals per day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, this schedule is not conducive to weight management.

As we have learned, when we eat, our blood sugar rises and then falls. In the typical carbohydrate-heavy diet, this results in energy ups and downs and constant hunger. But if we keep our blood sugar level consistent, we will have energy all day and our hunger cravings will diminish. The key to leveling blood sugar is to eat smaller amounts of food at the three major meals and consume healthy snacks between meals. This results in a consistent blood sugar level, consistent energy, and little dramatic hunger.

Your life is important

We cannot forget the emotional aspect of our weight. Oftentimes, we gain weight as a response to what is happening in our lives—many of us eat as a way to deal with emotional problems. Our weight then often increases the emotional turmoil in our lives. Being overweight can result in poor self-image, which is intensified by actual or perceived negative attitudes of our peers, family members, health professionals, and potential employers. The result? We eat more. Therefore, it is necessary to find and deal with the emotional issues in our lives.

What to do

Now that you understand why the diets you tried before didn’t work—that it was the diets and not you—you are prepared to act. Find a program that considers the causes of weight gain, not just the pounds. AIM’s SlimMetrix Weight-Loss Partnership is the program for you!