Chapter 3 - Exported.docx

The smartest path to success is to understand other people's mistakes and learn from them. Ignoring them and repeating the same mistakes over and over again is a form of insanity. In this chapter, we're going to cover the 17 most common errors people make with diets in general (not just weight loss...

The smartest path to success is to understand other people's mistakes and learn from them. Ignoring them and repeating the same mistakes over and over again is a form of insanity. In this chapter, we're going to cover the 17 most common errors people make with diets in general (not just weight loss). In the rest of the book, we're going to give you the antidotes to these mistakes, as well as all the strategies, tac­ tics, and knowledge that you need to succeed. In this chapter you'll learn: Diet breaks are evil, right? Wrong! Learn why diet breaks and refeeds are essential to keeping your goals on track by signaling to your body that it is not being threatened with starvation. Why the real challenge isn't the weight loss but rather the lifelong maintenance-and the five questions you need to ask yourself before starting an unsustainable diet. The four conditions that lead to trauma and how unprocessed traumas drive reactivity, escapism, resentments, fear, anger, and other destructive behaviors that impede your weight loss goals. Two of the most important tools you can use to make your body feel safe when dieting so your starvation self-defense mechanisms don't kick in. The best tool for solving the unresolved traumas that lead to subconscious and emotional eating. Studies have confirmed that long-term weight loss maintenance is extremely rare.'·2, 3 For the last few decades, only 3 percent have been able to achieve their weight loss goals long term. In our observation, that 3 percent is made up of extremely driven people who usually go "all in." This usually includes hiring coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and psychologists to maximize the odds of success. By avoiding the 17 most common weight loss mistakes in this chapter and doing the opposite of each one, you will multiply your odds of success. Let's dive in. DIET MISTAKE #1: DIETING TOO FAST Let's start with the fundamental reason for almost all weight loss failures: dieting too quickly. So-called 12-week transformations and other short-term diet goals are some of the main culprits for these weight loss failures. The faster you lose body fat and the more fat you lose, the harder your body fights back. The speed of weight loss seems to be the main trigger. As we saw in Carl the Caveman's example, losing too much body fat too fast activates your starvation self-defense mechanisms, and that's when you're basically screwed. Can you lose body fat quickly? Yes, to a certain point. However, diet breaks should be incorporated strategically every few weeks to let the body know that it's safe (meaning that it won't starve to death). Do not sacrifice your future for short-term gains. As an example, if you've got 50 pounds to lose, give yourself a year-even two. It will make the journey more enjoyable and maximize your odds of success. The key is to develop long-term vision. Playing the tape forward is a valuable mental process that you can use in a variety of ways to get you out of your short-term desires. Imagine two futures: Future #1: You go all in and cut your calories severely, train like a pro athlete, and lose a bunch of weight over the next three months. Then you experience the starvation survival effects: Your metabolism drops, your hunger goes out of control, and you quit. Fast-forward a few months: you've regained all the weight you dropped, and you've given up on your aesthetic goals. Future #2: You lose weight intelligently and take a bit more time to do it. You actually get to enjoy a better lifestyle than the hardcore dieter. Your body feels safe, and you get to your dream goal and stay there for the rest of your life. Which future sounds better? Choose carefully. In summary, avoid: The latest Hollywood diet fad and the "12-week transformations." These set you up for a brutal weight regain. Intense, massive training programs. These set you up for injuries and quitting. DIET MISTAKE #2: NO DIET BREAKS OR REFEEDS Diet breaks and refeeds are two of the most important tools to prevent starvation survival effects from kicking in. They help the body feel safe by giving it enough calories and avoid the fast track to metabolic adaptation. When your body eats at maintenance or above, it's no longer threatened by starvation. Strategically using these tools makes all the difference in the world for extended fat loss journeys. Diet breaks are when you eat at maintenance (usually for a week or two). They help keep your metabolism run­ ning faster during weight loss cycles. Refeeds are when you consume higher calories for one or two days a week. As long as your weekly calories are in a deficit, you'll lose body fat. Make sure to track your overall calories and not to overeat on the weekends. You can easily blow five days of progress in a day or two. Refeeds are also known as cheat days or cheat meals, but we don't like those terms. They imply that you're off track and breaking the rules. When they're well designed and an intentional part of your game plan, you're not cheating. You're just refeeding your body. Many diets that have shown good results have incorporated weekly refeeds: Scott Abel's Cycle Diet, Dr. Mauro DiPasquale's Anabolic Diet, Bill Phillips's Body for Life, and Tim Ferriss's Slow Carb diet. There are many benefits to these, and we will cover them in Chapter 32. DIET MISTAKE #3: FOLLOWING AN UNSUSTAINABLE DIET Unsustainable diets take many shapes and forms. Are you giving up foods that you love? Are you forcing yourself to eat foods you don't enjoy? Are you too hungry? Are you nutrient deficient? Is the diet psychologically or spiritually misaligned with your core values? Can you follow a strict, unsustainable diet for a short time and achieve great results? Yes! Anyone with a bit of willpower can cut calories using drastic measures, but the real question is: What's next? What are you going to do after that? If you choose to do an unsustainable diet, just make sure that you've got another dietary strategy lined up after it. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up for guaranteed failure. To be successful for life, you must find a nutritional phi­ losophy that you can follow for life. One important factor to keep in mind is: what is unsustainable today might become your favorite way to eat tomorrow. This book is going to give you virtually every viable possibility and the best practices so that you can con­ sciously choose and build the best diet for you. DIET MISTAKE #4: NOT RESOLVING UNDERLYING EMOTIONAL TRAUMAS AND ISSUES Most people who are overweight use food as a drug. People with food issues use food to escape the emotional pain or boredom they're feeling. This is because food has druglike effects on both dopamine and serotonin. Healing traumas that affect your nervous system is just as important as eliminating the Ben & Jerry's from your freezer. When most people hear the word trauma, they imagine horrific experiences. However, many experts in the field call such horrific experiences "big-T" Trauma. Not everyone has had those. But virtually everyone carries what experts call "little-t" trauma. There are four conditions that lead us to feel traumatized: We experience a painful event We experience an unexpected event We feel alone We don't have the resources to process emotional pain Most people keep accumulating traumas for their entire lives because they don't learn to process pain as it hap­ pens. They just keep suppressing it. We cannot escape our traumas. We can only suppress them for so long. Unprocessed trauma drives reactivity, escapism, resentments, fear, anger, and other destructive behaviors. This is because trauma embeds itself in the body. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score is probably the best book on this topic. Matt and Wade have spent weeks of their lives using a variety of processes and technologies to permanently eliminate the traumas from their nervous systems; their peace and happiness rose exponentially as a result. The key is to do a deep inventory of emotional issues and systematically clear them using tools such as the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT; also known as "tapping"), forgiveness work, neurofeedback, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), or other modalities. Does healing trauma really help with weight loss? Yes, it does. In a one-year trial conducted by Dawson Church, one of the world's leading EFT researchers, people lost between 11 and 22 pounds in the year using tapping. More importantly, they kept it off. The emotional impulses to escape with food had been removed. DIET MISTAKE #5: NOT TRACKING FOOD CALORIES, MACROS, SLEEP, AND EXERCISE This one is a mixed bag. Can you lose weight without measuring food and tracking calories? Yes, especially early on. As we covered in the previous chapter, just going from a standard American diet to any kind of structured diet usually leads to a significant calorie deficit (and therefore weight loss). Most people underestimate the calories they're eating by 40 percent.4 And then they wonder why they're not losing weight. They unconsciously sneak in calories in a variety of ways: a handful of nuts here, a tablespoon of peanut but­ ter there, a piece of chocolate after dinner, etc. (Note: unconscious eating is one of the body's starvation survival effects.) There's nothing wrong with those little snacks if they're part of your plan, but they can be the difference between losing weight and becoming stuck. You can't improve what you don't measure. It's critical to create feedback loops (more on this in Chapter 32). It's easy to lose weight in the beginning by making a few simple diet or exercise changes. However, this won't last forever. As you go further down the path, precise changes and decisions need to be made. It becomes a guessing game if you don't track inputs and outputs. That said, many people can lose a significant amount of weight without calculating every calorie. Wade prefers eyeballing portion management with weekly weight tracking to see if he's losing or gaining body fat. Keep in mind that Wade has decades of experience and did spend many years weighing and measuring. Getting down to a world­ class level of body fat is rarely possible without getting hyper precise. Just as all Fortune 500 companies have world-class accounting practices, all high-performance athletes apply world-class tracking to their physiology. If you want to be in the 3 percent of people who manage their weight easily for life, putting accountability in place will shorten the time you take to get there. In fact, it might be the only way to get there and stay there. The good news is that you may only have to measure for a few days. Then, if you're applying the Simplest Diet Secret (Chapter 9), it's easy to tweak portion sizes without measuring. Another option is to employ meal-prep com­ panies that do all the measuring for you. However, if your goal is to move to a superhuman level of aesthetics, we strongly suggest outsourcing the design of your diet to an expert and then tracking your calories. Hire a coach or nutritionist who does the math for you and simply tells you what to eat. Read on. DIET MISTAKE #6: NO COACHING OR ACCOUNTABILITY IN PLACE This might sound surprising, but you can't trust yourself when it comes to keeping yourself accountable in your weight loss journey. Why? There are two primary reasons: The odds of you creating the right strategy are low unless you're a deep expert. Your starvation self-defense mechanisms can easily override your conscious mind. This is the big one, even for people like us. Even though we are deep experts, we don't even trust ourselves to stay accountable like an outside authority can. Why? Because: We can simply slack off with easier training plans (like not including things like squats and deadlifts). We can resist cutting calories when we should cut them. We can fail to add new things that we need to keep results flowing (like adding in a second workout). We can slide totally off course after one "slip"-if we have a bad day, or a bad week, we need a coach to get us refocused. So, we're no exceptions to the rule. Despite being experts in this field, we hire coaches to help us design our diets. Why? Because we know we can't trust our own minds-we're aware of all the starvation self-defense mechanisms and the tricks they can play. The diet boogeyman is real. The starvation survival effects are numerous, and each of us can trigger a different set. But our point is univer­ sal: Get a coach! Preferably, find a good one that you bond with, who supports you and knows what they're doing. One of the most powerful principles of success is to stack every advantage you can. Coaching and accountability are the most powerful advantages anyone can have. A great coach will help motivate you, solve your problems, and create a winning strategy. We go into great depth on this in the "Jedi Council" appendix in our From Sick to Superhuman book. DIET MISTAKE #7: GETTING LOW-QUALITY SLEEP What are the consequences of bad sleep for dieting? The short answer is that you're going to get fatter, lose muscle, destroy your willpower, be in a horrible mood, and crash your immune system.5 Low-quality sleep makes losing weight many times harder. Your hunger hormones go up, your cravings increase, you start burning lean muscle mass instead of body fat, your willpower goes down, and your fat-burning hormones (HGH and testosterone) go down. The groups who consistently had less sleep had higher levels of catabolic (muscle-destroying) hormones such as cortisol, and they also had lower levels of anabolic (muscle-building) hormones such as testosterone and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1). There's more on this in point #17 at the end of this chapter. Research has shown that low levels of sleep (5.5 hours nightly) significantly raise your body's respiratory exchange ratio (RER). This means your weight loss is going to be more muscle and less fat. This is the last thing you want. The short-sleep research study referred to above was done on 10 overweight adults.6 Over two weeks, the group getting 5.5 hours of sleep per night lost 55 percent less fat and 60 percent more muscle than the group getting 8.5 hours. Beyond this, the group getting 5.5 hours also reported greater cravings than the group getting 8.5 hours. Cravings kill diets. Levels of the hunger hormone, ghrelin, increased by 28 percent.7 Our goal in any intelligently designed diet is to manage ghrelin and ideally lower it, not increase it. If you can't manage hunger and cravings, your odds of success with any diet are close to zero. Sleep deprivation can easily lead to out-of-control food cravings. We could write an entire book on the consequences of bad sleep. The point is that optimizing your sleep is one of the greatest investments you'll ever make. Great sleep levels you up in virtually every area of your life. We repeat: great sleep is one of the biggest make-or-break factors for anyone trying to lose weight. Tackling your weight while sleeping poorly is like entering an ass-kicking contest with a broken leg. It's tough. We suggest reading our in-depth chapter on optimizing your sleep in our book From Sick to Superhuman. DIET MISTAKE #8: NOT ADDRESSING OTHER HEALTH PROBLEMS You could call ignoring other health problems an indirect cause of diet failure. But the right diet will make you healthier. Underlying problems such as hormonal issues, thyroid issues, gut issues, fatty liver, and much more can make losing body fat and getting healthy a tough journey. If your thyroid function drops too much, weight loss will become extremely difficult, if not impossible. If your body isn't producing enough testosterone and growth hormones, your metabolism will slow down and your athletic performance will drop. The point here is to make being healthy a primary goal and a guiding light for your "Ultimate Nutrition Diet." DIET MISTAKE #9: LOSING MENTAL VIGILANCE Loss of mental vigilance is one of the main causes of long-term dietary failure. Once you lose mental vigilance, it's usually the beginning of the end. People stop paying attention to their weight. They stop tracking calories and macros and unconsciously start increasing calories. It's easy to drop exercise habits and default to old eating habits. Food quality selection goes down. Maybe the most fatal of all is that people get rid of their coaches. Great coaches help maintain your mental vigilance. They call you out when they see your behavior slipping. They help bring back awareness when it starts drifting away. Do you know when you need the most mental vigilance around weight loss? After you've achieved your goal. Why? First, that is the most dangerous point at which starvation survival effects start kicking in. Hunger usually goes into overdrive. Your motivation can drop massively after you achieve a significant goal. Your body releases dopamine-a neurotransmitter responsible for happiness and motivation-when you're work­ ing toward a goal and any time you hit a milestone along the way. It's the chemical release that keeps you moving forward. But when your goal is reached, the neurotransmitter drops.8•9 As we've noted, in our opinion, the most important part of your weight loss journey starts after you've achieved your goal. This is when you need a great strategy to: Intelligently reverse diet out of your deficit practice without regaining weight. Find the ultimate sustainable lifestyle. Create new goals that will keep you focused. Again, a great coach will help you with all of the above. The point is never to drop your guard. Weigh yourself every day. Studies on people who have lost weight con­ firm that those who keep it off weigh themselves daily.10, 11 Get a body fat scan once or twice a year. Take pictures regularly. Join health communities. Get bloodwork twice a year. Hire coaches. Get accountability buddies. Find fun workout partners. Stack the odds of success in your favor. DIET MISTAKE #10: NOT CONSIDERING GENETICS Diet fanatics are often so dogmatic about the diet that works for them that they force it on all their clients and social media followers. There is little to no consideration of individual genetics. Nutrigenomics is the science of nutrition and genes. This is one of the most exciting new fields of health and nutrition. It's still early; however, massive amounts of research and discoveries are coming out at an acceler­ ated rate. Some people are genetically superior fat-burners, so they feel great with a ketogenic diet. Others who don't have the same genes struggle to enter ketosis and feel stressed on that system. Some people feel amazing while they're fasting. Others become stressed, their HRV crashes, their cortisol goes up, and they enter a catabolic state (meaning that they're losing precious lean muscle tissue). Your genetics and constitution also affect your body shape and tendency to store fat, which you should take into account when you set your aesthetic goals. Without individualization, the one-diet-fits-all method can end up forcing square pegs into round holes. Working against your genes will always be an uphill battle. We will go in depth on how you can use nutrigenomics to maximize your odds of success in Chap­ ter 33. To learn more about your personal nutrigenomics, go to: www.BIOptimizers.com/book/genes. DIET MISTAKE #11: CHEMICAL OVERLOAD Another indirect (but crucial) health factor is an overload of chemicals, which can negatively impact a variety of organs and systems in the body. This can lead to loss of energy, affecting metabolism. An average human in 2020 was being exposed to over 80,000 man-made chemicals. A 2009 study by the Environmental Working Group found more than 200 toxic chemicals in cord blood sam­ ples from newborns. A woman who uses body care and beauty products could be exposed to more than 500 toxic chemicals before she leaves the house in the morning. Studies of lab rodents have shown that it takes only one endocrine disruptor to cause obesity, even if the animals eat the same amount of food.12 Thousands of obesogenic chemicals are lurking in your home, office, air, food, and products you put on your skin. Studies have found these substances in human blood, sweat, urine, and fat cells. These man-made chemicals can elevate your metabolic set point by: Disrupting the functions of sex hormones, thyroid, leptin, and insulin13 Causing prolonged, low-grade chronic inflammation14 Increasing micronutrient use and excretion, which may cause or worsen deficiencies Inhibiting digestive and cellular enzyme activity Throwing off your gut biome These changes can lead to obesity, metabolic syndrome, autoimmune disorders, autism, infertility, and even men­ tal health disorders. Therefore, if your goal is to be biologically optimized and achieve long-term results, you must actively work on detoxifying your body and lowering your toxic burden, including in your food, your body, and your environment. DIET MISTAKE #12: POOR DIGESTION Poor digestion is another indirect contributor to dietary failures. One of the keys to finding the right nutritional approach for you is to look for what makes you feel great. Feel­ ing great helps you have more energy, drive, and motivation. Poor digestion can make it hard or impossible to feel awesome and thus impact your results. Not feeling great can easily lead you to quit a diet. Suboptimal digestion-such as from enzyme deficiencies, low stomach acid, and an unhealthy gut biome­ leaves more undigested food particles that can stimulate the immune system and feed bad gut bacteria. This condi­ tion can also lead to food allergies and sensitivities, and allow yeasts and parasites to grow. Poor digestion can also lead to inflammation, which can impact your entire body. Undigested proteins can lead to negative immune system responses (this is what allergies are). Protein and amino acid fermentation can often generate inflammatory or toxic metabolites.15 You'll find more on this in the next point. Our approach to solving these problems is simple: Optimize your digestion with enzymes, probiotics, and HCL (included in many BIOptimizers digestive formulas). We will cover the process in great depth in Chapter 28. When your digestion is optimized, you feel great, you have more energy, and you'll be more excited to keep going. DIET MISTAKE #13: LEAKY GUT, FOOD SENSITIVITIES, AND FOOD ALLERGIES This point is an extension of the previous one. Being biologically optimized is critical for feeling your best. That's why it's important to remove foods that are toxic and stressful to your body. One person's "superfood" is another person's toxin. There are some powerful tests that will reveal your own personal superfoods. We will cover those in Chapter 31. Perhaps one of the biggest drivers of chronic diseases is metabolic endotoxemia-being poisoned by toxins in bacterial cell walls. A leaky gut, caused by the typical modern diet and lifestyle-along with dysbiosis (bad bacteria causing gut issues)-can lead to metabolic endotoxemia. Many common foods in the modern diet can open up the gut barrier, such as: Gluten, which can activate the zonulin pathway and open up the gut barrier, even in people without celiac Industrial food additives, such as food texturizers Excess amounts of sugar or salt16 Casein from Al milk causing digestive issues and partially digested peptides being absorbed into the blood17 If you are healthy, your gut should be able to recover from these just fine. However, for those with low-grade inflammation and dysbiosis, a leaky gut can expose undigested food and bacteria toxins to the immune system. They then develop food sensitivities, food allergies, and metabolic endotox­ emia, causing more inflammation. The inflammation leads to leptin resistance and many modern ailments. A leptin-resistant brain is a starved brain in a fat body. It cannot sense that your body is well fed, so you continue to be hungry while your hypothalamus reduces all nonessential energy expenditures. In other words, diets that don't remove sources of inflammation and repair leaky guts tend to not produce sus­ tainable results for these people. In Chapter 29, we cover gut biome BIOptimization, which studies have shown to strengthen your gut barrier and fix metabolic endotoxemia.18 In Chapter 31, we cover tests for leaky gut and food sensitivities. DIET MISTAKE #14: VITAMIN, MINERAL, AND NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES Many diets can lead to a variety of nutrient deficiencies unless they're properly designed. We will cover those in great depth as we review each type of diet and outline its potential pitfalls. Nutrient deficiencies can affect the body in multiple ways, but the two most significant ones are: Systems in the body can become compromised. For example, your thyroid can become less active and thus lower your metabolism if you're deficient in iodine. You just quit. There are two ways that nutrient deficiencies can cause people to quit. First, a deficiency can cause the body to produce certain cravings because it wants you to patch the problem. You may crave minerals and grab a bag of salty, high-calorie snacks. You might crave amino acids and go eat a burger. A key focus for any successful diet is to minimize cravings. Second, when people don't feel good on a diet, they quit. If you don't feel great on yours, you're on the wrong diet or you're doing the diet wrong. Your personal, subjective feedback of how you feel on a diet is crucial. Trust your biofeedback. Once you find your Ultimate Nutrition Diet that is optimized for your mind and body, you will feel awesome. DIET MISTAKE #15: PROTEIN DEFICIENCIES Amino acids-and therefore protein-are literally the building blocks of life. Many scientists believe that around 4 billion years ago, a miraculous dance of molecules came together into amino acids, which made life as we know it possible.19 Your body needs amino acids to thrive. When you eat protein, your body breaks it down into amino acids using enzymes. Amino acids rebuild muscle tissue, peptides, neurotransmitters, organs, and much more. When it comes to diet­ ing for weight loss, muscle building, or athletic performance, protein is the king macronutrient. Most effective diets are higher in protein because protein is more satiating and has a higher thermogenic effect. The standard American diet is too high in fat and carbohydrates and too low in quality protein. Calorie for calorie, protein breakdown takes 30 percent more energy to digest and assimilate than carbs and fats. In other words, if you replaced 1,000 calories of carbs and fats with the same number of protein calories, you'd be burning an additional 300 calories a day. That's an extra deficit of 300 calories a day just by eating a different macronutrient. That's a lot. Protein is also muscle-sparing if you are in a caloric deficit. The importance of this cannot be overstated. When you're losing body fat, protecting your lean muscle tissue is one of your top priorities. And if you are trying to gain lean muscle mass, protein is essentially the main macronutrient you want. Protein feedings stimulate muscle growth. When you shift from protein deficiency to optimal protein consumption, you'll get significant results, both in terms of fat loss and muscle building. DIET MISTAKE #16: ESSENTIAL FATTY ACID DEFICIENCIES There's one more essential macro: fat. Most people are overconsuming the wrong type of fats and are extremely deficient in essential fatty acids (EFAs). EFAs are the most important type of fats to focus on. The standard American diet, and even most weight loss diets, are too high in omega-6 and too low in omega-3. This imbalance increases inflammation and reduces insulin sensitivity. Your health can improve radically when you balance inflammatory omega-6s with anti-inflammatory omega-3s. Fats are another building block of the body-they literally become part of you. Hormones, brain, hair, skin, organs, and other tissues all use fats to build themselves. That's why selecting high-quality fats and minimizing bad fats tends to create a big improvement in lipid profiles and brain function. The two primary fat factors to focus on are: Optimizing your fats based on the diet you choose Being mindful of your genetic mutation related to fat metabolism When Wade dieted for 11 months straight on an extremely fat-deficient diet, his brain function tanked. He walked around like a zombie, operating on fumes and willpower. Genetics are crucial in selecting the best fats for your body. Generic statements like "coconut oil is the best fat" and "saturated fats are evil" are uninformed opinions. Analyze your nutrigenomics to help find the best fats for your body. This can have a massive impact on your results. For example, vegetarians and vegans need to be more vigilant to make sure they're getting enough docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, one of the EFAs). DHA is critical for brain function, eyes, reproductive function, and much more. Yes, the body can convert some of the alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) from seeds into DHA and EPA, but not efficiently. Microalgae is a much better source because it can help prevent cardiovascular, inflammatory, and nervous system conditions.2'' Bottom line: optimize the fats based on your chosen diet and genetics. To learn more about your fat-burning genetics, go to: www.BIOptimizers.com/book/genes. DIET MISTAKE #17: LOSING TOO MUCH LEAN MUSCLE TISSUE This is absolutely one of the biggest problems with many people's overall approach to weight loss. They don't have the right strategy to preserve their vital lean muscle tissue as they lose weight. Why is that so important? Because lean muscle tissue has the following key benefits: It improves aesthetics. Virtually everyone looks better carrying more lean muscle mass. Their proportions are more attractive. That being said, how someone's body looks is 100 percent their own personal preference. Only a fraction of the population wants to look like a professional bodybuilder. We suggest becoming conscious of what your ultimate aesthetics are. Does a certain celebrity, athlete, or bodybuilder inspire you with their body aesthetic? It helps to store glucose. Muscles are fantastic carb storage units. The more muscles you carry, the more glycogen (carbs that have been broken down) you can store. This helps prevent blood-sugar­ related health problems. It increases your basal metabolic rate. This means you have a faster metabolism. Each pound of fat­ free weight has been calculated to use about 8 to 15 calories per day.21 Muscles are vital for movement. Whether you're a professional athlete or an elderly person, muscles are what allow you to move in the world. And when you get older, they're a lifesaver. Professor Claudio Gil Araujo followed 3,878 people for 6.5 years. The participants in the weakest quartile had a risk of dying that was 10 to 13 times higher than that of those in the top 3rd or 4th quartile. As you get older, the quality of your life becomes highly correlated with your lean muscle mass and strength.22 Leg strength is what determines whether you: Fall down easily Cross the street quickly Can carry your groceries Can go up and down stairs easily One of our unique approaches with VIP clients that helps create world-class results is to focus on anabolism even when their goal is to lose body fat. Don't confuse anabolism with anabolic steroids. Anabolism is simply the process of using the energy from food-after it has been broken down-to carry out other actions within the body. More anabolism means your body has increased protein turnover. It means it's building more lean muscle tissue. And the more anabolic you are, the more calories you're going to burn all day long. SUMMARY Only 3 percent of dieters achieve their weight loss goals long term. Here are 17 of the most common reasons 97 percent of people fail: l. Dieting too fast. If you lose too much body fat too fast, it will activate the starvation survival effects that make your metabolism drop, increase hunger, and overthrow your willpower. No diet breaks or refeeds. These strategies help your body feel safe and prevent the starvation survival effects. Following an unsustainable diet. You can follow any diet for a short time, but you'll eventually quit if it's not one you can follow for life. Not resolving underlying emotional traumas and issues. Food has drug-like effects on both dopamine and serotonin receptors. People with food issues use food to escape the emotional pain or boredom they're feeling. S. Not tracking calories, macros, sleep, or exercise. If your goal is to move to a superhuman level of aesthetics, we strongly suggest outsourcing the design of your diet to an expert and tracking your calories. No coaching or accountability in place. You can't trust yourself when it comes to keeping yourself accountable in your weight loss journey. Low-quality sleep. The consequences of bad sleep on dieting include getting fatter, losing muscle, destroyed willpower, horrible moods, and a crashed immune system. Not addressing other health problems. For your weight loss journey to be optimized, your health needs to be optimized. Losing mental vigilance. Loss of mental vigilance is one of the main causes of long-term weight loss failures. Not considering genetics. Diet fanatics are often so dogmatic about the diet that works for them that they force it on all their clients and social media followers. There's little to no consideration for individual genetics. Chemical overload. An overload of chemicals can negatively impact a variety of organs and systems in the body. This can lead to loss of energy and has effects on metabolism. Poor digestion. Poor digestion can make it hard or impossible to feel awesome and thus impacts your results. It can easily lead to you quitting a diet. Leaky gut, food sensitivities, and food allergies. Being biologically optimized is critical for feeling your best. That's why it's important to remove foods that are toxic and stressful to your body. Vitamin, mineral, and nutrient deficiencies. Many diets can lead to a variety of nutrient deficiencies unless they're properly designed. Protein deficiencies. When people shift from protein deficiencies to optimal protein consumption, they experience significant results both in terms of fat loss and muscle building. Essential fatty acid deficiencies. Most people overconsume the wrong type of fats and are extremely deficient in essential fatty acids (EFAs). EFAs are the most important type of fats to focus on. Losing too much lean muscle tissue. This is absolutely one of the biggest problems with many people's overall weight loss approach. They don't have the right strategy to preserve their vital lean muscle tissue as they lose weight. This book sets out to burst the diet industry's bubble and equip you with the right tools and strategies for lifelong biological optimization (which we call BIOptimization). BIOptimization is the process of giving your body all of the nutrients it needs in optimal quantities and qualities. BIOptimization is about optimizing all of your body's organs and biological systems. The 17 mistakes listed above will essentially move you away from biological optimization.