First I want to let you know that I am not trying to make you believe in something that you don’t. I want to share the knowledge and facts that I have found over my fitness and health journey so far. While I am not trying to force you to agree with all of this, I do want to try and reach as many people as I possibly can. Let me tell you before you start reading this story, that this is a fitness and health related story and I will be focusing on the concept of a ”diet” versus lifestyle. If you are not into health and or fitness than that is perfectly okay and hopefully you will still take something away from this. Like I said before, I am not trying to make someone believe in something that they don’t but encourage you to be open to information that might be new to you. In this blog I take out all the opinions and focus on the facts that our bodies have shown us.

The reason I want to tell you this story is because I am and have been frustrated with how health and fitness is being promoted right now. We all know the ” famous” Instagram fitness models and tv shows that promote certain training methods and ”diets”. These days a lot of our ”fitness and health” information comes from these fitness models and tv networks, so it’s not suprising that a lot of people start following what they’re doing and saying. But that’s also the frustrating part, just because something is promoted so much over mostly social media and on tv doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the right way to go. I should tell you that I don’t like the word diet but I will be using it for the sake of this story.

So here is why there is no such thing as a diet.

I should not tell you that there are absolutely no diets, because in this world there exists one that could be labelled as such, yes just one. This ”diet” is great for so called deadline goals, like trying to lose weight for a wedding or for a photo shoot. We all need to realise that a diet is not called a lifestyle for a reason, it’s temporary. If you don’t mind what happens to your results after you reach your goals, than of course it’s perfectly fine to use this diet. But like this story will show you, if you do care and do want to hold on you will have to make it a lifestyle.

Every ”diet” can be traced back to the diet that I like to call the ”beach body diet”. How this Beach body diet works is that you gain muscle mass and weight by eating more calories. There is also no use in tracking just calories but I will get back to that later on. This process involves 3 different stages that I will tell you about along the way. This diet starts of with the gain cycle or we can just call it the ” get big cycle” (Stage 1). During this cycle you increase your calorie intake and that should make that you gain more muscle mass and fat ( so get heavier and bigger) Of course the science behind it is not that simple but that is the basics of it. So after you complete your get big cycle, you try and lose all of the gained fat and yes muscle mass (stage 2). You might start to see where the idea and principle behind this ”diet” does not make sense if you wish to keep your results. Sure you try and hold on to your muscle mass while losing all that weight that you gained, but do you really believe that none of the weight you’re losing is part muscle mass? Because what happens during the cut fase is you start taking in less calories and so less protein as you were doing before you started this whole diet (less than your body needs). Why protein is such a big factor in this story overall is that this is your one and only building block that your muscles need to grow, maintain and stay healthy. Yes you might gain a little bit of muscle mass during this whole process but it’s not significant if you don’t try and maintain it afterwards. After this process something happens that you don’t see on these well known weight los tv shows (like the biggest loser) or fitness models talk about (stage 3). This is the part where you start eating and going back to where you were before. This is the big difference between a diet and a lifestyle change. Once you start going back to your old ways it’s no longer a lifestyle and it turns in a temporarily change and fix. So yes, changing your lifestyle is the only way to get to your goal and maintain that whatever it is that you want.

Below you will find an overall picture of this diet.

normal body weight: 80 kg/ 177lbs —–> months later ( end of Stage 1) 90/198lbs kg

—–> (End stage 2 ) 77,5/ 171lbs kg —–> normal life ( stage 3), back to where you started.

Whether you cut out carbs or if you starve yourself to lose weight, as long as you don’t hold onto whatever it is that you’re doing you will lose it again. This is where you will enter that vicious circle, you start, you possibly succeed and you start to lose it again. This process will go on as long as you don’t make it a lifestyle. The side effects of doing this time after time has a huge impact on your body. What you need to know about your body is that it adapts to whatever you do to it, but that takes time. So if you stop putting carbs into your body it doesn’t know what to do and it takes time to adjust. The same thing goes for when you start eating everything that you cut out previously. Your body is not going to feel great while going through all these changes and here you got the start to a possible eating disorder. Hopefully you can see the connection between this ”diet” and all the other ones that you might have heard of, they are all temporarily.

Now we can move back to the part where I said that just counting calories is probably not going to do anything for you. We can talk about how carbs don’t necessarily make you fat and that fats are not the enemy all day long, so we’ll just stick to the important basics. Why it doesn’t make sense to just count calories is because, the 3 macronutrients (carbs, fat and protein) don’t have the same impact. what I mean by impact is that for example 1 gram of carbs gives you less calories than a gram of fat. Carbs and protein give you 4 calories per gram and fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So you see how just looking at the calorie amount can work against you. Lets take an average human as an example. This person eats 2500 calories a day and has an average ratio of 50% carbs, 30% protein and 20% fat.

That means this person will eat:

– 1250 calories of carbohydrates which equals 312.5 grams

– 750 calories of protein which equals 187.5 grams

– 500 calories of fat which equals 55 grams

So here you can see just how few grams of fat you need to eat to get to your total for the day. And how easy it is to go over that number as well. These numbers also show how much more food you have to eat to get your protein and the carbs total in your body, in comparison to fat. For protein it’s over 3 times and for carbs almost 6 times as much. So the reason why just looking at calories will probably not help is because you don’t see what gives you those calories and in what ratio.

Although I focused and explained the ”beach body diet” I hope you see and understand that all the diets out there have the same result. Whether you want to make that lifestyle change or stick with that diet you are doing, or plan on doing I really hope you succesfully reach your goals. Because the big motivator for me to write this is, I want everyone to reach there goals, how you get there and if you stay there is upto you. I can only do my best to help you in the way I believe in.

Please reach out to me if you have any comments, suggestions and questions about this!

– Everything starts with one step, or one brick, or one word, or one day

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