participants in the National Weight Control Registry—which tracks people who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year—regularly keep food diaries.
If you follow the Smart Fat Solution closely, especially if you make use of the Phase 1 and Phase 2 meal plans and recipes, you won’t need a food diary. But you’re probably going to go “off the reservation” at some point, and you may even find that you’ve drifted a few pounds away from your target. That’s where a food diary comes in. Keeping a record of what you eat—even for a few days—
can accomplish a lot. It’s an eye opener, and it helps you track your progress. It also keeps you mindful of what you’re eating. It’s very hard to eat without thinking when you’ve made a promise to yourself to write everything down!
Here’s a way to use a food diary as part of the Smart Fat Solution. Try keeping one for up to three days when you start Phase 1—particularly so you can track your 5-5-10 intake of smart fat, protein, and fiber. Then, try it again for a few days when you’re in Phase 2 as a way to make sure that you’re still within the smart fat recommendations. Try it one more time when you are past Day 31—again, just to make sure that you’re aware of what you’re eating and that you’re still hitting the 5-5-10 mark.
Make the diary as simple or as detailed as you want; do whatever works for you, but at the very least, try it when you first start the Thirty-Day Plan and then as a check later on.
If you go this route, you don’t have to keep a diary forever. Jonny once went on a monthlong journey to track every single morsel he put into his mouth. He tracked protein grams, carb grams, fat grams, calories—all of it—and also kept note of his exercise habits just for good measure. At the end, he had learned a great deal about what his body needed to lose, gain, or maintain weight. He never repeated the experiment, but the knowledge he gained during that month was invaluable. Steven does a three-day food diary analysis at least once every year, and he learns something important about his nutrient intake from it every time.
Food diaries can help you snap out of a plateau funk or bring you back to eating right if you slip up from time to time. Don’t eat right just to keep a food diary; keep a food diary to eat right!
never want to be the guy who has a high school reunion, puts on the tux he hasn’t worn in years, and
“suddenly” realizes that he’s gained 25 pounds without noticing. Use the scale! It will help you stay conscious. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. Think of it as just another way to get important information about what’s working for you and what’s not.
We have one caveat, however: An ordinary scale won’t tell you anything about body composition, which is an important metric when you’re trying to lose weight. Remember: You want to lose body fat, not muscle. (People who lose weight without preserving muscle often find that they become
“skinny fat.”) Fortunately, a number of higher-end home scales now tell you your body fat percentage as well as your weight. These body fat percentages are reliable within 2 and 4 percent (as they depend upon hydration), and they give you a good idea of what direction you’re going in. You can purchase a bioelectrical impedance (BEI) scale for less than $100. You can also find high-level BEI scales in some doctors’ offices, gyms, and spas.
If you truly want to use a scale to track your progress, ditch your old-school bathroom scale and replace it with a BEI model (see www.SmartFat.com for recommendations). We think it’s worth it if you’re a scale-user. (A note on hydration: Being more hydrated can change your body fat percentage numbers by 1–2 percent, so when you’re tracking improvements using a BEI scale, ignore any changes unless they are more than 2 percent.)
My weight loss was moving along at a great pace, but I’ve reached that plateau and now it has stopped. What can I do?
In our combined fifty-five years of practice, neither of us has ever seen a person successfully lose weight over time without encountering the dreaded “plateau”—that point in the weight-loss journey where weight loss seems to stop dead in its tracks. This plateau is frustrating for everybody, but you can do a couple of things about it.
First is to think about your weight loss differently. Your weight—or more correctly, your body fat percentage—is like the stock market. You can’t pay attention to every change that happens on an hourly graph of stock market activity—you’d go crazy. What’s important, with stocks and with weight loss, is the overall direction of the graph. The little daily dips and surges that happen throughout the day in the stock market don’t matter very much if you look at the big picture and see that over time the stock market is generally going up. Similarly, your weight can fluctuate by a couple of pounds from day to day, but what’s important is what’s happening over the long haul, that is, that it’s generally going down. Plateaus are a part of the weight-loss journey. The trick is not to be defeated by them but to plan for them and not be surprised (or derailed) when they happen.
One common reason for plateauing: If you are following our recommendations, your fat mass will decrease and your muscle mass will increase, so your total weight won’t change. This doesn’t mean that you’re plateauing; you’re actually doing a great job because you want more muscle mass to burn fat! But still, you might get hung up on the number on that bathroom scale. Don’t! Instead, measure your fat mass and lean mass and track them separately (you’ll need a BEI scale to do this).
That said, other forces are often at work that can contribute to (or cause) plateaus, and if you’re stuck for a while at the same weight and nothing seems to be working, it might be time to consider some of these. For example, many patients in Steven’s clinic have a test to measure basal metabolic rate (BMR), especially if they have any challenges losing weight. BMR is the rate at which you burn calories when you are at rest.
Steven’s clinic also offers genetic testing. Both genetic testing and metabolic rate can be important pieces of information when you’re setting out to modify a diet. (For example, some people with a certain variant of the gene that may be correlated with obesity actually do better with a lower smart fat diet!)
Two other factors that can cause, or prolong, plateaus are food intolerances and toxins. If you’re eating a food to which you are sensitive, your body may be responding by making a lot of inflammatory chemicals that can interfere with a smoothly running metabolism, not to mention burning fat. (Undiagnosed food sensitivities are a frequent cause of weight-loss plateaus.) So if you hit a prolonged weight-loss plateau, consider trying a food allergy elimination diet. (Visit our website at www.SmartFat.com for details.)
Another thing to consider is that when you lose a lot of fat, you release a lot of toxins. While that fat is melting off your hips, butt, and thighs, it’s also, unfortunately, releasing a bunch of stored toxins into your bloodstream. These toxins lower your metabolism (the rate at which you burn calories), and they make you feel grumpy and sick. If you’ve been eating dirty fat and mean protein for years, guess what? You’re probably loaded with toxins, and when those babies get released into your system, all hell can break loose.
Though there’s no scientifically accurate agreed-upon test for measuring toxins, you can safely assume that if you’ve been eating the Standard American Diet of mean protein and dirty fat, you’ve got toxins galore in your body, and they block your calorie-burning ability dramatically. If toxins are holding you back from losing weight, it might be time to add some detox supplements that can help your liver do its job of clearing them from your system. The ones we like are milk thistle (900 milligrams a day), N-acetylcysteine (NAC; 600 milligrams a day), curcumin (500–1,000 milligrams a day), and selenium (400 micrograms a day). Your total intake of selenium from food and supplements should not exceed 400 mcg. Keep in mind that your multivitamin may have 100–200 mcg of selenium.
(See Chapter 8 for more on supplements.)
A low-tech solution to plateaus is as simple as it is elegant: Drink more water. The formula we both like for weight loss is to take your weight, divide by two, and drink that number of ounces of water every day. (So if you weigh 150 pounds, you should be drinking 75 ounces every day, or a little more than nine 8-ounce glasses of water.) Meanwhile, try sweating more. Exercise may not be the most effective way to lose weight (that honor goes to diet), but it’s one of the best ways to assure that you continue to hold on to your gains. Try upping your activity level or intensity.
Probably the best advice of all when it comes to plateaus is also the hardest to follow: Be patient.
Plateaus are a fact of life on the weight-loss journey. And they’re not the end of that journey—they’re just a minor obstacle in the road.