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To illustrate this whole process, let’s suppose that you are a male, 50 years
old, 5’8” tall, weighing 195 pounds, whose normal physical activity level is “light”.
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Your IBW (from Table 1) is about 145 lbs. So you could profitably lose up to
50 pounds.
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Your REE (from Table 6) is 1897 Calories/day.
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Therefore, your calculated TEE (from Table 8) is 3035 Calories per day (for
convenience round this to 3000).
A person of this size can easily restrict Calories to 1500 per day and also
control the Eight Vital Factors without difficulty (we’ll demonstrate this in later
chapters). This means that even without increasing your activity level through
exercise, your Calorie deficit can be as much as 1500 Calories per day (3000 minus
1500 equals 1500). That is a deficit of 10,500 Calories per week—which is 3 pounds
of fat lost per week. This deficit will be larger if you are more active or smaller
if you are less active.
Weight-loss specialists generally consider 1–2 pounds a week to be the ideal
rate of loss—so by this particular standard, losing three pounds a week is actually
a little fast. Now losing 2–3 pounds of fat per week may not sound like much, but
if the process is so painless that you can easily do it for 6 months, you will easily
lose the 50 pounds.
The Multi-Diet is specifically designed to allow you to easily maintain steady
weight loss for as long as you may need in order to get down to the weight you want.
It does this by showing you how to manage the Eight Vital Factors that control The
Beast.
Let’s take another example. Suppose you are a female, 36 years old, 5’5”
tall, weighing 150 pounds, whose normal activity level is “Light”.
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Your IBW (from Table 1) is about 128 lbs. So you could profitably lose up to
22 lbs.
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Your REE (from Table 7) is 1422 Calories per day.
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Therefore, your calculated TEE (from Table 9) is 2133 Calories per day (for
convenience round to 2100 Calories/day).
A person of this size can easily restrict Calories to 1200 per day and still
manage the Eight Vital Factors properly (demonstrated below). Therefore without
increasing your activity level through exercise you can create a Calorie deficit of
up to 900 Calories per day (2100 minus 1200) or 6300 Calories per week. This is
slightly less than a 2 pound per week loss. If you want to lose the full 22 pounds,
it would probably take you about 12 weeks.
Diet Slowdown
In reality, you probably won’t maintain the exact Calorie deficits we’ve
calculated above—so losing the full amount will take longer than the above
calculations would indicate. The reason for this is the phenomenon of “diet
slowdown”. This phenomenon is real—but it’s not difficult to understand or to
deal with—unless you don’t know about it. If you don’t, it can be very
discouraging.
As you lose weight, your TEE decreases—which means you lose weight more and more
slowly (all other things remaining the same). This happens because when you weigh
(e.g.) 200 pounds, your heart, lungs, liver, and muscles must burn lots of Calories
just to keep all those fat cells alive and move them around with you all day. When
you lose (e.g.) 50 of these pounds and you’re only carrying 150 pounds around all
day long, those organs don’t have to work nearly as hard and so they won’t use
nearly as many Calories.
But if you keep eating the same number of Calories, and your body has stopped
using as many, this means your daily Calorie deficit must get smaller and your rate
of weight loss must become slower (other things remaining the same). I recommend you
use the above charts to recalculate your TEE as your weight drops. I would suggest
recalculating it after each ten-pounds lost so you’ll know where you stand.
There are three methods you can use to handle diet slowdown.
- Decrease the number of Calories you eat. (But not below 1200/day, and don’t
mess up any of the Eight Vital Factors doing it.)
- Increase your activity level (Calorie expenditure) through exercise. (See more
on… exercise.)
- Let your daily Calorie deficit slowly shrink and just stay on the Multi-Diet
longer.
I personally used all three methods regularly. (And I often chose a different one
each day depending on how I felt.J)
The First Seven Pounds Don’t Count
Keep in mind that particularly in the beginning of a diet—the first week or so—the
scale is very likely to show you losing more weight than the amount you calculated
above. This is due to water loss. Experts say things like “The first 7 pounds don’t
count—it’s all water”. I don’t know whether seven pounds is a proper figure
or not—that would depend on some very individual factors. But for the first day or
two of your diet you may not burn much fat. This is because your body may tend to
first burn up a lot of its store of glycogen (stored carbohydrate) before it switches
over to serious fat burning.
The chemical process for storing glycogen requires a lot of water. As the glycogen
is burned, your kidneys dump the water it used and this makes the scale look like you’re
losing weight fast. And you are, but very little of it is fat, and it only happens
once and then stops. After that you settle into steady and serious fat loss—if you’ve
learned how to stay on the Multi-Diet successfully by controlling the Eight Vital
Factors.[3]
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