Step One
Power Through
the First Week
The beginning of any great adventure is momentous. Before you start to change your shape, you need to be ready to make a change in your life. Think carefully and be sure that you are ready to make a change now. If you are, I am ready with the information and tools you will need to make a great start. For this first week, we are going to skip any fancy calculations, and I am going to give you a simple program to follow. I am doing this because it will make it easier for you to start the program. (If you are one of those people who likes to do things precisely, then you can skip ahead to calculate your exact protein needs for this first week.)
In this chapter, I'll empower you by teaching you how to use protein to get control of your eating every day. Then I will give you a choice to make. You can jump-start your plan to lose weight by using meal replacements, which have been scientifically proven to make calorie control easier, or you can simply try to eat foods in controlled portions to try to accomplish the same thing.
I must warn you that this second approach may sound more appealing, but it is difficult just to decrease the amounts of your favorite foods and still get adequate protein, vitamins, and minerals on a diet. In research studies, trying simply to eat less of your favorite foods works the least well of all approaches to weight loss.
How Weight Loss Works
If you eat the same number of calories as you burn, your weight remains the same.
If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight, and for every 500 calories less you eat per day, you will lose about 1 pound of weight per week.
The amount of food you eat is less than the calories you burn, but the energy has to come from somewhere. Your body takes it from your stored calories of fat, and whenever you take in 500 calories less per day than your body needs, it burns one pound of fat in a week. So, if you eat 250 calories less than you burn each day, you will lose 2 pound per week, and if you eat 1,000 calories less per day, you will lose 2 pounds per week and so forth. The key to healthy weight loss is to make sure the reduced calories you eat provide the nutrition you need. And the key to effective weight management is to make sure that the foods delivering those reduced calories are enjoyable and satisfying.
The Secret of High-Protein Brain Signals
High-protein foods send signals to the brain that keep you from being hungry for hours -- stronger signals than either carbohydrate or fat gives. As the protein in your food is digested in your intestines, it is broken down to individual building blocks of protein called "amino acids." Some of these can enter the brain, where they can affect the balance of signals that monitor how hungry or full you are. Our typical breakfasts of refined cereal grains often have too little protein in them to send the kind of signal of fullness that will last until lunch. The secret of the Empowering Shake is that it will keep you feeling full -- if you put enough protein into it. As you will see, this is more protein than you think, and very likely more than you are eating now.
The Protein You Need Every Day
If you eat too little protein, you can damage your heart and muscles seriously. This was a problem with some of the starvation diets of the 1970s. The next generation of meal replacements provided enough protein to avoid these problems. When used as recommended, the meal replacement plans of the 1980s used two shakes and a regular meal, and provided about 50 to 70 grams of protein in one day. But a lot of people complained of hunger within a few hours of drinking these lower-protein shakes. Then, in the 1990s, the tide turned and the market favored low-carbohydrate diets with high-fat and high-protein shakes. These were much more filling, but as you will see later the low-carbohydrate part of these diets is not healthy, and the truth is that you don't need all that fat to feel full.
The Empowering Shake is satisfying because it has enough protein to match your body's needs. It makes sense that a 250-pound man is going to need more protein than a 120-pound woman to feel satisfied. I'll show you how to make an Empowering Shake with your personalized protein prescription, but first I want to give you an idea of some typical plans for protein consumption.
For a typical woman, I recommend about 100 grams of protein per day. That would be 25 to 30 grams at breakfast and lunch as a shake, a 25-gram protein snack in the late afternoon, and at dinner a salad made with up to 4 cups of lettuce with wine or rice vinegar, 5 ounces of chicken or fish with 3 cups of steamed vegetables, and a fruit for dessert. For a typical man, I recommend 150 grams of protein per day: 30 to 40 grams each for breakfast and lunch, 20 to 30 grams in the afternoon snack, and 50 to 75 grams at dinner.
Personalizing Your Protein Intake
How do you personalize all these different protein levels when you make your shake? I do this by combining a soy-protein shake with soy milk or regular nonfat milk. The meal replacement shake mix I use has about 10 grams of protein per serving, and the soy milk or nonfat milk adds another 10 grams of protein ...
Continues...
Excerpted from The L.A. Shape Diet by Heber, David Excerpted by permission.
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