NBC – Ali Vincent was the first female to win on the show with an 112-pound weight loss. Vincent recently posted to Facebook about gaining the weight back.
You can lose weight quickly. Contestants on the Biggest Loser can lose as much as 20 pounds a week. That is great news, right? Well no. This is probably the worst fitness program in existence.
The Biggest Loser Program has many flaws, first the contestants’ workout four to five hours a day, which is unrealistic for most people. Most people’s schedule wouldn’t allow them to devote more than 1 to 1 ½ hours a day to exercise. When your goal is to lose body fat, restricting calories should be your number one priority. Your second priority should be to burn additional calories while maintaining or building muscle mass. Studies have shown that people typically underestimate the number of calories consumed and overestimate the number of calories burned during exercise.
This study by the Department of Medicine, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center concluded, “The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calories is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported and an overestimation of physical activity, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis.” If you wear an activity monitor or log your workouts on MyFitnessPal, the app will tell you that you can eat more calories based on the number of calories burned. I strongly recommend you don’t for a number of reasons. The first is that we have a tendency to under report our eating. Secondly, I question the accuracy of many cardio machines and even activity trackers to calculate calories burned. The next reason is that you want to get accustomed to smaller portions and eating less food so you can keep the weight off after you lose it. Last, by not counting the calories burned, you will accelerate your progress toward achieving your goals.
Abs are made in the kitchen, you simply can’t out run a bad diet. You can’t afford to lose muscle along with body fat, if you want to transform your body. Losing muscle mass will decrease your metabolism, making future fat loss more difficult. If you allow yourself to lose muscle, you will hit a fat loss plateau before you reach your goal.
The next time you go to the gym, look around. You will typically find the leanest people spending the majority of their time lifting weights. The overweight people will typically be doing cardio training the majority of the time. You might say, well that is because they need to lose weight. But a year later, three years later, you’ll see the same people in the cardio area looking the same, plotting away with minimal results for their effort, if they haven’t quit all together, dejected by a lack of progress.
The reason why many consistent cardio exercisers fail to lose weight is that they rely on exercise to burn the fat instead of restricting their caloric intake. In many cases they aren’t even tracking their food intake. Huge mistake! What doesn’t get measured; doesn’t get managed. Attempting to lose more than 1% of your bodyweight per week is unwise since it will result in muscle loss.
Second, the Biggest Loser Program focuses on weight loss and not fat loss. Some contestants take shortcuts like losing water weight, which is useful for athletes cutting weight for a contest, but meaningless with regard to body composition improvement. Building muscle is discouraged on the program. I actually watched an episode where a woman was criticized by a trainer for hitting the weights too hard and building muscle, which resulted in her not losing as much weight from the previous weigh-in. What a bad message to send. Every pound of muscle gained increases your metabolism 50 calories a day.
The type of weight you lose is more important than the amount of weight you lose. Strength training is the best form of training for improving body composition because it promotes fat loss while building muscle. A study compared diet and strength training vs diet and cardio training. The 12-week study found that the cardio group lost more weight, than the strength training group (32 pounds vs 28 pounds), but the strength training group had lost a lot less lean muscle mass.
The study concluded that “the addition of an intensive, high volume resistance training program resulted in preservation of lean body weight and resting metabolic rate during weight loss with very-low-calorie diets.” If you are at 30% body fat level and you lose 10 pounds, but three of those pounds are muscle. You haven’t decreased your percentage body fat very much. You will look almost the same. You will just be a little smaller, weaker version of your former self. Worse, by losing muscle, you have decreased your metabolism, which will lead to a fat loss plateau.
If the muscles loss is severe enough, you will begin a downward spiral where your body composition gets worse. Every pound of muscle gained or lost will either increased or decreased you metabolism approximately 50 calories a day. Once you resume normal eating you will likely gain back the lost body fat, but not the muscle. When you lose body fat while building muscle mass, you transform your body by significantly reducing your body fat percentage. You’ll become leaner, stronger, and fitter. Your ability to burn calories will increase instead of decrease, which will help keep the weight off after your resume a maintenance diet.
Last, the contestants on the program damage their metabolisms and they typically gain back the weight. Here are just a few articles that describe the epic failure the program is in promoting a healthy lifestyle.
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‘The Biggest Loser’ contestants gain again: Why weight keeps coming back. By Madelyn Fernstrom TODAY
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The brutal secrets behind ‘The Biggest Loser’ By Maureen Callahan New York Post
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The Fat Loss Habit: Creating Routines that Make Willpower and Fat Loss Automatic takes a new approach to getting leaner, fitter, and stronger. The program uses high-impact change strategies that make the process of adopting a healthy lifestyle easier. The nutrition and workout program, like the change techniques have all been proven effective, and are all backed by research and scientific studies.
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