A fitness coach has warned against fad diets and offered his top tips for helping people lose weight.
Former international bodybuilder John Kavanagh says it might be harder to lose weight if you're stressed and fad diets stress your body out. So if you’re still doing Veganuary, you might want to reconsider, especially if you haven’t done your research on how to have a balanced diet.
“Everybody will get a honeymoon period,” said John who is now the Managing Director of the luxurious gym New You in Dublin 2 which specialises in weight loss. “Go on into any diet in the world, intermittent fasting, vegan… you're gonna get stuff that you didn't get before and you could get good results for three months from it, and then it's gone.”
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So how can you actually lose weight in a healthy way? Luckily for us, Mr Kavanagh has given us a few free tips on the things that aren’t working and the things that are.
Train smart, not hard
What people always do, he says, is they go and look for extreme levels of exercise straight from the beginning. Instead of doing controlled weight training, they go straight into crossfit or some other type of program which still doesn’t simply work for them. “There's a phrase that we have that says the less you train, the more you gain. It's not about who trains the hardest, it's about who trends smartest.”
John advises to work out for about 30 minutes. High intensity training is what we’re aiming for but “you gotta take that with a piece of salt because intensity is relative to where everybody comes from”. High intensity for somebody could be to hold onto a bar and do 10 squats down to a bench.
“Lots of people out there at the moment are trying to kill themselves with exercise plan. The evidence is there because it doesn't work for 92-93% of people. And the reason is they're doing it too much. They don't know how to apply exercise at the right time, and they're reading a lot of junk about nutrition.
Don’t do intermittent fasting
When you have too much of the stress hormone cortisol in your system, it causes glucose intolerance which means the body creates more insulin. Insulin then takes too much glucose out of the bloodstream instead of getting the energy into a cell, the energy then ends up in our visceral area as visceral fat.
Intermittent fasting triggers a very high cortisol release, the weight loss expert said. “People don't really realise it – intermittent fasting may enable you to lose weight, but it doesn't tell you what type of weight you're losing.” That’s why, he says, when you see someone who’s lost weight doing intermittent fasting, they look ‘emaciated’. “They're practically in what we would call frailty syndrome which is where the body is losing and losing a lot of muscle.”
Keep an insulin-balancing diet
If your cortisol levels are high, you'll actually crave sugar. But this actually causes mayhem in your body, Mr Kavanagh warns. “What we have as a situation now, we have people who are living stressful lives, gaining weight, then they try to lose weight and they go very extreme. So the very extreme things is they'll train too hard, they'll do the wrong type of training, they'll overstress the body, drive up the cortisol levels, and then they're craving more, and the food is out there to actually feed those cravings. So it's a massive 360 degree cycle.
“The most effective way of keeping cortisol under control is to eat regularly. But more importantly, it's to keep their glucose levels under control… At every meal, we want protein, carbohydrates, and fats.” We would also want to eat protein foods first and carb foods second, since that would control the insulin level. According to him, a good breakfast would be eating poached eggs first and porridge second.
Don’t overeat at dinner, especially not with sugary foods
People who are stressed during the day crave sugar at night or they simply overeat at dinner because they’re actually craving insulin – the one hormone that can actually suppress cortisol. Too much sugar at night however stops your brain from releasing growth hormones during sleep and they are critical for the sleep cycle because they tell your body to repair and heal.
This is when we burn fat and build muscle if we’ve been training during the day. Your body would also go into ‘super deep sleep’ and when you wake up in the morning, you feel revived and hungry. “One of the side effects people get all the time from yo-yoing around with food and having high cortisol levels is they can't sleep. A huge number of the people out there can't sleep.”
You might want to reconsider doing Veganuary
John had things to say about Vegan January, or Veganuary, especially about those vegan enthusiasts who didn't do any research on balanced nutrition. “The vegan diet doesn't work because you need a lot of supplements to make it work… I often say to vegans out there, I guarantee you that I eat three times the amount of vegetables that you eat. Because they don't end up eating vegetables, they end up living on pasta and ice cream because they're literally at a point where they don't eat regular enough. They don't get the nutrition, the body breaks down.”
John Kavanagh is the Managing Director of New You, a luxurious personal training weight management, medical and rehabilitation clinic in Dublin 2.
Have you gone on a diet since the start of the New Year? How’s that going for you? Let us know in the comment section below.
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