So I've been dieting for the past 2-3 years and I've lost 140 lbs. Along the way I have tried pretty much every diet in existence. Keto, HCG, Cleanses, IMF, etc.
First and foremost I'm not trying to refute any scientific claims or am I trying to deter anyone from a diet that is working for them. I couldn't care less if you're drinking the purple brew from a leprechaun's shoe, as long as you're getting healthy.
What I did want to know is why these diets seem to work. Was there really a magical hormone that targeted fat? Could I trick my body into entering some sort of ultimate metabolic state? Maybe...
Here's what I do know...evidence and claims for weight loss is all over the place. Its a multi-million dollar industry and unfortunately, people will say whatever to make money (even doctors). I decided to break down my knowledge of energy into the most fundamental form....whatever excess we put in gets stored, whatever excess we use up gets taken out. I used this knowledge to break down how these diets work and why they're successful.
My first experience was with the HCG diet. The idea behind it is that you take some pregnancy hormone and stick to a very stringent diet (500 kcals) you would lose a pound a day. My friend told me about it and so I jumped on board. The diet turned out to be legit, I was losing a pound a day and became a huge advocate.
We would spend so much time going out of our way to stick to this ridiculous diet and then inject HCG hormone into our behinds every morning (seriously). One day, I watched a documentary on a guy who was losing weight by simply eating calorie regulated portions of fast food. He was eating the worst of the worst, but never over 2,000 kcal. This made me wonder how much of this HCG diet was actually real.
I decided to come up with my own 500 calorie diet. It was similar in design to the HCG but with much more food options and no injections. I discovered that I lost weight at exactly the same rate. With this in mind, I did a bit more research to see what the HCG was actually for in terms of dieting. I found information saying that it was an appetite suppressor all the way to a hormone that targets belly fat (by a bunch of random HCG advocates). I also discovered that, the person who invented the diet and then resurfaced it were nothing but con men. I decided that the HCG was a pointless placebo and never used it again. It was the 500 calorie diet that was the real bread winner. With this new knowledge in mind, it helped me break down other diets I came into in the future.
The next diet I experienced were cleanses. You drink some lemonade or magic juice from some plant from Alaska with something secret in it and you lose 10 lbs in 3 days...something like that. How could a lemonade possibly cause your body to expend nearly 2 weeks worth of energy in 3 days? Something to do with toxins right? Well, even if you cut your calories to 0, if you are passively burning 2,500 kcals a day, it is impossible to burn 35,000 calories with this method in 2-3 days. So losing 10 lbs on a lemonade diet is just not possible.
I started to think more about this, where were these extra pounds coming from? I remember that at the start of the HCG diet, they would instruct you to have a gorge day (where you at as much of what you wanted) and over the next few days you would magically lose 10 lbs. What I started to realize (and a lot of people have trouble wrapping their head around this) is that if you eat an apple that weighs 1 lb, you are going to gain 1 lb until you body poops out the excess matter. This means that if you eat 3-4 lbs of food a day and it takes about a day to digest, you're probably always holding a descent amount of fecal matter (or undigested food) inside of you, especially if you're overeating. With the lemonade diet, you don't eat for 2-3 days and your body is completely clear of any fecal matter that would normally be going through the digestion process. This can possibly attribute to 2-3 lbs, maybe even more, of weight loss. Well, as soon as you started eating normally again, that fecal weight would be accounted for and you would jump back up 2-3 lbs. The other thing is that depriving your body of sodium and carbs can actually cause you to drop in water weight which can also attribute to a portion of the "weight" you've lost.
The part of the cleanse that actually works is the intermittent fasting portion of it. You are basically cutting your calories to nothing for those 2-3 days which awards some genuine weight loss. You don't need a magical lemonade in order to do this. You can intermittently fast with just regular lemon water (cayenne pepper if you're feeling cute). Whether you choose to do a cleanse or just a regular IF session, you can expect the same results. You will lose a lot of water weight and fecal matter and some actual fat as well. (I'm not suggesting you IF btw, that's something you should talk to a professional about)
The next diet is Keto. Being that this is the most popular, I'm going to get the most hate for this one. Before you guys bash me to death, please realize that I do believe in the evidence of ketones in the body and I get why this type of diet is extremely useful in the fitness community. What I don't buy into, is the hype of all of it. We've experienced many forms of the keto diet in the forms of the atkins and paleo diet, even the hcg diet was borderline keto. All these diets worked perfectly fine without forcing your body into some ketogenic state. So what is it about these low carb diets that work so well? Well, carbs can carry a lot of water weight so that's definitely part of it, but what I think makes people so successful at these types of diets is the food selection limitations.
Most of the foods that are easily accessible to us have carbs. Ordering a protein burger at most places makes you sound like a complete weirdo. Everything has a bun, has sauce on it, or has potatoes on the side. Because we avoid these types of foods, we avoid the convenience of being to eat whatever and whenever. Most of the places we were eating before are now off limits.
These diets almost always force us to start making our own meals and measuring how much food we're consuming. When we start keeping track of what we put in, we start to keep track of what we put out. We're using apps and now all of the sudden people are keeping track of their progress, and I think it's a huge part of the success behind all of it.
So be basic, get the app, keep track of everything and the numbers will never lie to you. This worked for me, I really hope it works for you guys too.
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