How to cut calories without triggering the famine response....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 6-9-2016

1.  One way to do this is to eat abundant high quality protein each day.  This can help you avoid the failsafe famine response if your calorie intake is a bit too low but not very low.

You will also have fewer harsh symptoms and be less hungry and feel better even though your  calorie intake is reduced.

Doing this and adding effective strength training also ensures that you lose ONLY fat.

So eating enough protein is important to avoid or minimize the famine response.  Eating enough protein is important to enable you to feel enough better and avoid extreme hunger so you can do it long enough to get results.  And, it ensures that the weight you lose is ONLY fat if you also do effective strength training.

(So we have a section on the best kinds of protein and the ones that are least desirable below.)

2.  Another way to prevent this AND protect your health too is to eat a LOT of organic vegetables each day. 

If you eat less than 6 servings a day of organic vegetables, add a serving or two to get as close as you can to 6 or more.  Your stomach has enough more food, you feel less hungry; AND this is one of the most powerful ways other than exercise and some supplements to protect your health.

It also is a very effective way to lose fat. 

People who begin to eat that many vegetables a day often lose 25 pounds of fat with very little other effort or extra hunger.

Both Dr Furhman and Dr Terry Wahls teach this and people who use their guidelines and do this tend to go to BMI readings of LESS than 25 if they keep doing it!

Dr Wahls found that except for eating a bit of seaweed & liver and some organic fruit, AND eating that many vegetables a day provides super-nutrition -- plus NOT eating harmful or fattening foods to make room for that many vegetables also helps. 

So your body gets enough nutrition and fiber and that also cuts the famine response.

(She suggests some greens, some cruciferous vegetables, and some orange or yellow vegetables each day to get that level of supernutrition and to avoid overdoing any one thing.)

3.  Another way to prevent this is to eat some health OK fats and oils as long as you still have a calorie deficit.  You feel rotten and are less healthy if you don’t.  Not doing this also makes you hungrier and seems to help trigger the famine response also.  People who do this keep off the fat they lose better and are much healthier.  Doing this also helps avoid the famine response.

(We have a section on those below also.)

4.  Yet another way is to cut calories more some days a week and eat the calories that will sustain your goal weight on the other days.  

Studies show that people who do this lose more fat than people who eat less every day!  (It’s as if your body says, “Yes the rations are short some days.  But that doesn’t last long currently, so it’s NOT a famine.)

I tried doing partial fasting two days a week and lost weight at first.  And then promptly gained it back!  It was a partial triggering of my famine response. (So I still cut calories those two days but not as much.)

I wondered why that happened.  The next method explains why and how to avoid it!

5.  Dr Mark Hyman just added a very important fifth way!

 “….if you’d like to know how much you should be eating, calculate your resting metabolic rate (RMR) or the total number of calories your body needs to survive at complete rest. 

If you eat fewer calories than your RMR, your body thinks it is starving.

Calculating your RMR is easy. If you are average size, take your weight in pounds and multiply by 10. If you are very muscular and lean, multiply your weight by 13. If you are very overweight, multiply it by 8.” 

Eating less than your RMR means your body goes into starvation mode. 

You can still cut back calories a lot without going there!

If you are eating 2500 calories a day and weigh 200 pounds with significant extra fat, that means that eating less than 1600 calories a day will trigger your famine response.

But you CAN eat 1700 calories a few days a week which will remove fat AND not go below 1600 calories.

I decided to look online for RMR calculators.  They are still less accurate than you would get by a more thorough version that included more data.  But they are likely more accurate than Dr Hyman’s approximation.

Here’s what I got:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/calrmr.htm    Has an RMR calculator  Based on just my sex,  age and height and weight, this calculated my RMR as 1454 calories a day 

This one was just a bit lower with the same data   http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/   got 1443.93 or 1444.

Since I've been eating closer to twice that many calories, I can cut back 10 or 15 % 3 weeks a month and 30% to 40% one week a month.

I could even cut back 30% to 40% three weeks a month or even four without going too low according to this.

But cutting too much less than 1600 calories would likely trigger the famine response.

So, these are the five ways to lose fat without triggering the famine response.

A.  The best kinds of foods for protein are:

1. The vegetables!  Dr Furhman discovered they have very high protein per calorie. Greens and cruciferous vegetables score highest.

2. Raw tree nuts for those not allergic.  Almonds, Pecans, and Walnuts all work and taste good!

They are remarkably good for you and provide supernutrition for minerals including magnesium for strong bones and copper for good collagen formation -- and fat burning!  And they have several kinds of vitamin E including the very protective gamma tocopherol.

They also have the omega 9 monosaturated oils that extra virgin olive oil has that has been found so heart protective and to reduce chronic inflammation.

This combination is so health supporting that people who eat nuts almost live as many years longer as smokers live fewer years than average!  That’s a huge effect.

Even better, despite their high fat content eating an ounce or two a day of nuts does NOT cause you to weigh more.

And, it gets even better than that!  The metabolism of people who eat nuts seems to go up because people who eat nuts eat MORE calories and are LESS fat and weigh less than people who don’t.

Between their high nutrition and high health OK fats and protein and fiber, nuts turn out to be a superb food to prevent the famine response.

This may be helped by the fact that copper not only helps prevent heart disease and strokes and aneurysms, it helps you burn fat for calories more than you would if you were low in it.  And nuts are high in copper.

3.  If you can get dairy foods from cows fed only grass and organic sprouts, they are high protein, actually have safe fats according to recent research, and taste good and are filling.

Kerrygold grass fed Irish Cheese and Organic Valley Whole milk from grass fed cows are available at Whole Foods.

The cheese tastes great; and the milk has extra anabolic compounds which makes it good for an after workout drink to help build muscle.

They also are super time efficient!  You remove them from the refrigerator and eat them!

Whey from grass fed cows has been shown to help build muscle best in part because it has the same exact percentage of amino acids as humans!

(Jarrow is one of the companies that sells it.  I work out and have Jarrow’s grass fed whey and Organic Valley Whole milk from grass fed cows mixed together right after.)

Maple Hill yogurt is also from 100% grass fed cows and a mix of that plus fresh fruit makes a good breakfast and has probiotics and protein!

4.  Whole eggs from chickens truly fed outside on pasture is also health supporting with as many nutrients as a vitamin pill in the yolk and very high quality protein. 

Again, Whole Foods sells those.

5.  Wild caught salmon and the small fishes like sardines, herring, and small mackerel – also wild caught are high in omega 3 oils including DHA and are one of the best sources of health OK oils and protein.  People who exercise and eat them two or three times a week are much healthier and more likely to avoid depression, PTSD, and Alzheimer’s disease!

6.  Meat from bison, cattle, and lambs fed only grass and organic sprouts are also OK but cost enough, need enough more prep & cooking time to eat often. 

Bison and New Zealand lamb work well. 

So is beef from cattle that are truly 100% grass fed. 

But you have to be careful because penning cattle up and stuffing them with grain before they are used for beef is often called grass fed if they were fed on grass before that but actually have all the problems of factory fed beef.  They were grass fed initially but this grain finishing makes them more harmful and fattening to eat.

7.  Soy and other grains are NOT good sources of protein because they tend to cause high blood sugar and way too high omega 6 which causes harmful high inflammation.

They also tend to be factory farmed with GMO seeds and are sprayed with herbicides and pesticides.

Their high blood sugar boost tends to make you MORE hungry and fatter too!

Avoiding them 100% is the best strategy according to this research.  That goes double if you want to lose fat you keep off!

B.  Besides the fats and oils in these protein foods, extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, and butter from cows fed only grass are the health OK oils and fats. 

Extra virgin olive oil and the similar monosaturated oils in tree nuts and avocados is most health protective other than the omega 3 oils from fish

You can also get the most valuable omega 3 oils in fish oil as omega 3 supplements and DHA supplements.

Extra virgin olive oil has the best track record for health and is the one best used most of the time.

But coconut oil has a higher smoke temperature and is a good oil to cook with.  It tastes good.

Studies show it delivers its calories directly into your muscles for use instead of into your fat.  AND, your brain can run on it when your blood sugar is low!

Butter from cows fed only grass has actually been shown to be heart protective by recent studies.  And some foods taste best with some butter.

But other studies show it has less health benefits than olive oil which is even more heart protective.  So butter from cows fed only grass is best used like a spice -- on occasion not as your major food oil source.

(Soy and other grains are NOT good sources of oil because they tend to cause high blood sugar and way too high omega 6 which causes harmful high inflammation.

They also tend to be factory farmed with GMO seeds and are sprayed with herbicides and pesticides.

People who use extra virgin olive oil instead of soy or corn or canola oil are MUCH healthier!)