If you’re like most people, you’ve struggled to keep up your energy and stay motivated to keep up with your workout routine and your commitments to yourself. How many times have you made excuses for not exercise or falling off the diet wagon? Probably too many to count. Keeping your body healthy and in shape isn’t something just for athletes, it’s something that college students, moms and professionals need to be concerned about as well. Not only do you live longer, you lower your risk of disease, cancer and increase your energy. Studies have continually shown that people who regularly exercise and eat healthy consistently advance in their careers faster than their less healthy peers. This is often attributed to their energetic attitudes, motivation and also their outward appearance of professionalism.
When your body is working right, you work at a much higher level than when things are going worse. This higher coefficient of energy allows you to get more done, spend time on important things and help to maintain a high level of motivation and mental acuity. This is where a new diet, called the “Bulletproof Body” claims to be helpful. This diet is a 180 degree change from the more traditional “cut calories and carbs” style diets out there. If a normal doctor or dietitian encountered this diet, they’d probably assume the person was going to become obese, considering that it advises eating upwards of 4000 calories per day, particularly since it also advises not exercising much as well.
How This Diet Purports to Deliver Weight Loss
Based upon the high caloric intake, this Bulletproof diet certainly is a lot different than traditional methods of cutting food or increasing exercise. The diet’s founder claims that you will often achieve the lowest levels of HDL cholesterol and triglycerides by following this plan, even though it’s not limiting your fat or carb intake whatsoever (to things that impact these levels). Yet, how exactly does this work?
- Step One – A Bulletproof Diet. The Bulletproof diet recommends eating a lot of calories, at least 3000 calories per day. However, you want to eat foods that are good for your body, low hormones, and natural. Foods should be nutrient dense, such as free range meats, organ meats or other high nutrient proteins. You want to have a lot of foods high in fat, it’s claimed, to help your body to burn fat rather than sugars, which it would do instead. This is essential, as your body will crave carbs and sugars if you cut down on these areas too much over time. You need fats to form most of the complex proteins and hormones your body needs to keep your metabolism running at optimal levels. You also want to avoid anything such as xenoestrogens and mycotoxins, which can cause significant problems to your body over thel ong term.
- Step Two – Consistent Sleep. Certainly there are many studies out there that show the link between a person’s sleep schedule and their overall health, including weight gain. People who sleep better and for longer periods almost universally stay healthier and have less issues with weight. If you’re aiming to lose 100 pounds or so, you can’t start sleeping 5 hours a night at the same time. You need to have adequate delta (REM) sleep each night. This is one of the purported essential parts of the diet.
- Step Three – Exercising is Important. Certainly the Bulletproof diet doesn’t suggest no exercise, but it does advise that you limit your exercise to building muscle and helping tone your body, rather than trying to burn calories. This is actually good advice that many researchers are coming around to as well. If you are trying to burn calories through weight loss, the time it takes to do so is just too great to warrant this as part of your daily routine. Even a full hour of cardio will only burn about a single hostess cupcake worth of calories, hardly something that can be lauded. According to the Bulletproof Diet, you want to have brief, intense, infrequent and purposeful exercise to make the most of it. They advise 4 hours per week being spent on this total, which is much less than a lot of diets advise.
The Bulletproof diet is certainly different than many methods out there, in that it describes a diet that’s high in calories and low in exercise. It remains to be seen how effective it actually is for users in practice. Yet, ultimately, it’s hardly a surprise that for most people they will at least want to try this diet for themselves given its lack of restriction. There are likely better diets out there, however, that provide more reliable results.
Dr. Jeff Volek of Ohio State university actually looked at the benefits of this diet in more detail in recent years. He found that most athletes favor high fat/high protein and low carbohydrates as part of their diet. The effects are often seen in more modern methods known as the “Paleo diet” or ketogenic diets. These dramatically reduced fat in patients, increased muscle and promoted significant health benefits. Drastic reduction in carbohydrates, was found in his research, to induce rapid weight loss through a state dubbed “ketosis”, which causes stored fat to be burned instead of glucose as we typically would so with a carb rich diet.
In recent years a lot of investigation has been conducted by researchers trying to pin down just exactly is causing so many people to not lose weight permanently when they try to do so. For the most part, people who try to lose weight in the longer term fail to do so. The relapse rate after dieting is over 95% after only 6 months. What studies have found is that people who try to lose weight actually think about it as a “temporary” hurdle they have to tackle and once they do, it will be over. The reality is that people need to think of it is a fundamental life change. one that requires long term commitment. In order to maintain any weight lost you must successfully lose weight quickly as studies have shown, but also maintain your diet indefinitely afterwards.
Green coffee now comes in supplement form, that makes it at lost easier to take each day. This chlorogenic acid is preserved and high quantities of green coffee extract is delivered to users. This raw green coffee would be far too bitter to eat directly, but in this way it preserves the good parts of the green coffee and makes it easier to take each day. If you roast coffee up to 70% of the acids above are actually lost. Typical dosages of green coffee as recommended by doctors to patients now are along the lines of 1000mg per day. This works out to around 500mg twice per day which is fairly typical. Green coffee does not have high concentrations of caffeine that are created through the roasting process as well, which cuts down on feeling “buzzed” while on this supplement.
In this particular study as published, a team of researchers tested fourteen healthy subjects to see what happened if they were given a low dosage of green tea “catechins”. They were also given a combination of Vitamin C as part of this trial. It was found that those who had green tea extract had a much higher level of metabolites in their skin. Researchers observed additional benefits that reduced the inflammation of skin markets, such as PGE2 and 12-HETE. The researchers as part of this study believed these effects were caused by green tea through the production of skin cells that offered protection against long term damage from UV rays. These catechin metabolites were linked directly to protection against sunburn inflammation and even longer UVR style damage modes.
Many weight loss methods claim to offer quick results, sometimes even within a matter of days. Not all of these methods are bogus, but many of them don’t have any sort of clinical basis for their claims. Not only are you battling your body’s own natural instincts by trying to lose weight so quickly, but there are a host of additional potential problems. Your metabolism is highly sensitive to impacts in diet, particularly if you’re not taking a product that stops it from dropping when you cut calories. Naturally your body will attempt to stop any sort of weight loss if you decrease your caloric intake, and it will also increase your hunger as well. There’s no good that will come from trying to go through an all or nothing style weight loss plan.
When you drink juice each day, it’s a great way to detoxify your stomach, your cravings and also decrease your appetite. Your body if it has all of the nutrients it needs will not “crave” food nearly as often as you would typically experience. The result is a much more stable and easier maintenance of your weight. In addition, juice diets are now popular and being highly recommended by physicians. There is good reason for this, as eating fruits and vegetables (as well as drinking them) has been shown in many studies to boost your metabolism. On average someone on a juice diet (drinking juices for a meal per day) is going to lose roughly 10 pounds every two weeks. This is a very fast level of weight loss.