Weight Loss: LookCut's Healthy Fitness Perspective - An Introduction
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Weight loss information is confusing. One of the principle reasons is you rarely find any framework for evaluating one set of protocols against another. The paradigm is simply ‘weight loss’ or ‘lose weight’. Success is defined by weight loss. There are 5 fundamental flaws this paradigm presents.
-Short term weight loss often produces long term weight gain.
-Weight loss as a paradigm often sacrifices appearance for health.
-Weight loss does not address long term feeding behavior. In fact, more often than not, weight loss creates problems with long term feeding behavior.
There are a lot of ways to lose weight. The problem is losing weight more often than not has nothing to do with being lean, fit and energetic for life. In fact, more often than not, weight loss makes being lean and fit over the long haul more difficult.
Let’s think for a minute about weight loss as a framework for understanding the 3 most important factors that will determine your long term weight management: feeding behavior, metabolic efficiency and aging.
FEEDING BEHAVIOR
Most people seeking weight loss really have issues with feeding behavior.
As a paradigm, ‘weight loss’ does not give us the proper framework for understanding that problems in feeding behavior are not automatically solved by losing weight.
Weight loss often makes issues with feeding behavior worse.
It is most common to lose weight by increasing restraint for eating and increasing the time and energy devoted to losing weight. While you can lose weight in this manner, it does not address the physiological control mechanisms governing feeding behavior. If you want to understand why the majority of people who lose weight gain it back, this is why.
Feeding behavior is hormonally controlled. Weight loss does not 'fix' the hormones that control feeding behavior.
Feeding behavior is hormonally controlled by key hormones like cortisol, insulin, leptin, gherelin, glucagon and a host of others.
A number of factors exert influence over these hormones, such as your total body fat, your diet composition, your feeding patterns, stress and many others.
The only weight loss plan that will ever truly work is one that addresses the hormonal controls of feeding behavior.
You have just found a weight loss fact. You can dissect that statement a million different ways and it will still be true.
Once you understand that weight loss more often than not does not effect the control points of feeding behavior, you have now begun to form a proper framework for true lifelong weight loss. Now let’s look at another core challenge.
METABOLIC EFFICIENCY
Most people today have some form of Metabolic Damage. Metabolic Damage is damage to your ability to utilize carbohydrates and fats as energy. The form of Metabolic Damage we are most familiar with is insulin resistance, where you tend to store carbs as fat more readily than burning carbs for energy.
If you want to be lean for life, you need Metabolic Efficiency. Metabolic Efficiency means that you more readily burn fats and carbs than you store them.
As a framework, ‘weight loss’ totally fails to account for the critical role metabolic damage and metabolic efficiency have upon our long term weight.
In fact, many people lose weight while damaging their metabolism. Here is an example. The current weight loss trend of ‘eating the foods you like to lose weight’ is a prime example. Eating the foods you like often creates a lot of Metabolic Damage. Metabolic Damage ultimately makes you fat because you tend to store the foods you like to eat as fat.
AGING
Your age has a lot to do with your weight. The role of aging in weight gain is something "weight loss" as a paradigm gives us no framework to account for.
You are getting older every day. For most of us, as we get older, we tend to get fatter.
You can lose weight, but weight loss does not automatically equate to an ability to keep age related weight gain off.
Any weight loss or weight management plan that does not address age related weight gain will fail over the long haul.
As we age, key cellular functions become less efficient. Your cells become less permeable, you have fewer mitochondria in your cells, you don’t absorb and digest nutrients as well as you once did. All of these mechanisms and many more profoundly affect your ability to get and stay lean.
If you want to evaluate a weight loss plan and that plan does not address aging, then plan on gaining weight as you age.
In summary, what we have just accomplished here is to lay the foundation for a true framework for being lean for life.
A true framework for being lean for life addresses the true barriers you face over your life – feeding behavior, metabolic efficiency, and aging.
This is the basis for the LookCut’s Healthy Fitness approach.
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