How to Achieve Lasting Weight Loss _ Bill Campbell, PH.D.

My name is Doctor Bill Campbell and I'm an Associate professor of Exercise Science at the University of South Florida where I also direct the performance and physique enhancement laboratory .

I'm a past president of the International Society of Sports Nutrition and I'm the current science editor for Avatar Nutrition .

And today I'm gonna talk about three strategies for long term weight loss success strategy .

Number one is to keep it slow .

I would say you should aim to lose about 0.7 to 1% of your body weight on a weekly basis .

Now , for somebody like me , that's about £200 that would be about 1.7 to £2 of weight loss per week .

Now , that may seem slow but actually the slower the rate of the weight loss , the better the things that can happen if you violate this strategy is your body doesn't discriminate against the weight loss that you lose , you lose fat .

But if you lose body weight too quickly , your body will also lose muscle mass stores .

And that's what we want to avoid .

If you've ever watched the show , the biggest loser , they employ a very rapid weight loss approach .

It's very extreme , extreme dieting and extreme exercise .

There has been some research that has followed up some of those participants and what they found was , yes , those individuals lost a lot of weight .

But within just a few years , they gained almost all of their weight back and more troubling is their metabolisms were still suppressed .

Many years later .

In some instances , their metabolisms were 500 calories slower than what would have been predicted based on their body weight alone .

There was also another study done and instead of investigating obese individuals , researchers from Norway had elite athletes in their study and they had two groups , one group , they said we want you to lose body weight on a fast rate .

The other group , they said we want you to lose body weight , but we want you to take a slower approach .

What the researchers observed was both groups lost about the same amount of body weight .

But interestingly , the slower weight loss group actually gained £2 of muscle and the fast weight loss group didn't gain any muscle .

So once again , we have science validating this approach of a slower weight loss is better .

Our second strategy that I wanna discuss is to not cut calories from protein .

One dieting .

Now , there is no secret to dieting .

You have to reduce your calories , but you don't wanna reduce calories from protein that leaves us with cutting calories from fat and carbohydrates .

In terms of your protein intake during a diet , I would aim for about a gram of protein per pound of body .

If you can get yourself up to that level .

That's a great place to be for protein intake during a diet .

If you're able to increase your protein when dieting , what that will do is allow your body to maintain as much muscle mass as possible .

Increasing protein not only allows us to maintain our muscle mass In some instances , you may even be able to increase muscle mass during a dietary period .

And the other thing that increasing protein does is it helps us from keeping our metabolisms from getting suppressed .

So we wanna keep our metabolisms as high as possible during a diet as well .

One other benefit that increasing protein during a diet has is that it makes us feel fuller .

It's more satiating .

So if you think about this for a moment , if you're constantly hungry , you're not happy and you're more likely to quit the diet and then not experience success .

But if you increase protein , protein makes you feel fuller .

And if you're feeling fuller during a diet , you're probably going to stay on that diet longer .

Therefore , leading to longer term weight loss success .

Our third strategy for weight loss success is an easy one , especially if you're watching this , you probably already lift weights .

But that is so important during a diet .

Simply lift weights .

Everything about a diet is cata bolic to our bodies .

When you lower your calories , your body wants to break down fat , it even wants to break down muscle .

It makes you more tired .

Everything is cata bolic , but the act of lifting weights is one area in your life where the body is getting an anabolic stimulus .

So if you can consistently lift weights during a diet , you're providing your body a buffer against all these other signals and messages that want to break down fat and muscle .

As far as a recommendation for weight training at a minimum , I would recommend three days per week with doing whole body workouts that would be sufficient if you typically work out four or even five days in the weight room , that's even better during a cata bolic diet period .

Also , when you lift weights during a diet , it's really the only way to experience body rec composition .

That is when you lose fat and gain muscle and that's very hard to do .

But if you put all three of these strategies into perspective and apply them , that allows you the possibility of losing fat and gaining muscle during your dietary period , I'm Doctor Bill Campbell and be sure to come back to bodybuilding dot com to see more videos and articles by myself on the topic of sports nutrition .