"The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook" by Lyle McDonald

• People tend to read diet books selectively, hearing what they want to hear and ignoring the rest (especially the warnings).
• LBM is lean body mass, the amount of your body that isn’t fat.
• An average male may carry from 18-23% body fat and an average female somewhere between 25-30% bodyfat.
• The scale can’t tell you what you’ve lost, it can only tell you how much you have lost.
• When you’re worrying about long-term changes, the real goal is fat loss.
• It’s easy to hide the true results of a diet by not making the distinction between weight loss and fat loss.
• Most mainstream diet books and authorities echo the idea that 2 lbs per week is the maximum. Where did this value come from? Frankly, I have no idea.
• One pound of fat contains roughly 3,500 calories of energy.
• Studies demonstrate a rapid weight loss of anywhere from 1-15 lbs in the first week or two of a low carbohydrate diet and average weight losses of 7-10 lbs in the first week are fairly standard. Most of it is simply water loss although some of it will be true tissue loss., meaning fat and muscle. After that initial rapid weight loss, true weight/fat loss slows down to more ‘normal’ levels.
• The diet described in this book is simple a slightly modified protein sparing modified fast (PSMF), a very low calorie diet consisting of lean proteins, a small amount of fat and carbohydrate, a more or less unlimited amount of no calorie vegetables, some basic supplements, and nothing else.
• On average, caloric intakes will come out to be about 600-800 calories a day coming almost exclusively from protein.
• PSMF is essentially a ketogenic diet without the dietary fat.
• True fat loss will be lower (than calculated ideals) because of various inefficiencies and the slowdown of metabolic rate (which can start after only 3-4 days of severe caloric restriction).
• Frankly, it’s not healthy to starve the body down to such super low bodyfat percentages (males: 3-4%, females: 7-9%).
• Dehydration beyond even a small level can really destroy performance capacity.
• By starting with a few weeks of crash dieting, weight loss is kick started and this can give the necessary positive reinforcement needed to keep folks moving ahead.
• Since the crash diet described here is based around whole foods, it helps with the initial stages of food reeducation.
• There are some nutrients (such as glucose, some fatty acids, and about half of the amino acids) that can be made in the body from other sources. At the same time, there are nutrients which cannot be made by the body (the vitamins and minerals are examples, so are the essential fatty acids and about half of the amino acids) and are hence considered essential.
• The goal of this diet is to provide only the essential nutrients, while removing everything that is nonessential, in order to generate the greatest caloric deficit and the most rapid weight/fat loss.
• There are roughly 8 essential amino acids, 2 essential fatty acids, a host of vitamins and minerals and a few other substances that are required on a daily basis.
• While the body can survive fairly extended periods without carbohydrates or fat, a lack of protein leads to a loss of body tissue, function and eventually death.
• Dietary proteins are made of compounds called amino acids, of which 18-20 occur in the diet.
• Proteins have a number of crucial roles in the human body but most of them are structural (meaning the protein is used to build things).
• Something to note is that, in contrast to carbohydrate (which is stored in both muscle and liver) and fat (which is stored on your fat ass and stomach), there is no real ‘store’ of protein unless you count the small amount floating around in the bloodstream and your muscles and organs.
• Protein contains 4 calories per gram.
• Without getting into the current controversy over carbohydrates in the human diet, I’ll simply point out again that there is no strict nutritional requirement for carbohydrate.
• Fibrous carbohydrates are all your high-fiber carbs, meaning all of your vegetables.
• Starchy carbohydrates are, more or less, everything else: breads, pasta, rice, grains, basically any carbohydrate that contains a good bit of digestible carbohydrate.
• Starchy carbohydrates contain 4 calories per gram.
• You’ve probably heard that the human body cannot derive calories from fiber but this isn't entirely true, various bacteria in your gut breaks down fiber and it has been given a rough approximate caloric value of 1.5-2 calories per gram.
• Unless you’re consuming an absolute ton of it per day, you can generally ignore the caloric value of fiber.
• In the body, carbohydrate is only used as fuel. Incoming carbohydrates are either used immediately for energy, stored for later (as glycogen in the muscle and liver), or, under extreme conditions, converted to fat and stored.
• All tissues of the body can use glucose (what all dietary carbohydrates eventually get broken down to after digestion and absorption) and most will use it when it is available. At the same time, with a few exceptions, those same tissues will happily use fatty acids (from either the diet or the fat stored on your body) for fuel when carbohydrates are not available.
• I should note that carbohydrates (stored as glycogen in the muscle)are necessary to support high intensity exercise such as weight training or sprinting.
• Except in a fairly small percentage of people, dietary cholesterol has almost no impact on blood cholesterol levels. Rather, the types and amounts of dietary fat being consumed play a far larger role in blood lipid levels.
• Simply put: all fats are not the same in terms of health effects or what have you.
• Trans-fatty acids (also called partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) are a man made fat made by bubbling hydrogen through vegetable oil to make it semi solid with a long shelf life. Of all the fats, trans-fatty acids have the worst effect on blood lipids and overall health.
• Saturated fats are found almost exclusively in animal products and are solid at room temperature. Although it’s far more complicated than this, saturated fats tend to have a negative effect on blood lipids and health.
• Monosaturates are present in almost all foods which contain fat and are liquid at room temperature. Monounsaturates have a neutral, if not beneficial, effect on health.
• Polyunsaturated fats are found primarily in vegetable oils and are liquid at room temperature. They are generally claimed to have a positive effect on human health although things are a little more complicated than that.
• Polyunsaturated fats come in two major “flavors”, referred to as omega-three and omega-6 fatty acids.
• The key thing for readers to realize is that w-3 are the real nutritional powerhouses with the fish oils having a profoundly beneficial effect on human health and fat loss.
• On the rapid fat loss diet, w-3’s should be about the only fat you eat with preformed fish oil capsules being the preferred form and flax seed oil being a distant second.
• Dietary fat has both structural and energy uses in the body. Fundamentally, that’s what body fat is, stored fat that provides energy to your body when you aren’t eating enough (or you’re exercising or starving or what have you).
• In simple terms, that’s what fat loss is: your body is mobilizing stored fatty acids from your fat cells and burning them for energy.
• From a caloric standpoint, all fats have the same value which is 9 calories per gram.
• Fiber is not considered an essential nutrient but it plays many important roles in human health.
• Fiber can be subdivided into two major (and several minor) categories which are soluble and insoluble fiber. Soluble fibers mix in water and take up a lot of space in the stomach: this is good while dieting as it increases feelings of fullness. Insoluble fibers don’t mix with water but help with bowel regularity and keep the colon healthy.
• Alcohol really isn’t a nutrient in that it provides nothing of nutritional value to the body. It provides calories and alters nutrient metabolism in a fashion that tends to promote fat gain.
• Most parts of the human body are in a constant state of breakdown or buildup and nutrients must come in to the body to provide building blocks for those processes.
• At the lowest level of cellular function, the only form of energy that your cells can use directly is something called adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
• The body generates ATP from the burning (oxidation or combustion) of either glucose (from carbohydrate) or fatty acids (from fats). Under specific circumstances protein can be used to produce ATP, either directly or via the conversion to either glucose or fat (usually protein is converted to glucose to be used as fuel).
• With a few exceptions, every tissue in your body can use either carbohydrate or fat for fuel. What determines which they use? For the most part, it’s the availability of carbohydrates: when carbs are available (because you’re eating plenty of them), those tissues will use carbohydrates, in the form of glucose, for fuel. When carbs are not available (because you’re restricting them), the body will switch to using fat for fuel. That fat can either come from your diet or from the fat stored on your butt or stomach.
• When you eat more carbohydrates, your body uses less fat for energy; when you eat less carbohydrates, your body uses more fat for energy.
• A few tissues in your body such as the brain/central nervous system and one or two others can’t use fatty acids for fuel; they can only use glucose.
• Ketones are made from the breakdown of fat in the liver and function as a fat-derived fuel for the brain during periods of starvation/carbohydrate restriction.
• The body is able to make as much glucose as the brain and the few other tissues need on a day to day basis.
• Protein requirements go up when you’re restricting either calories or carbohydrates.
• Over the first few hours of starvation, blood glucose and insulin levels both drop. This signals the body to break down glycogen (stored carbohydrate) in the liver to release it into the bloodstream. As well, the body starts mobilizing fat from fat cells to use for fuel. After 12-18 hours or so (faster if you exercise), liver glycogen is emptied. At this point blood glucose will drop to low-normal levels and stay there. Blood fatty acids have increased significantly. After a day or so, most cells in the body, with a few exceptions, are using fatty acids for fuel.
• The few tissues that require glucose are getting it via gluconeogenesis in the liver. This process requires amino acids. If you don’t provide them, the body has to break down protein tissues to provide the amino acids to make glucose.
• The shift to using ketones decreases the need to break down body protein to make glucose.
• By providing protein intake, the liver uses dietary protein instead of body protein to make glucose, which spares the loss of LBM.
• PSMF:
• Protein intake set depending on body fat percentage and activity.
• Basically unlimited amount of vegetables (a few are off limits).
• Either fish oil capsules or 1 tbsp of flaxseed oil per day for EFAs.
• A basic multivitamin/mineral supplement. One or two other key supplements.
• Planned diet breaks depending on activity and body fat percentage.
• Length of PSMF to be set depending on body fat percentage and activity level.
• Calipers are the preferred method of body fat calculation.
• Frankly, if you’re not that lean and not currently very active, there’s a fairly easy way to get a rough estimate of your bodyfat percentage and this is by using something called the Body Mass Index (BMI).
• First you’re going to multiply your current weight by your bodyfat percentage to determine how much of your total weight is fat. Now subtract the pounds of fat from your total weight, this is how much LBM you have.
• Diet category based on body fat percentage:
• 1: 15% or lower for men, 24% or lower for women
• 2: 16-25% for men, 25-24% for women
• 3: greater than 26% for men, greater than 35% for women
• There are three basic types of exercise that can be performed. The first is cardiovascular or aerobic exercise which refers to any activity that is performed more or less continually for anywhere from 20 minutes up to several hours. The goal of aerobic training is to burn calories and improve the health and fitness of the cardiovascular system. The second is resistance training which refers to any activity where the muscles are forced to work against a high resistance so that you are unable to continue activity for more than a minute or so. Finally is interval training which is sort of a subcategory within aerobic training; you can think of it as sprint training. Interval/sprint training is performed with the same types of activities as aerobic training but entails working very hard for some short period of time (anywhere from 10 seconds to several minutes) and then taking it easy for some period of time (which depends on the length of the hard part).
• I don’t think interval training is appropriate or sustainable on a crash diet.
• The calorie burn from exercise will generally be quite small compared to the deficit created by food restriction.
• From a weight loss standpoint, about the only people who are able to burn a ton of calories with exercise (athletes) are the ones who don’t need to in the first place.
• Once you’ve generated a daily deficit in the realm of 1500-2000 calories/day, burning a few hundred more calories per day with exercise simply doesn’t amount to much.
• While exercise may not greatly affect the total amount of weight lost on a diet, it can affect the composition of what is lost, that is fat versus LBM.
• Unless it helps with adherence to the diet, I don’t see much of a point in doing anything but the mildest aerobic activity on the crash diet. Thirty to forty minutes a few times per week (maybe daily) would be it.
• Frankly, weight training 2-3 times per week with a basic full body routine would probably be the best choice on this diet. One exercise per body part for a few heavy sets is more than plenty.
• Individuals who get involved in regular exercise are more likely to maintain the weight/fat loss than those who don’t.
• I’ll mention up front that it appears to take quite a bit of activity, along the lines of 2500 calories per week burned through exercise to maintain the weight loss.
• If you already have a program: You should keep up your training program but the total volume and frequency of your training should be cut way back; you simply won’t have the recovery capacity on so few calories.
• Studies routinely show that both volume (number of sets, amount of aerobic training done) and frequency (days per week) can be cut back significantly (by up to 2/3rds) as long as intensity (weight on the bar, speed) is maintained.
• Trust me on this: cut your training back on this diet.
• I want to add that the low blood glucose that typically occurs on a low-carb diet can really sap training intensity, especially in the weight room. Consuming 5 grams of carbohydrate about 10 minutes before you train can help a lot with your ability to maintain intensity, by increasing blood glucose back to the normal range. Conceivably, you could even increase this to 15-30 grams of carbs taken during workout as well. If you want to save some of your protein intake and consume it around training (maybe 15 grams of whey immediately before and/or after the workout), this will help to support protein synthesis and limit LBM losses as well.
• Too much cardio when added to a crash diet such as this one can cause more problems than it solves. At the same time, once you get down to extreme levels of leanness (12-15% or lower for men, 21-24% for women), some cardio certainly appears to help with fat loss.
• I can’t see folks recovery from interval training during the crash diet.
• I think the best choice of exercise during the crash diet is weight training, more so than cardio. The deficit is already huge to the point that cardio (unless it improves diet adherence) won’t have a big impact and weight training works better for sparring LBM.
• By depleting muscle glycogen (by using higher repetitions), the body will increase its use of fat for fuel.
• Multiply your LBM in pounds by the number from the table, that’s your daily protein intake.
• I’d strongly suggest that you get in the habit of reading labels, you’d be surprised at how many hidden grams of carbs and fat turn up in what you’d think are pure protein sources.
• Note that most protein sources can contain a gram or two of fat or carbs without being any big deal within the scheme of this diet.
• Low-fat and low-carb protein sources:
• skinless chicken breast: watch out for various flavorings on commercial products
• low-fat fish: tuna, cod, halibut, flounder, lobster, crab
• extremely lean red meat: 95-98% fat free
• fat free dairy: includes fat free cheese and cottage cheese
• egg whites
• beef jerky: can contain quite a few carbs depending on the flavoring
• protein powder
• I highly recommend you get one or more servings of dairy in your daily meal plan.
• The protein in dairy (casein) has been shown to be anti-catabolic, that is LBM sparring.
• An additional benefit of dairy protein is that milk protein (casein) digest very slowly, it tends to sit in the stomach a long time. This helps increase fullness.
• I don’t think protein powders should make up the bulk of your daily diet although they can be used sparingly.
• Use whey protein right around your workouts.
• Protein powders tend to leave people hungry as they digest fairly rapidly unless combined with a soluble fiber.
• The problem in my mind [with an all protein powder diet] is that, while this generates amazing weight/fat loss in the short term, it does nothing to teach or retrain overall eating habits in the longer term.
• I think structuring a crash diet around liquid products is easier but ultimately limiting in the long-run. I’d rather see crash dieters get into the habit of making good whole food choices for when they come off the diet.
• With the exception of peas, carrots and corn, and beets (the starchy vegetables which contain a lot of carbohydrate) which are off limits except in tiny amounts, you can (and should) eat basically an unlimited amount of vegetables).
• Either go buy preformed fish oils and take 6x1-gram capsules per day, or, if you must, use one tablespoon of flax oil per day. You can either take all of your EFAs at once or spread them out across the day; just make sure and get them.
• Athletes may want to take 5 grams of a fast acting carbohydrate (you can actually buy glucose pills in the diabetic section of any pharmacy) about 5-10 minutes before their weight workouts, this will raise blood glucose back to the normal range and help to maintain exercise training intensity. It only adds 20 calories to the daily diet. Again, up to 15-30 grams of carbs (think Gatorade) can be sipped on during a workout, adding 60-120 calories to the diet. While this may slow weight or fat loss slightly, the improvement in ability to maintain training intensity (a key in maintaining LBM) more than makes up for this.
• A large water intake should be part of any diet.
• Other non-caloric drinks are also acceptable although every now and again you find someone who swears up (correctly or not) that the citric acid in soda or stuff like Crystal Light stalls their weight loss.
• I want to mention some basic supplements which should be a part of any low carbohydrate diet. The primary group to worry about are the electrolytes: sodium, potassium, and magnesium. All three are lost on a low-carb diet and supplementing them seems to help people avoid fatigue. 3-5 grams of sodium (just put salt on your food), up to one gram of potassium, and 500mg of magnesium should be supplemented.
• I want to mention calcium again, in addition to your one or two servings of dairy protein per day, adding 600-1200mg of calcium (generic calcium carbonate from the grocery store is fine) is a good way to ensure adequate calcium intake and help with fat loss. Take half of it in the morning and half of it at night.
• Oh yeah, take a one-per day multivitamin every day, just to be sure. Supermarket generic is fine as far as I’m concerned.
• Meal frequency is determined by how many calories you’ll be eating per day, as this determines what a realistic number of meals can be.
• One ounce of almost any meat will contain between 7 and 8 grams of protein.
• Three ounces of animal protein is about the amount that will fit in a cupped palm (or roughly the size of a deck of cards).
• A regular size can of tuna has 32 grams of protein.
• Most protein powders contain about 30 grams per scoop.
• I would like readers to get some vegetables at every meal, they provide important nutrients, will help keep you full, and keep you regular.
• As mentioned, vegetables can pretty much be consumed without limits with the exceptions of the starchy vegetables: peas, corn and carrots.
• Many of the condiments we are used to using either contain a lot of carbohydrates, fat, or both.
• Foods and beverages that can be consumed with essentially no limit: lemon juice, all spices, vinegar, mustard, soy sauce, salsa, pico de gallo, water, diet soda, coffee, teas, broth/bouillon, other sugar free drinks.
• I suggest you at least check the labels on anything you’re considering, fats and carbs tend to hide everywhere.
• Note that foods containing zero (or near zero) net carbohydrates are off-limits. The sugar alcohols being used in these are converted, to one degree or another, to glucose in the liver and should be counted as carbohydrates.
• Decades of research have led to one rather depressing conclusion: human body weight is regulated. The regulator is the hypothalamus (a structure in your brain) and things such as metabolic rate, hunger, activity levels and hormones are what change when you gain and lose weight.
• For the most part, your body wants to keep you where you are at body weight/body fat wise. So when you start dieting, eating less and losing bodyweight, your hypothalamus senses it and your body slows metabolism, increases your hunger/appetite levels, and alters hormone levels in a generally negative fashion. To a much lesser degree, when you overate and start gaining weight, your hypothalamus increases metabolic weight, decreases your hunger/appetite, and ramps up certain hormones. The system is very asymmetrical and the human body generally defends against weight loss far better than it does against weight gain.
• So when you start a diet, eating less and losing weight, your body notices it and starts to adjust metabolism downwards. Appetite/hunger tend to go up and many hormones change. In essence, this is the ‘starvation response’ that everybody talks about. Metabolism (and weight/fat loss) slow and you get so hungry that you tend to break your diet, frequently eating so much that you put the weight you lost right back on. I should mention that the degree to which this occurs depends a lot on the level of leanness. Meaning that someone at 10% bodyfat will tend to have far greater issues with this than someone who is at 40% bodyfat. Keep that in mind as it helps to explain the differences in frequency of free meals, refeeds and full diet breaks.
• There are two distinct components to the drop in metabolic rate: the body weight component and the adaptive component. The first is simply a function of losing bodyweight. I haven’t talked much about metabolic rate but the amount of calories you burn both at rest and during daily activity tends to be related directly to your body weight: a heavier individual burns more calories than a lighter individual both at rest and during activity. So as you lose weight your energy requirements go down. The adaptive component either reduces or increases the caloric expenditure more than you’d expect based on the change in body weight.
• If you’ve reduced your bodyweight, you will have reduced the number of calories you burn each day because of it.
• In the short-term, a few days to a few weeks of dieting, the main system that is decreasing metabolic rate is a decrease in sympathetic nervous system (SNS) output. In fact, within 3-4 days of extreme dieting, SNS output can and will drop, lowering metabolic rate slightly.
• Is there any way to increse SNS output? The answer is yes and the compound is cheap, readily available, and safe as long as you use it correctly. The compound is the much maligned combination of ephedrine and caffeine (known in most circles the EC stack).
• The fact is that the EC stack has been clinically studied and used for nearly 2 decades. It has been shown to increase metabolic rate, blunt hunger, may correct the SNS defect present in obesity prone individuals, increases fat loss and decreases muscle loss on a diet.
• EC is a stimulant and that means it has side effects including increased heart rate, blood pressure, jitteriness, and a couple of others. Do note that the side effects of EC typically go away within days to weeks of regular use.
• EC tends to be very safe and effective when used intelligently and in a controlled fashion and can be extremely dangerous if you’re a dumbshit about it.
• The extreme caloric deficit of the crash diet makes the SNS slowdown a very real issue.
• The rather standard dose of EC for dieting purposes is 20 mg ephedrine (or the herbal equivalent) and 200 mg caffeine (or the herbal equivalent) taken three times per day. Note that some studies suggested the addition of aspirin (making it an ECA stack)would improve the effect. Start with a half dose taken once per day and see how you react.
• Yohimbe seems to particularly help with stubborn fat deposits.
• Yohimbe is used prior to aerobic activity (the aerobics are necessary to burn off the now mobilized fatty acids).
• As one major caveat, you should never (NEVER) mix EC and yohimbe; in fact, you shouldn’t take them within about 4 hours of one another. The reason is that the side effects of each will multiply and both blood pressure and heart rate can really jump.
• If you decide to use yohimbe (yohimbe HCL is the better choice) the effective dose would be 0.2 mg yohimbe per kilogram per kilogram of bodyweight or about 0.1 mg per pound consumed with 100-200 mg of caffeine. This would be taken 30-60 minutes before low intensity aerobic activity (preferably first thing in the morning before eating).
• Fatter individuals can usually diet longer without needing a break from the diet than leaner individuals.
• The more strict you are with your diet the more likely it is to backfire on you.
• A single cookie (or even a single meal) can’t undo a week or more of dieting.
• Dieting nonstop for days or weeks on end gets to be a real mental grind, more so on an extreme diet like this one.
• Breaking your diet a little bit isn’t going to kill you.
• I think, under most circumstances, a free meal is best eaten out of the house, at a restaurant. This is because you’re less likely to go nuts on your total food intake at a restaurant..
• I want to give you one warning: do not be surprised if your bodyweight spikes a little bit the next morning, especially if you eat a lot of carbohydrates at your free meal. Just realize that it is water weight and will drop off shortly after returning to the crash diet.
• Dieting for long periods at a stretch becomes a real physiological drag.
• Breaking the diet up into more manageable stretches, 8-12 weeks at a time with a 2 week break makes the whole process much easier psychologically.
• About the only group that usually can’t even consider taking a full diet break are athletes and contest bodybuilders (maybe models) who are under very specific time frame to reach their goals: the two weeks of dieting time that they lose may not be justified if they don’t get into shape in time for the contest, competition, or photo shoot.
• So category 1 dieters have the joy of going straight through without free meals or refeeds for 11-12 straight days. At which point they should perform a 2-3 day high-carb, high-calorie refeed prior to going back to normal dieting.
• To maintain the weight/fat lost, you have to maintain at least some portion of your diet and activity habits.
• Successful dieters tend to keep track of their weight (or body fat) on a regular basis.
• Most people are simply atrocious at estimating their food intake.
• Making folks go through the headache of measuring everything for a few days helps them realize not only how much they’re eating, but what real world portion sizes are.
• A great many studies have shown that high fat diets tend to promote what researchers call passive overconsumption of calories. The essential problem is that, in the short term, fat doesn’t blunt hunger or alter food intake.
• Both protein and carbohydrate tend to blunt hunger in the short-term.
• Here’s a series of ‘rules’ for eating that will tend to make strict calorie counting ‘mostly’ unnecessary.
• Eat more frequently
• Eat plenty of lean protein
• Eat a moderate amount of fat at each meal
• Eat plenty of fiber from vegetables, fruits, and unrefined carbohydrates likes beans
• Eat moderate amounts of refined carbohydrates such as breads, pasta, rice, and grains
• Eat slowly
• Continue to utilize free meals and/or structured refeeds
• Exercise
• There is a delay between eating and when your brain gets the ‘signal’ that you are full. On average, the delay is about 20 minutes or so although even this may be impaired in some individuals.
• The first and most important step in developing a maintenance level diet is to determine maintenance calorie levels.
• Depending on activity levels, total daily energy expenditure usually ranges from about 12 calories per pound of bodyweight for relatively sedentary individuals to 15-16 calories per pound for relatively average activity levels with extremely active individuals going up to 20 calories per pound or more.
• After calories have been set, proper protein intake is the single most important aspect of any diet.
• I recommend everyone start with a baseline carbohydrate intake of 100 grams per day.
• Any meal or snack should ideally contain some amount of all the nutrients.
• If you’re losing less than one pound per week on average you need to cut calories further, another 10% reduction would be appropriate.