Protein Benefits: Real or Hype?

Protein has been shown to benefit people in a number of different ways, from increasing metabolism (thermogenic effects) to de-greasing and repairing a fatty liver.  One of the important benefits that increasing your dietary protein seems to deliver is the benefit of increasing lean muscle mass.  Even in a calorie deficit, it has been suggested that increasing your protein will preserve your lean muscle so that the majority of weight will be lost from fat.    You see when you go on a diet, eating less than your body needs, then “what” you are eating will result in you losing certain amount of muscle and a certain amount of fat.

An ideal diet, has you burning the greatest amount of fat, but preserves as much lean muscle as possible.  Many people go on diets eating anything that they want (including junk food) but just less of it.  What they do not understand is that they could be losing as much if not more muscle than fat, a fact that they will not be aware of simply by looking at the scale.  Do you think that that would make a difference in your body composition and how you looked? Imagine if you were to lose 50 pounds of weight, but in one scenario you lost 50 pounds of fat compared to another scenario where you lost 25 pounds of fat and 25 pounds of muscle?  Which scenario would you prefer?

A study that was just conducted this year, looked at the effects of dietary protein content on weight gain, energy expenditure and body composition during overeating. This was an excellent study because it was all performed in a controlled setting.  This means that all the participants were observed, monitored and fed under the control of the researchers.  Basically they were under house arrest for the duration of the study so all food eating was accurately recorded.

The results were interesting.  This was an overfeeding study so all subjects, who were between the ages of 18 and 35, were fed more than their daily energy needs. One group was fed a calorie surplus that had 5% protein (low group), another had 15% protein (normal group) and the last group was fed a diet that had 25% of its calories coming from protein (high protein group).  All groups were overfed an average of a thousand calories over their daily requirements.

The results proved that you can gain weight regardless of the macronutrient profile, of course.  But it also proved that the higher the protein intake the greater the acceleration of fat burning and the increase in lean muscle mass. The low protein group gained the least amount of weight, the normal protein group gained more weight, and the high protein group gained the most. But, the interesting thing is that all 3 groups had gained the same amount of fat.

• The low protein group experienced no increase in energy expenditure (thermogenesis) and no increases in lean muscle mass.
• The normal group had an increase both in lean muscle mass and energy expenditure.
• The high group had even a greater increase in both!  

The bottom line just looking at calories is that eating more than your body needs will increase your weight.
But, more importantly, this study proves the benefit of protein as it relates to thermogenic properties and retaining or increasing lean muscle even in a calorie deficit diet!  Said differently if you want to have the body of your dreams it involves losing fat and retaining or increasing your lean muscle.  To do that protein in the right amounts are key.

1)Bray, GA.  Effect of dietary protein content on weight gain, energy expenditure, and body composition during overeating: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA 2012

Think And Get Lean

Initially the title of this article might strike you as a bit ludicrous, “in order to lose weight you just have to think”?  You might be asking yourself; what about diet and exercise,  and if you watch the Biggest Loser or use a personal trainer, somebody potentially yelling at you? But, indeed the key to long term weight loss can be found more in your thoughts than in any amount of information on diet and exercise.   The title of this article should of also rang a bell for some of you and its similarity to the title of another famous book, a book that has helped more people become wealthy than any other book ever written!

So let me help you to understand, how by thinking differently you can in fact completely change your health and your weight. Think and Grow Rich continues to be the quintessential book on wealth creation ever written.  Did you know that within its pages the author, Napoleon Hill, never once discussed investment opportunities or the mechanics of making money?  There is not page upon page of information as it relates to savings, stocks, real estate, passive streams of income, etc. 

The success that people have experienced after reading the book had nothing to do with the mechanics of savings or investing, but had everything to do with getting the reader to think differently.  It explained in detail how to develop a wealth consciousness, how to set and move towards the accumulation of wealth by taking action, and how to attract wealth into your life through a positive mental attitude and an enthusiastic approach to serving others.   

Napoleon Hill provided the inner strength strategies necessary to succeed in increasing the reader’s wealth.

How does this relate to weight loss?  Knowing what to eat or the best way to exercise, basically diet and exercise, is merely the mechanics to losing weight; just like job advancement, stocks or real estate is the mechanics of increasing your wealth.

The real key to losing weight can be found within yourself.  Not by thinking but in fact by thinking differently, you can achieve your goal of increased health and having your dream body by making that small mental shift. You must realize that changing anything begins with changing yourself.  Your thoughts, feelings and actions of the past have created the level of health and weight that you now enjoy.  If you are not happy with your weight and want to change it completely, start by realizing that lasting change will come from thinking differently and changing your relationships with food.

This simple change will lead to a health consciousness; it will develop the inner strength and drive to take action towards your goal.  Through that small mental shift you will literally magnetize your new body and health to you!   It will also help you to develop the self-motivation and positive mental attitude that will empower you to take the action necessary to attain your dream body!

Think and Get Lean!

About:  Michael Mountain is a transformational author on health, weight loss & personal growth and is featured on Amazon.com. He is the author of the Ultimate Fat Loss Solution Diet which is available presently free of charge at www.michael-mountain.com.   He is also the author of Mindset for Weight Loss transformational program - a revolutionary step-by-step program designed to provide the “inner-strength strategies” to take any diet and make it effective for permanent weight loss.  This program allowed him to end his own personal 20 year struggle with weight and poor health!  You can sign up to receive his blog updates on weight loss and motivation at www.michael-mountain.com

How to Maintain Weight

There is so much discussion on how to lose weight that the question on how to maintain weight is grossly ignored.  Yet, if you were to look strictly at the statistics of the number of people who lost weight and kept it off, it is a little disheartening. 

Approximately 95-97% of all people will fail to maintain their weight after achieving their weight loss goals.  So indeed this is an important topic of discussion.

Here is a generalized way to understand the difference between weight loss and weight maintenance. Weight loss is 75% psychology and 25% mechanics - learning what is healthy nutritious food and eating it in amounts that lead to consistent weight loss, as well as exercising or not in a way that works for you. Maintaining weight is 100% psychology because you already know what you should eat and in what amounts.  There is no new information to know in regards to exercise, diet or nutrition unless you are just furthering your education.  But, it is not necessary for maintaining your weight.  

Unless…

…if your diet was so extreme that you find yourself without a working knowledge on what is healthy and how much you should be eating, in other words you are ill-equipped to begin living health as a lifestyle.   It would benefit you to look into continued information on diet and nutrition.     This is why so many diets out there make no sense and have such a high percentage of their clients gaining the weight back…they are too extreme and have them eating ridiculous types and incredibly little amounts of food, amazingly many of these are found in hospitals or are doctor supervised!

Moving forward, regardless of the diet you used to lose the weight,  it would be inaccurate thinking if your idea for maintaining your weight was to quit on your diet completely.  To go back to the very habits that caused the weight gain in the first place and attempt to control how much you eat is a recipe for disaster…you might as well pull out your “big clothes” and start banging your head against a wall right now. What is necessary for a while is keeping your health and weight in your present mind consciousness.  For how long… for as long as it takes for your new healthy lifestyle to move into your unconscious mind.  The second it does, that is when the entire system will run itself.  That is correct, when all of the new healthy patterns; what you eat, when you eat, how much you eat, and daily exercise have gone from conscious disciplined thought to become ingrained habits in your unconscious mind, that is when you can relax. 

If you have not learned how to accelerate this process then you may have to forever run yourself through checks and balances.   On the other hand if you learn some key strategies that accelerates the formation of new unconscious habits, freedom from policing yourself can be yours very fast,  learning these inner-strength strategies will lead to easy permanent weight management.

 Until then you have got to be aware of yourself and the priority of health in your life.  Take the time to create a process to monitor your weight, your exercise and your food choices.  It’s as easy as… in the morning; weigh or take a look at yourself in the mirror, plan your days meals and what exercise you will do in advanced, and in the evening re-evaluate your follow through.

About:  Michael Mountain is a transformational author on health, weight loss & personal growth and is featured on Amazon.com. He is the author of the Ultimate Fat Loss Solution Diet which is available presently free of charge at www.michael-mountain.com.   He is also the author of Mindset for Weight Loss transformational program - a revolutionary step-by-step program designed to provide the “inner-strength strategies” to take any diet and make it effective for permanent weight loss.  This program allowed him to end his own personal 20 year struggle with weight and poor health!  You can sign up to receive his blog updates on weight loss and motivation at www.michael-mountain.com

WHY You Eat is the Key To Permanent Weight Loss

Hunger, social situations and the myriad of reasons one eats is not the topic of this article. The larger, broader picture of what leads us to gaining weight is, because within its understanding lies the solution to permanent weight loss. An important part to realize in the broader picture of things is that what we eat and how much we eat is an action, as is whether or not we exercise. These actions have lead to the level of health you know have. Your past actions (food choices) or lack of action (exercise) have created the results, your weight, you presently enjoy. If you want to change your results than all you should have to do is change your actions.

Since going on a diet is a change in action, it would make sense if the results were to follow and success was easy to achieve. We can summarize it in the following way…

Unhealthy Actions => unhealthy results/being overweight

Change the action or go on a diet/start to exercise…

New Healthy Actions => New Results/Weight Loss

That is what a diet in fact is supposed to do, it gives you the information necessary to hopefully carry out new actions. But, here is the problem and why 95-97% of all people fail to lose weight and keep it off when they simply follow a diet. All actions that human beings perform are initiated by their thoughts and their feelings. Unfortunately, your thoughts and feelings are linked to old patterns. These learned patterns or habits are associated with unhealthy actions (unhealthy food and no exercise). Picking a diet book up off the shelf reading it and then following its recommendations for diet and perhaps exercise, does nothing to change your thoughts and emotions; the very thoughts and emotions that drive you towards your unhealthy patterns of eating and not exercising.

Here is an analogy, you can think of going on a diet just like taking an aspirin for pain, it does not treat the underlying condition or cause of your pain, it just masks it. Similarly while on a diet, you have not broken the cycle by treating the cause of your weight gain, as a result you will inevitably gain the weight back or sabotage your own weight loss efforts.

We can summarize things further in the following way…

Thoughts/feelings => unhealthy actions=> unhealthy results

It should be obvious by looking at that line above that real, lasting change will come from having strategies in place that direct your thoughts and feelings. By creating a simple and slight shift in your mindset towards food and exercise, you will engage the most powerful ally you could ever have in your goal to lose weight… YOU!

New thoughts/feelings =>New healthy actions=> New Results!

New thoughts and emotional connections with food will treat the cause of your problem and free you to achieve your dream results. Knowledge on what is healthy, nutritious food and why exercise is vital to your health is going to give your new mindset the opportunity to make new associations with that information. When your mind and your new actions are congruent and “on the same page” towards achieving your goal, then permanent weight loss becomes effortless. But, if you ignore the power of your mind, it will fight you all the way. That is why people struggle with will power and why up to 97% of all people don’t achieve lasting results. If you want to end your struggle and want to feel a sense of incredible self-empowerment, then know the following… When you change your mind then you will change your results, because changing your mind is the key to following through with new action!

About: Michael Mountain is a transformational author on health, weight loss & personal growth and is featured on Amazon.com. He is the author of the Ultimate Fat Loss Solution Diet which is available presently free of charge at www.michael-mountain.com. He is also the author of Mindset for Weight Loss transformational program - a revolutionary step-by-step program designed to provide the “inner-strength strategies” to take any diet and make it effective for permanent weight loss. This program allowed him to end his own personal 20 year struggle with weight and poor health! You can sign up to receive his blog updates on weight loss and motivation at www.michael-mountain.com

Habits vs. Willpower: the 10,000x Rule

Your bad habits are 10,000 times stronger than your desire or will power!

Yes, 10,000 times.

But, here is the good news!

The key to permanent weight loss is using your subconscious mind, literally tapping into this immense power, by creating new habits.

But wait - before you start creating new habits - there is more. You also may have certain "BELIEFS" that you "bought into" at some point in your life. These beliefs, too, can literally get in the way of you ever achieving permanent weight loss.

For example, if you have failed on previous weight loss attempts you may have a strong belief that you can’t lose the weight.

You may have looked at yourself so many times in the mirror that your internal dialogue changed from "I need to lose some weight" to " I am fat" or "I am a fat person".

Worse - someone, usually someone who’s opinion you value (a parent or significant other), has told you that "you are FAT" or worse "you will always be fat, that’s just who you are" and you believed them.

I have even met people who have created associations of comfort and emotional support to food from their parents, who in return label their kids as fat, even though it's really their design. Let me elaborate...

Imagine being fed a lifetime of junk; unlimited ice cream, potato chips, fatty foods with not a vegetable to be seen. You sit down with the people you love, your siblings and parents, and share good times while eating all this junk. Even when your friends come over, your mother lays it on thick with ice cream, cakes and cookies, and you feel all this sense of love. But, as soon as your friends go home, your mother looks at you, disgusted and says, "You’re fat! How come you can’t be skinny like your friends?"

Talk about mixed messages and head games!

As you can see, these situations were created by your parents, but there is zero benefit of blaming them and living in the past, other than to recognize how these things came about.


The above is an excerpt from Mindset for Weight Loss by Michael Mountain. It is currently available on amazon.