We know that the foundation of dieting is that age old mantra: calories in equal calories out. In other words, if we don’t want to gain weight, we must eat consume fewer calories than we use. This is the number one rule of weight loss. But Fat Loss 4 Idiots takes it a step farther. After all, you aren’t just concerned with “weight loss”, you want fat loss. So, with Fat Loss 4 Idiots, we take a closer look at specific meals – not only are daily calories important, but calories consumed in a meal take a front seat. The key with calories is to make sure you don’t eat too many at a single sitting or over the course of a day, and to keep the source of the calories varied.

(Not) Your Average Low Calorie Diet

Fat Loss 4 Idiots is not just a low-calorie diet. True, it does work because you eat less than you burn (calories in are less than calories out). But, every diet on the market is a low calorie diet, even the popular “low carb” diets. Low-carb diets are great for really fast weight loss, but after that, they are just as effective as any other diet you can think of. After the initial weight loss, any weight you continue to lose is because you are simply eating fewer calories, not because something crazy is happening without carbs. Think about it, the majority of Americans get almost 2/3 of their calories from carbs. So, if you cut carbs from the diet, you can make up some of the calories with fat and protein, but probably not all of them; and there you have it, a plain old low calorie diet, at the heart of all the hype.

But, if dieting is just low calorie, why don’t we just cut back and not worry about it? Well, that’s the point of Fat Loss 4 Idiots. You’ve been provided with guidelines, meal patterns, and food combinations ensuring that your meals will be balanced and you’ll be cutting calories from both single sittings (meals) and your daily total. It’s great, because you don’t have to count calories or worry about balancing intake and output: the work has been done for you, your job is to eat!

Manipulating Calories

I mentioned earlier, and you know from reading the Fat Loss 4 Idiots diet, that one of the goals is to rotate your foods to manipulate you calories. But why? Because your body will “adapt” to food patterns. If you eat a high protein diet, your body will become accustomed to this habit, and your metabolism will adjust; your stomach will become more acidic, you will release more proteases (enzymes which digest proteins), your liver will change adapt, etc. The same goes for carbs – as you eat more of them, your body makes the necessary changes, and shifts its metabolism to use carbohydrates more readily than protein. Athough some of these changes happen instantlly, many of them won’t be noticed for a few days. How can we use this to our advantage? Fat Loss 4 Idiots monopolizes this feature of our metabolism by slowly switching back and forth between fuel sources. As your body starts to adapt to protein, your diet is shifting to carbohydrates. And, just as your body starts to grow accustomed to carbs, your diet is moving back to protein as the fuel source. The end result is that Fat Loss 4 Idiots will impair your body’s ability to consume calories. This multiplies the effect of “calories in, calories out”, because not all of the “calories in” actually count!

Why Not Fat?

Fat Loss 4 Idiots only manipulates protein and carbs as fuel. A smart observer might ask why fat is not manipulated as well. After all, fat has more than twice as many calories as protein and carbs, so a small change in fat would result in a relatively large change in calories, right? True, but the result on fat loss is pretty small. When eaten in excess, food sources (carbs, fat and protein) are stored as fat. But, fat can be stored directly as fat – 100% of fat eaten can be stored as body fat. In contrast, protein and carbs must be converted into fat in order to be sotred as fat. Therefore, since it is more work for carbs and protein to be stored, Fat Loss 4 Idiots manipulates only those two fuel sources, and keeps fat intake reasonable. In this manner, Fat Loss 4 Idiots “keeps your body guessing” when it comes to metabolism, and forces your body to work harder to store your food as fat.