I often get asked what’s the best way to diet or what’s the best fat burning diet. People are always looking for a short answer to these questions so here it is: find a good diet plan and follow it. That’s it. The best fat burning diet is a healthy diet that you can follow comfortably until you get down to your target weight and stay there. That is the best fat burning diet.
We’re not talking about short-term weight loss here. There are all sorts of ways to lose a few pounds quickly and you can find thousands if not hundreds of thousands of articles dealing with this online. You can also find all sorts of gimmicks like plastic wraps and pills that are being marketed to anyone who doesn’t value their time or money.
What people really want is a way to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of their lives. It’s about making changes to your daily eating routine that will lead you to lose weight and improve your health in a lasting way. All the information in the world isn’t going to help you lose weight by itself.
There are more overweight people today than ever yet we know so much more about what causes obesity
Information Does Not Lead To Weight Loss
I think this is pretty obvious. We have more information available to us today than ever before, yet obesity rates have never been higher. What’s worse is, we now have increasing rates of obesity among children. This is a first. It’s abundantly clear that simply knowing what causes weight gain is not enough to prevent it.
Some Nurses And Doctors Are Overweight
We’ve all heard that knowledge is power, but is it true when it comes to losing weight? Nurses and doctors spend a lot of time in school learning about health and nutrition. They have what’s called a working knowledge because they make use of what they’ve studied in their day to day working lives. They often advise their patients about which foods to eat and which to avoid. Yet, despite having a working knowledge about diet and nutrition, some nurses and doctors are overweight or obese. How can that be?
Information Has No Power If It Is Not Put Into Action
Unless the information motivates you to make changes in your life, it will not help you to lose weight. Knowledge by itself is not enough to bring about results. We all know that sugar can lead to obesity, but many people consume soft drinks and sports drinks each and every day.
It’s common knowledge that sweetened beverages are the biggest contributor to the obesity epidemic yet it’s a thriving, multi-billion dollar industry. (1) Consumers are slowly cutting back on these drinks every year, but beverage manufacturers are still selling over 12 billion cases a year as of 2015!
People know they shouldn’t be eating the wrong foods, yet they do, or we wouldn’t have the obesity problem that currently exists.
You might think you’re on a good fat burning diet, but if you have a weight problem, you need something else don’t you?
Knowing what contributes to a problem is not a solution to the problem. It’s just information. We need something else that will allow us to make use of that information in a way that will give us the results we want to get. You need a plan you can follow because without a plan you will not take action. When we don’t take action, we don’t get results.
What’s The Best Fat Burning Diet
The best fat burning diet is one that lets you lose weight and lets you keep the weight off for good. It has to be a diet you can see yourself following for the rest of your life or else you won’t keep the weight off for good, will you.
Crash diet plans and really low carb or really anything kind of diet is not something you’re going to be able to stick to. Do you want to succeed in turning this around or do you want to stay on the yo-yo diet circuit?
The best fat burning diet has three parts to it. First, you need good information. If you already have a lot of information about nutrition and dieting, you have one of three parts to the solution. Second, you need a blueprint or plan to put the knowledge to use. Knowledge by itself isn’t going to change anything.
You need a diet plan that lets you put the knowledge to use in a way that changes what it is you eat. The third thing you need is to take action and put the plan to work for you. To summarize, before knowledge can have the power to make changes in your life, you need the following three things:
- The information (knowledge)
- A working plan to implement and put the knowledge to use
- Action. You need to take action and follow through until you get the results you want
Part 1 – The Best Fat Burning Diet Has Good Information
There’s a lot of information about dieting and losing weight, but not all of it is accurate or up to date. Some people say the secret to weight loss is to eat less and move more. (2) Others say the secret is that you have to eat less. (3) I disagree with both these ideas and I can and have proved them to be wrong.
You need accurate information and you need the right plan to capitalize on that information. For example, it’s true that consuming too many calories will lead to weight gain, but to simply recommend that you should cut calories would not be the best way for you to apply that knowledge. You will get much better results if you selectively cut some calories over others.
For example, you will get much better weight loss results if you were to cut 500 calories of sugar from your diet than you would if you were to cut 500 calories of protein. You won’t lose much weight if you cut out protein and your health might suffer.
So, skipping the main course to cut calories and eating a good portion of desert is not the best way to cut calories. As ridiculous as this sounds, I actually know someone who used to try to diet in exactly this way!
Part 2 – The Best Fat Burning Diet Has A Blueprint Or Plan
If you were to read every article about what contributes to weight gain or what leads to weight loss, this in itself would not bring about any change in your diet. Even if you were to make a few changes in your diet based on what you read, those changes might not be made in a way that would lead to significant weight loss for the longer term. The information on weight loss you have needs to be put to use in a way that will make fundamental changes to what it is you eat and the daily routines you follow.
In weight loss, this blueprint or plan is called a diet. The word diet does not necessarily mean that you are going to eat less. (4) In fact, this type of diet is doomed to fail in the long run.
A good diet simply means that you are going to eat differently from now on. The diet lays out a framework that leads you to take action(s) that changes which foods you eat, when you eat them and where you get your food from. Most people need to make changes in all three areas to lose weight and keep it off long-term.
Part 3 – The Best Fat Burning Diet Calls For Action
The third component needed is action. You need to follow the instructions in the diet plan so you change your eating routines. The reason that just eating a bit less of this and cutting out a bit of that doesn’t work for weight loss is simply because you haven’t made changes to your eating habits.
Most people have strayed off the path for so long that major changes are needed. You have to stop what it is you’re doing and start over. That’s the only way to cut out all the bad contributing factors and build a new set of eating habits from the ground up.
You need to implement the plan and follow through on it. The best of plans won’t deliver results if it is not acted on. Not only do you need to act on the plan but you have to follow it through exactly as it has been laid out to get the desired results.
The Best Fat Burning Diet
First, let’s define the word diet. The word diet refers to a set course of eating and drinking where the kind and amount of food you should eat is planned out so you can either lose weight or follow a certain lifestyle.
Isolated actions won’t get the results you want. Real life experience is always the best evidence when evaluating different approaches. Before creating the ELH DIET, I made all sorts of isolated changes to my diet to try to lose weight. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of things I tried.
Things I Did To Lose Weight Before The ELH DIET:
- Bought low fat milk, cottage cheese and yogurt
- Cut portion size
- Ate more fruit
- Stopped making gravy with roasts etc.
- Ate yogurt instead of ice cream
- Ate baked potatoes instead of mashed
- Bought low fat cuts of meat
- Bought the natural, healthier version of cookies, bread etc.
- Ate brown rice instead of white rice
- Used whole wheat pasta
- Ate hard boiled or poached eggs instead of frying
- Fasting
- Ate more salads
Imagine making all these changes and not getting results! As I did these things, I expected to lose weight if I kept it up for a long enough period of time. But it didn’t work. I managed to lose a few pounds here and there but I would gain it back a short while later.
I finally realized that it was going to take more than this and that I would need to make a complete change to my diet if I expected to get lasting results.
By this point in time I weighed 210 lbs and I was 40 lbs overweight. Losing a few pounds wasn’t going to make much of a difference. I realized that I needed to make a complete change in lifestyle just as I did when I quit smoking.
And that’s when the light bulb came on. I remembered that even a habit like smoking could be licked in as little as a week. If you can stop smoking for 5 to 7 days, you’ve made it and you don’t ever need to go back to that habit.
And that’s when I also made the connection to the fact that our eating patterns are habits too. We have our likes and preferences and we tend to eat the same things over and over. Some people have toast and jam for breakfast every day for most of their lives and don’t get sick of it. In fact, they get quite disappointed if they have to eat something else. We’re creatures of habit when it comes to eating and a lot of us have developed very poor habits.
The good news is, you can break a habit in one week and you can form a new one in three or four weeks. In other words, you can turn your weight problem around in about a month. All you have to do afterwards is to keep going and the weight will gradually drop off.
It takes longer for some people than for others, but that’s not a big deal. Once you’ve decided to change things and not go back, what difference does it make if it takes 3 months or 6 months to get down to your optimum weight. What matters is that you get there and stay there once you’ve made it. Are you with me?
The Best Fat Burning Diet Is The ELH DIET
The ELH DIET is made up of three distinct phases that are structured to take you from where you are now to where you need to be. Here’s a brief summary of the structure of the diet:
Phase 1 – Reset stop what you’re doing and start over (one week)
Phase 2 – Retrain your appetite (who cares as long as you get there right?)
Phase 3 – Retain (the rest of your life at your optimum weight)
Phase 1 is a strict one-week reset period. This is where we quit smoking so to speak. We’re only going to eat certain things to keep us healthy and alive while we break all our bad diet habits.
In Phase 2 you slowly reintroduce foods into your diet. You’re going to pay attention here to see if you are mildly allergic (sensitive) to foods as you reintroduce them into your diet. You will pay close attention to see how you feel after you eat grains and dairy etc. and notice if you have any small adverse reactions.
If you are sensitive to dairy, you will notice it and can make appropriate changes to your diet. If rice causes bloating, you will either not eat it at all or you will eat much less of it than you used to. Foods that are known to contribute to obesity the most like sugar are either not reintroduced at all or are consumed on a very limited basis from now on.
This phase is where you learn to retrain your appetite to crave food that is good for you. You also learn how to mix and match foods to keep your blood sugar level down and put your body into fat burning mode. You will learn how to burn fat without exercise.
Phase 2 lasts until you’ve lost all the weight you want to lose
I will give you a list of foods you can eat during each phase so there is no guesswork. There’s nothing half-hazard about this. It’s a very deliberate process and it works for everyone. All you have to do is commit and follow through.
In all phases of the ELH DIET, we don’t worry about how much we eat. It’s pointless to try to control that aspect of your diet. We focus on what we eat and make sure we get good quality protein and fat. We eat food that is high in fiber and low in sugar and starch. Making these choices every day are what shifts your body out of a fat-storing condition and puts it in fat-burning mode.
Phase 3 begins at the end of the weight loss phase. You’ll be down to your ideal weight by this time and you won’t have to be as careful about what you eat. You’re not trying to lose any more weight at this point, you just want to retain your current weight. That doesn’t mean you can go back to eating junk food. It means you can be more relaxed about your diet.
Are you tired of losing weight only to gain it back? Do you want to fix this problem for good?
(1) https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/sugary-drinks-fact-sheet/
Sticking to a diet seems to be the big problem for most people.
Phase 1 of the diet is meant to help with that Sue. Once you’ve cut out all the junk for a whole week, it’s much easier to stay on course. All it takes is the desire to succeed.
Great post. Just bought your book. Thanks!