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Fat Loss, Muscle Growth & Performance Through Scientific Eating

Renaissance Woman D r. J e n n i f e r C a s e , D r. M e l i s s a D a v i s & D r. M i k e I s r a e t e l

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05 The Psychology of Dieting Success at both dieting and sports performance is very dependent on a good mind set. Perspective and psychological habits can profoundly affect success in any endeavor.This chapter will outline the design of a successful diet from a psychological perspective, to help you increase your chances of getting the results you want from the diet you have designed using the earlier chapters.

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Chapter Five If dieting was all about the physiology of eating and training, we could stop this book right here. You could simply eat for your goals like a machine and fitness would be just around the corner. Fortunately or unfortunately, human beings are not robots. We are not only physiologically complex, but psychologically complex as well. Psychological differences between people, and even differences in mental state within the same person over different periods of time can have a great impact on their dieting success. While we’re busy learning about the physiological details of successful performance and fat loss dieting, we had better take a good look at the psychological side as well. Within this chapter, we will outline the design of a successful diet from a psychological perspective, to help you increase your chances of getting the results you want from the diet you have designed using the earlier chapters.

The Psychologically-Informed Dieting Process There are 5 main organizing guidelines that are worth our special attention. There are other important guidelines to be sure, and this is not an inclusive list, but considering these 5 guidelines and following them is very likely to help with the process of successfully sticking to a dietary intervention.

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1) Cl e a r L ong Ter m Goals If you don’t know where you’re going on your next vacation, how do you know what to pack? How do you know what plane tickets and hotels to look at? How do you know what languages to brush up on? How do you know which of your friends to ask for recommendations? How do you know if you can afford the trip? How do you know if the trip is somewhere you want to go? How do you know if it’s even worth it to go? Everyone knows that the very first order of planning a trip, is deciding where to go! So if we’re all in agreement that a trip to nowhere is not a great idea, then we can acknowledge a very related concept; beginning a diet without a long term goal is similarly silly. It sounds obvious, but many clients come in for diet coaching with questionnaires listing goals as “gain muscle”, “lose weight”, “maximize strength”, “get lean” all listed as goals for a single 3 month diet. Perhaps this

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is a side effect of not having read this book yet and not realizing that phases of muscle gain and fat loss happen independently. It can however also be evidence of a state of being unsure ‘where’ they want to go in their diet endeavor. A long term goal can mean many things, but to be sure “I have no idea” is not one of them. Long term goals can include: • What you want to perform like in 3 months • What PR’s you want to set in 6 months • What you’d like to look like within a year

We could plan longer than a year at a time, but then we risk taking our “goal” and turning it into more of a “wish.” If we plan too far ahead, we’re left with “just train eat and keep getting better” as our plan, which isn’t really a plan at all and something we were going to do anyway. It’s our sincere advice to you to keep most of your goals within the one-year time horizon. And hey, if you achieve those goals, you can plan your next year accordingly.

Not only should goals exist, they should also be clear. If you want to be better at bodybuilding, that’s just fine. If your crossfit performance is the big focus, great. If you wanna put pounds on your total within the next three months, cool. If you just want to see your abs and look like the athlete that you are, also great; we all love to look good. But make sure you understand that goals come with tradeoffs. “I just wanna get better” is NOT a goal. Do you mean leaner? Lighter? Stronger? More muscular? Better at the squat, bench, and deadlift? Even a combination of those goals is just fine, so long as you

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understand that the combination is your goal and you’re willing to accept slower progress in all of those sub-goals if they cannot be worked toward simultaneously. What happens if you don’t have a clear goal? There are 4 negative possibilities that come to mind: a. L o s s o f mot i va t i o n

When you have no goal and times get tough in the gym or on the diet, what do you tell yourself? Well, we’re not sure, which is one of the reasons we recommend having a goal! It’s tough to cheat on your diet with that piece of cheesecake if you’ve got a meet coming up for which you’re on track to make a weightclass. It’s unlikely that you’re going to stand in front of figure judges and know that you could have looked better had you not fallen off the wagon multiple times during the diet. There will be many times on a tough diet during which you will ask yourself “why am I even doing this?” Your long term goal is the answer to that question and has a very big effect on your motivation and consistency. If you have no answer to that question and your goal is “just trying to lean out a bit” (which is not remotely clear), having that extra piece of cake you know you shouldn’t doesn’t seem like such a big deal, so you wind up derailing any progress towards your vague goal. While many women find the process of fat and weight loss rewarding and motivating in and of itself, many of those same women struggle mightily with attempts at gaining muscle. The uptick of the scale, the increase in dress size and the disappearance of your favorite muscle definition can wreak havoc on motivation for muscle gain. When gaining weight, many females are fighting one or more of the following - their personal preferences for appearance, most of society’s norms (often reflected in the mildly rude comments from grandparents or

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parents as to recent weight gain), a lifetime of cultural indoctrination, and, most powerful of them all, genetic programming designed to encourage them to be smaller, not bigger. Gaining muscle requires at least a temporary gain in weight, especially if you’re leaner to start with, so the motivation to do this must be the highest we can engineer so as to maximize the chances of successfully pulling off a mass gaining phase. If you have a clear goal of “I’m very focused on gaining muscle,” and not just “I want to look better,” you’ll be able to better resist the temptation to scrap your muscle gain phase halfway through and revert back to fat loss for no good reason. b. L o s i ng a s e ns e o f t im e -to -ta rg et

If your long-term goal has been to lose 50lbs and you’re down 25, you’re halfway there! Yay! Blow up the balloons and invite the clowns; it’s you’re ‘halfway-there’ party! Comparatively, if your long-term goal barely exists, or is the ill-defined “I’d like to get leaner,” how do you even remotely know where you are in the process? If you don’t even know how long your journey will take, you might find yourself pretty disparaged and under-motivated. (Think back a situation like this in some cardio class you might have taken…..if you are told to do 25 sit ups, you have a definite end point and can probably blast through 25 - no problem. If, however, the instructor just yells “Do sit ups until I say stop!”, you might take a break after 15; you have no idea if the end is in sight or how much to conserve or exert energy in order to make it to the unknown end.) Knowing how far you’ve come and how much further you have to go can allow you to prepare for reality, expend your psychological energy wisely, and push hard when you know the goal is close (and save the hard pushes for later if the goal is still further away). Successful dieters don’t cheat a week out from their bikini show, and they don’t cut out all the fun foods on week 1 of 16 in their

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show diet. But if you have no idea how long the road to “getting leaner” is, your strategy and motivation will suffer. c. P robl e ms de te r min in g rewa rd a n d c o m plet io n

If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve arrived? Do Olympic sprinters continue to run past the finish line, Forrest-Gump-Style, around the track until officials restrain them? Of course not, because they know that celebration of their victory and planning for the next race begin right as soon as they cross that line. And in a big sense, your long term goal is that finish line. If we don’t diet to enjoy at least the results, then why the hell do we diet at all? If you don’t have a long term goal, when is your party? Never? When you finally give up and break down? What kind of party is that? And if you don’t have a goal to finish, when are you supposed to choose a new goal and make further strides? Having a clear long term goal, along with progressive mini goals that support it, will go a long way towards motivating you to succeed. This strategy will allow you to reward yourself for your accomplishments, hopefully to enjoy them fully, and to intelligently plan your next goal, even if that next goal is “establish a healthy and balanced eating pattern at this bodyweight, forever.” d. P robl e ms wi t h c o n sisten t p ro g ra m m in g

Internet diet and training authority Martin Berkhan once coined a less than-PC, but phenomenal and hilarious term; “Fuckarounditis.” Martin defined this state of affairs based on fickleness often seen in lifter/dieters. When someone changes their focus of training once a week, changes their diet goals once every two to three weeks, and starts using new exercises they saw someone else recommending on Facebook the very same day they saw them, that person can be diagnosed with Fuckarounditis. The problem with this state of affairs is that when you give your

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body too much variation in stimulus, it tends not to adapt to any of those stimuli very well, so the net results tend not to be anything that could be described as successful. If you have no clear long-term goals for your dieting process, you might end up switching directions so often that you go nowhere. One week you’re cutting, and the next week you’re cheating a bit too much and oh well, you might as well add some muscle by massing. In two weeks, you’re feeling a bit bloated from the massing so you start cutting again. 4 days into that, your CrossFit competition comes up, which means you carb load the night before and party the night of, so there goes your cutting phase. At the end of that month or so, where are you in terms of progress? Probably where you started or close to it. But if you began a well programmed fat loss phase at the start of that same month instead and stuck to it from the get-go, you could have been down 5-7 pounds already and seeing visible changes in your appearance along with improvements in your performance. We don’t recommend having long term goals just because it sounds nice or because everyone else says so. We recommend them because they work. They work to make dieting easier, simpler, more straightforward, more effective, and more rewarding. If you start dieting for either fat loss or muscle gain and you don’t know why or where you’re headed, or when you need to get there, consider stopping and thinking it through before you proceed. Ten minutes of planning can save you months of time and effort.

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2) S p eci fi c S ho r t Te r m G o a l s While long term goals anchor the outline of our motivation and direction, short term goals allow us to steer the ship and keep it pointed in the right direction. Short term goals can be between a month and a week in length, and allow us to make the adjustments we need to keep on track. For example, imagine that your goal was to lose 15lbs in 3 months (long term). How would you go about making sure you were on track? If you want to be maximally effective, you cut up the 15lbs into weekly chunks. 15 divided by 12 is 1.25, which is the average amount of weight you’re going to have to lose per week if you want to reach your longer-term goal of 15lbs in 3 months.

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Now you don’t just have a hazy goal off in the horizon somewhere, you have a map with which to plan out your every step. If your initial diet keeps you losing at about 1.25lbs per week, you don’t change a thing and just coast along! If your initial diet is too slow and you only lose .5lbs per week, you need to cut calories, increase expenditure, or maybe even do both so that you can meet your short term goals weekly. If your diet is too aggressive and you lose 2lbs per week at the start, you can eat more food to slow the process down and prevent muscle loss. Of course, in order to have the kind of short term weight goals that help you tremendously with staying on track and achieving your long term goals, you need to use your mortal enemy… THE SCALE. If scientists tried to design a machine that makes women question their very self-esteem and value, they’d have to work long and hard to better the common bathroom scale. To many women, the scale is a value-laden instrument designed to make them feel guilty about how skinny they could be and shame them for how skinny they’re not. It doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s step out of teenage insecurity and dependence on a number for our self-worth. You’re a goal-oriented mature adult on a mission. An adult who understands that athletes move, and this movement requires muscles. These athletes come in a wide variety of body sizes and shapes, but all have the similar goals of gaining muscle, losing fat, and improving performance to different extents. The scale comes to this arrangement only as a tool and nothing more. If you calmly and logically decided to drop from 155lbs to 140lbs over 3 months to improve your performance and appearance, the scale will help you tremendously with staying on track for those goals. If you weigh yourself with no goals or no healthy and stable lifestyle in mind, you won’t find any magic in the number of protons and neutrons that compose your body, which is fundamentally what the scale really measures. It tells you little to nothing about your goals, appearance, health, or performance.

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Short term goals, especially those of body weight change, are very helpful in keeping you sane and on track for accomplishing your goals. The next question is the effect of the speed of weight loss and gain on psychology.

3) Op t i ma l Bo dywe i g h t Ch a n ge Ra t e How fast or how slow dieters attempt to lose weight during their fat loss phases seems to impact not just physiology (how much fat they lose and the amount of muscle they spare), but psychology as well. It turns out that the recommended weight loss rate we discussed in Chapter 2 is also psychologically beneficial. SUP ER SLOW W EIGH T LO S S

From a physiological perspective, there is not too much wrong with losing weight very slowly. If you’re able to keep very close track of your food intake and

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your activity, it’s quite possible to detect and replicate a loss of around 0.25% of your body mass per week. For a 150lb woman, that translates to about 1.5lbs of tissue lost per month, which is very tough to detect, but perhaps not impossible. One thing we can say for sure about this fat loss rate is that it’s definitely safe for muscle retention. Speeds of loss that slow present only a tiny catabolic risk to muscle that’s easily overcome with proper diet and training. Simply speaking, risk of muscle loss is minimal. There is, however, a non-physiological problem with such a slow weight loss. It’s been shown in well-controlled studies that those dieters whom attempt needlessly slow weigh loss rates (under 0.5% per week and perhaps even as high as under 0.75% per week) experience greater dropout rates and weight re-gain after the conclusion of the diet. The top hypothesis is that super-slow weight loss rates are destructive to motivation. Seeing steady noticeable results is a very powerful motivator, and super slow diets just don’t deliver the goods in that regard.

A very related approach to going super slow is the looser approach of “just eating healthy.” Eating healthy is fine, but there is no good reason to think that just healthy eating will result in noticeable and meaningful fat loss. You can eat just the same number of calories healthy or not, so if your goal is weight loss, you need a more precise plan. It seems from both the literature and our extensive work with clients through RP that most people do best with faster rates of weight loss, between 0.5% and 1% bodyweight per week. What about the alternative? How does super-fast weight loss affect psychology? SUP ER- FAST W EIGH T LO S S

From a strictly physiological perspective, we can say that weight loss paces past 1% weight loss per week (especially 1.5% and above) are bad news. The caloric deficit is so great that fatigue skyrockets, training suffers, hunger and cravings become disproportionately intense, and muscle loss is likely. Chapter Five

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This hunger and performance loss ends up impacting the psychological side as well. How hard is it to stay motivated when you’re constantly exhausted, with all aspects of your athletic performance going downhill? How hard is it to stay motivated when you’re starving day and night and your mind is telling you to eat everything in sight? Super-fast loss rates look appealing because they can make even daunting weight loss goals seem less out of reach. Even the most willful of dieters however, can be worn down and overwhelmed with the monotonous brutality of an overly aggressive diet. This can result in cheating on the diet (with the equally brutal accompanying guilt), a change of diet goals during the middle of the process (tell yourself 155lbs is an ok place to stop the diet instead of the 150lbs you originally planned), or an even worse result -a complete cessation of the diet itself. Now, you’ve expended a ton of effort, reached no goal, and to top it all off, now likely have a super negative feeling about dieting. Between the extremely slow and the overly aggressive rate is our sort of golden band of weight loss pace. Weight loss rates between 0.5% and 1% of body mass per week seem to be not only comfortably within the physiological constraints, but psychologically sustainable as well. Are they sustainable indefinitely? Not a chance, which brings us to our next section.

4) Ma i n t e n a n ce P h a s e s So, we’ve got our optimal dieting pace and we’re good to go, now, let’s start dieting for a whole year and reach our goals! Wait, wait… we can remember that in earlier chapters there was mention of a limit to individual stretches of dieting, especially for fat loss. The limits already mentioned were physiological, but it turns out there are psychological ones as well. As mentioned earlier, diets exceeding much more than 3 months in duration tend to run into some physiological difficulties. After several months, high fatigue levels become unsustainable and training volume and intensity begin to

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drop, muscle growth mechanisms give way to muscle-burning mechanisms, and rebound, muscle loss and injury become much more likely. In addition, the body moves further and further away from its set point. Metabolic rates fall, requiring even deeper cuts to calories in order to sustain progress. The brain responds to these trends mostly by raising hunger levels and by dropping unplanned activity levels. Diet for too long and you’re super hungry and super lazy, not nearly the kind of environment that sustains fat loss, but most certainly one that greatly promotes cheating on the diet or worse, ceasing it completely. After every 2-3 month period of dieting, a maintenance phase can allow the dieter to not only re-set physiological mechanisms, but psychological ones as well. 2-3 months of maintaining the achieved weight while eating more and more food to accommodate an increasingly re-accelerating metabolism can be a psychological godsend to promote recovery from the stresses of dieting and prime the dieter for another bout of fat loss. Chapter Five

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Because of the isocaloric environment of the maintenance phase, the intense hunger of the preceding fat loss phase is quickly relegated to minimal or entirely non-existent. As plentiful food is consumed, normal energy levels are returned and daily activities become much easier again. Training feels fresh and new and your body feels recovered and strong. After 2-3 months of maintenance eating, the hardships of dieting seem distant and the motivation to tackle them anew is back to normal. Now you’re ready, both physiologically and psychologically, for a new round of fat loss dieting. So do we just diet infinitely with maintenance phases? When do we get to live life? What about balance?

5) T he R i g ht Ti m e fo r B a l a nce If you’re always dieting or re-establishing your physiology and psychology for another round of dieting, when is the time for balance? Isn’t there room for eating the foods you love AND getting the body and performance you want? There is, but the process is sequential rather than concomitant. FIRST you get the body you want, and THEN you enjoy the foods you love. To be clearer, there is quite a bit of enjoyment of the foods you love during each maintenance phase. We can’t just diet with no end, so periodic maintenance phases are a temporary return to balance, both physiological and psychological. Do we need maintenance phases for balance? Can’t we just diet with balance built in? By definition, no. The very act of creating a hypocaloric environment is what leads to weight and fat loss, and it is by definition throwing the body and mind out of balance. You must eat less than you burn, which is the opposite of balance. In fact, the more efforts you make to “live a normal life” (by eating tasty foods high in calories), the slower your weight loss is – you need the temporary imbalance to facilitate the change. Thus, the more you try to mix balance and fat

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loss, the worse the results for fat loss and the longer you have to diet and remain out of balance. The good news is, diets, as discussed extensively, are temporary.

To achieve almost any goal, work is required and the work needed for fat loss is temporary imbalance. Taking all of these concepts together, the psychological dieting landscape seems to have 3 recommended states, with two of them being temporary and one of them being indefinite in length:

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State 1: Dieting for Weight Change (temporary) State 2: Maintenance/Recovery Phase (temporary) State 3: Balance of Fun, Eating, and Training (indefinite) The first psychological state that seems best in the short term is that of focused, quick (but not too quick), and diligent dieting, whether for fat loss or muscle gain. This state is very effective for body composition changes, but not sustainable for periods longer than about 3 months at a time. In addition, diet phases shorter than about 1 month at a time tend not to accomplish very much body composition change, especially not when traded off against the restrictions typical of such a phase. Thus, for psychological and physiological purposes, we typically recommend diet phases to last between 1 and 3 months. The second possible state is the maintenance phase. When the focused diet state comes to its inevitable end, a maintenance phase must be initiated to recover the individual from the physiological and psychological disruptions of the diet state. Within 2-3 months (sometimes shorter or longer), the maintenance phase has returned the dieter back into dieting form, and at that point another focused diet can occur if needed. This initial phase following a weight change diet requires more attention to weight than subsequent periods of maintaining when your set point is established and you can relax a bit in terms of your eating precision. Once the dieter has achieved the body composition they find at least temporarily satisfying, they can enter into the third state; balance. The state of balance (otherwise known as a balanced lifestyle) is really just a maintenance phase that’s been indefinitely extended. In this state, the dieter continues to eat a fundamentally healthy and sport-oriented diet. The dieter continues to be active and train hard, but can also enjoy many of her favorite foods in satisfying amounts. By eating just a bit less “clean” and continuing to train hard, the dieter can rely on the body’s proclivity to remain in homeostasis, thus holding a stable

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bodyweight for months and years on end. If the occasional extended holiday produces 5lbs of weight gain, a period of several weeks of lighter eating can and will return the body back into its normal weight range. The dieter can remain in this healthy and enriching state of balance for as long as she chooses, and this is where some big misconceptions about the relationship of dieting and balanced lifestyles lie… The key is choice, and the big question to the dieter is “what do you want to do?” Sit down, relax, and do an honest self- assessment. Think about how you’d like to look in an ideal world and think about how much you enjoy your balanced lifestyle of food, friends and fun. Remind yourself that if you are going to diet, you’ll be giving up a lot of that food and fun for a few months straight. If your balanced lifestyle is more important than an ideal body, stop self-criticizing IMMEDIATELY and ENJOY YOUR LIFE; you only have one, and spending it in a state of purgatory is just no way to live. If you calmly give it some thought and decide that changing your body is more important than being balanced for the next 3 months, it’s time to diet - and with no ‘if’s, ‘and’s or ‘but’s. Once you’re dieting, focus and be diligent, and do what it takes. Commit to those 3 months fully or don’t do it all. Halfhearted dieting does not achieve goals, AND has the added pain of making you feel guilty. It’s the worst of all scenarios; you are neither changing your appearance nor enjoying your life! Don’t do this to yourself. All or nothing is the way to go. Once you’re done with a bout of dieting, you really must enter the maintenance phase - none of this “I want to lose 5 more pounds while I’m in maintenance” crap… that’s not maintenance then, is it? When you’ve been in maintenance for 2-3 months and your metabolism and psychology have re-set, you’re ready to make your next decision. Don’t make any decisions on an empty stomach,

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and don’t make any decisions on a post-diet metabolism and mindset; only decide your next move when you’re well into the maintenance phase and feel recovered. Take another look at your body and go through the same calculus again… what’s more important to you for the next several months: balance, or further enhancements? Remember that you can’t have both at the same time and that there is NO RIGHT ANSWER, only YOUR answer. Once again, whatever decision you make, dive in completely and don’t torture yourself with doubts. If you’re honest with yourself during this decision making process, you’re going to be both effective at dieting when you need to be, and happy and balanced when you choose, instead of trying to do it all at once or choosing a different option every other day. Make decisions and stick to them and you’ll not only be in great shape, but you’ll be happier too. What’s the point of a great body if you don’t ever enjoy living in it? Chapter Five

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