I wanted to share a story with you that happened a year ago to give you the background behind my WWAE posts in Instagram Stories. It started because I had a client come up to me a couple of months after attending one of my nutrition seminars to tell me that she was applying what she had learned and had lost 8 pounds. She also shared with me that when she and her friend (who also attended the seminar) were out to dinner they would ask each other…What Would Andrea Eat?? Or WWAE? So Chris and I decided to turn this into a little Social Media campaign which has been going on for the past year. If you check out BL’s Instagram stories you will see frequent postings with actual pictures of the foods I’m choosing to eat throughout my day. Here’s the key: Food I AM EATING!! Learning to manage our weight is not about starving ourselves or about going on very low calorie diets. It’s about learning how to eat and what to eat. It’s about making good food choices and then learning to fuel our bodies frequently throughout each and every day.
So, given all of the above, I want to take a moment to address what seems to be the latest trend in dieting: Intermittent Fasting. Of course, fasting has been around forever but now the word “intermittent” has been put in front of it and it has taken on this sexy, sensationalized appeal for losing weight. In my continuing effort to expose the latest fad diets for what they are and to counter them with sound nutrition information, I am here to tell you that intermittent fasting is NOT an effective way to lose weight. You could just stop reading right now and believe me as a Registered Dietitian, but if you’re interested in the why, here you go…
You can’t trick your body…it's smart, its intuitive and its decisions are based on survival!! So when you starve it, when you don’t eat enough calories in a day or frequently enough to fuel all the systems in your body, it has to get fuel or energy from somewhere else. And because fat is more crucial for survival than muscle mass is, you will break down your muscle mass first for the needed fuel before going after fat cells. So at the end of your fast or several days or weeks, you actually are “fatter.” The number on the scale may say that you lost a few pounds BUT because you lost more muscle mass relative to fat, your percent body fat is actually higher. Now as many of you likely know, muscle is way more active than fat is. In fact, it takes 8 times as much energy to support muscle than fat. So when we have less muscle relative to our fat, our metabolism slows down. We go back to eating what we did before fasting and we gain weight back…we gain fat back…and now we are even “fatter” than we were before!!
Cliff notes: Bottom line is plain and simple…when we fast, we hold on to fat and burn muscle. Our metabolism lowers due to lower muscle mass and due to insufficient calories. AND when we do eat, we often rationalize eating everything in sight. Our emotional brain takes over our logical brain because our logical brain isn’t very logical when it is being starved.
Instead of starving yourself, I’m proposing you do the opposite. You actually get to eat to lose weight! Try eating something about every 3-4 hours. Try consuming 4-6 small meals or snacks per day. See that each of the meals/snacks have healthy sources of fat, protein and good carbs. This will help stabilize your blood glucose meaning that you won’t get the highs and lows in energy but will stay steady all day long. It will maximize your ability to let go of extra body fat by sending a message to your brain saying there is plenty of food around, I can let go of these extra pounds around her mid section. Combined with a good exercise routine you can lose those unwanted pounds once and for all and, most importantly, do so in a way that doesn’t compromise your health.
Lastly, just a reminder that we lose muscle mass every year just due to the aging process. By lifting weights we can negate some of that loss BUT then why would we want to go on a diet that would break down what we are trying to so hard to preserve??
Check out BL Instagram stories as I share pictures of what my actual meals and snacks look like during the course of my day. Hopefully it will give you tangible examples of what making health food choices look like. WWAE??
