Hey also another person looking to lose 120 lbs here!
I began on 1/3/15 and in the 4 weeks I've lost nearly 23 lbs (out of a goal weight loss of 120 lbs).
Let me share with you how I got there and some tips I have - I'm not lecturing here just trying to share the knowledge I've gained over the last few months on the topic 🙂
I know weight loss can be hard, but I should say if you haven't already look into a low-carb diet. I know it used to be considered a "fad" but a lot of science has been published since. To give you a quick idea, the Atkins diet was recently put against 4 other popular diets, ranging from a vegetable/fruit only diet to the traditional low-fat diet. Not only did Atkins come out on top in terms of overall weight loss, but the participants on the Atkins diet lost the most weight the quickest and were able to stick with the program the longest.
What's the science behind it? Basically it goes like this: We eat carbs on a daily basis, from bread to cereals to grains to chips. To your body, a carb is a carb, doesn't matter where it comes from. What does your body convert carbs to? Sugar. So if you eat a bagel for breakfast you might as well have downed a soda because your body in the end will conver it all to sugar.
All these carbs drive an insulin overproduction response. Insulin's first step is to provide that sugar to your muscles, but if you're like 99% of people in the world who aren't running a marathon, your muscles are full. So Insulin then converts the sugar into fat (via the liver). So this is the issue! Trying to lose weight on a calorie restriction while eating a diet composed of carbs makes it very difficult! I think we can all agree how hard this is!
Obviously cutting out added sugars is a must, so it is good to take that first step. But a low-carb diet takes it to the other extreme. What ends up happening is you restrict your carb intake to 20 grams a day. What this does is force the body to burn its own fat for fuel. Why? When you don't have enough sugar intake (ie carbs), your insulin levels remain very low. In response to this, your body begins to produce ketones (don't confuse this with ketoacidosis in diabetics, two completely different things that have different resons for coming about!).
The reason for ketones is because Insulin is needed to provide cells with energy from your diet. Without Insulin, your body gets its fuel using Ketones. Ketones burn your own fat for energy! How is that for a diet?
Lots of studies have looked at comparing low-carb diets from 30g of carbs a day up to 110 g of carbs a day. What they found is the more carbs you eat in a day, the more the ratio of your fat to muscle loss increases. For example, on a 20-30g carb restricted diet, you will lose somewhere in the range of 2-4 lbs of fat a week, 99% being from fat and 1% being from lean muscle. At 110g of carbs a day, you lose 2.5 lbs of fat a week, only 70% from fat and 30% being from lean muscle.
So on a low carb diet not only do you burn fat faster, you will burn MORE fat than muscle, especially on a 20g carb restriction.
I am a big fan of the Atkins diet because I have lost 100 lbs on it in the past in less than 1 year. Unfortunately I treated it as a diet and not a life-style change and I gained that weight back. This time I am determined to make it a permanent change and eliminate added sugars from my diet even after losing the weight.
Atkins also allows you to add carbs back as you progress through the diet so you won't be on 20g permanently!
Last thing to mention: Studies have shown that Insulin blocks the Leptin hormone from signaling your brain when you are full. So a high-carb diet, driving overproduction of Insulin, is one of the reasons why so many of us can never seem to get full even after eating a big meal! One thing about Atkins is because it is a high-fat diet (again this isn't dangerous especially if you are eating monounsaturated good fats -> Look up the video by Dr. Jonny Bowden on YouTube in his lecture about Cholestorol), your body will produce a TON of Leptin signal to your brain. An because you are not eating sugar, you have no Insulin response, so you get full very very fast on very little food and your hormone signal for telling your brain when you're full works like it's supposed to!
Dr. Atkins tells in his book not to count calories. The reason for this is because it's impossible to overeat on the Atkins diet, because you are always so full. I tried counting once for the sake of it and I could barely eat more than 2000 calories a day, usually hovering around 1400 calories (And at no point was I starving).
Sorry for the long post! My message is here for all those on the same path as me looking to lose weight, but now we have the scientific understanding as to why not all diets are the same and its important for us to be open minded about this 🙂
