A fat-loss diet is an intervention; it is a short-term corrective treatment for a specific condition. That condition is obesity, or being over-fat. It is not meant to be the way that you live forever. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn some healthier eating habits while you are employing the intervention, but you should not live on a low-calorie diet for life. It’s unhealthy, and scientifically speaking, it would totally suck.

The research shows that the most effective length of time for fat-loss diets are anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks. If you do some quick math, with a healthy rate of fat loss of 1 to 2 pounds a week, you can quickly see that most of these diets result in a loss of 12 to 24 pounds of body fat during that time. What if you have more than that to lose?

Here's what most people do—and why they either fail altogether or quickly regain their weight. 

They usually continue at extremely low calorie levels. Or, perhaps they add more hours to their cardio regimens. I can't tell you how many clients we have had come into our program eating 1000 or fewer calories a day and spending two to three hours doing cardio programs daily. 

And guess what? Even at these extremes, they have ceased to lose weight.

The answer is really very simple. It's not obvious, but it is simple. They have dieted for so long, and they have worked their bodies so many hours for so long, that they are in a very unhealthy, run-down state. The prolonged low-calorie diet has absolutely crashed their metabolisms as well as their hormone levels. People are literally in starvation mode. 

Their bodies are preserving every last little bit of body tissue that they can. Their cortisone levels (the stress hormone) is through the roof, and their thyroid levels (which to a large extent regulate metabolism) are absolutely bottomed out. If a physician gave them a blood test right now, they would be shocked at the shape they are in. 

The first thing we have to do with clients who come into the program in this condition, is to feed them and heal them in order to set them up for a successful diet phase. We call this Metabolic Priming™.

We have to slowly raise their calories back to a normal maintenance state and dial back their exercises to a level that their bodies can recover from. They're starving and overtrained. Is there anything worse than exercising for hours every day and literally starving yourself while getting absolutely no results for your suffering? You wouldn't believe how common this is.

This is one segment of the population that the current health and fitness and diet gurus love to target and prey upon. These are people actively engaged in dieting and exercise, who are interested in both, who have shown that interest by following some sort of structured diet and exercise program, and who have ceased to see results from their efforts. What better market is there than a bunch of sweaty, starving people who are utterly frustrated with all the time, work, and suffering they are putting in day after day to no avail?

So, the normal marketing approach from mainstream, popular snake-oil salesman is to focus on these current symptoms that are a result of a crashed metabolism. They focus on the insulin response which is out of whack due to a prolonged starvation diet. They focus on hormonal imbalances, which are all direct results of a prolonged starvation diet. They focus on products and stimulants that can marginally boost caloric expenditure (like caffeine) in order to address the slowed, sluggish metabolism which is a direct result of a prolonged starvation diet.

Look guys, this is utterly shortsighted. It's profitable for the snake-oil salesman, but these are tiny little rabbit holes which are unnecessary and not worth your time to explore. Every one of those symptoms listed was a result of a prolonged starvation diet. 

The solution is not to address each individual symptom in a pointless effort to remedy that particular symptom. No, the solution is to address the underlying problem which causes all of those downstream symptoms in the first place.

Honestly, the fad diet industry is simply following the methodology of our health care system when they do this.

Our health care system is very quick to prescribe all sorts of expensive and dangerous pharmaceuticals to alleviate particular symptoms, but it's very rare that you get any sort of meaningful help from your doctor to address the CAUSE of all those symptoms—being in an overall state of ill health—far from your ideal body weight, and a perfect candidate for all of the diseases for which they are very happy to prescribe you medicines.

Our approach is to focus on the cause of all these symptoms rather than chase down every individual effect—go for the root of the problem, move ourselves from a state of ill health to health, and then see what symptoms persist from there.

Usually that takes care of pretty much everything.

The body is remarkable in its capacity to heal itself when everything is working in balance and in order as it was designed to work. When the different systems of your body are out of balance and out of whack, that's when we are at risk for all of those obesity-related illnesses we are so familiar with: Diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and heart attacks. It's no wonder the new epidemic in America is obesity.

So, the last thing that you want to do when you get to the end of a 6 to 12 week diet is to mindlessly continue at a very low calorie level for an extended period of time. No, you have to give your body a break.

We aim to reduce body fat by about 10% each dietary cycle. After losing 12 to 24 pounds of fat over an 8 to 10 week diet, you need to reverse diet—slowly raise your calories back up to maintenance levels in order to allow your body to recover, heal and set yourself up for the next diet cycle.

(Remember to reverse diet when you are through, though, or you will pile fat back on. No wonder so many people regain their weight!)

Then, your metabolism will be revved up, your hormones will be back in balance, and you will be ready to go another round on the diet, and lose another 10% of your body fat. Do this process over and over until you are modeling bikinis or competing in physique competitions. 

Your overall energy balance determines whether you are gaining or losing fat. If you take in more energy (calories) than you expend, your body will store that energy for hard times in the form of body fat. Remember, our bodies’ first goal is continued survival. Our DNA is not terribly worried about how we look in a bathing suit.

But we are...and our bodies are now facing a threat they have never faced before. In this day and age of cheap, plentiful food, the new health threat looming for most is actually obesity by overeating rather than death by starvation. We have to intentionally guide our bodies toward NOT storing a bunch of energy in the form of fat or else risk all the life-threatening diseases associated with obesity.

We address the calorie balance primarily through diet—as exercise is terribly inefficient in terms of calorie expenditure per minute. You can dedicate two hours of your day to a life-sapping treadmill OR you can decide NOT to eat a peanut butter sandwich. The choice is yours. For me, I’m going to reclaim my two hours I gave away, and just choose NOT to eat the sandwich.

That leaves diet to create a caloric deficit. That’s why we developed an approach we call the Sine Wave™ Diet. The Sine Wave diet makes creating a caloric deficit as pain-free and productive as possible. This diet model simply allows for ups and downs in daily caloric intake. You do not have to meet a calorie target every single day. Instead, what is important is your calorie average over the week. Thus, if you overeat one day, you can make up for it over the next day or two. Or, if you have a big family meal every Sunday, you can eat a little lighter in the days leading up to it.

Real Life is where the Sine-Wave diet really shines, and that makes all the difference in the world in your Real World Results. Most coaches tell you to hit your calorie target every single day, right on target every day. If you have ever tried to diet before while counting calories, you have probably experienced a bad day, a day when the numbers just did not add up the way you wanted them to.

And then what happened? If you are like thousands of others, you probably got discouraged and gave up. And here's the crazy part: That is totally the wrong reaction because it is based upon a false assumption, the assumption that there is some magical 24-hour cut off period wherein success or failure is judged. That's crazy. Who said that?

There is no 24-hour period written into your body that determines how much fat you burn. A much more accurate guide for the amount of fat you will burn over time is a weekly average of your daily caloric intake. If you go over by a couple hundred calories on one day, then just make up for it on another. All we look at in our clients is the average at the end of the week. That is the only number we look for in terms of calories with our clients, and we have a 100% success rate for weight loss and body recomposition. This allows for a diet that fits Real Life!

Imagine. You know you have a big family gathering on Sunday, and you know there will be all kinds of wonderful foods available. Why not just eat 100 calories less each day leading up to Sunday so that you can eat an extra 500 or 600 calories of all the delicious food? If the outcome is the same in terms of fat loss, why would you not do that?

If you decide to go out and eat this evening with your family, but you don't have the calories left in your daily budget to eat anything at the restaurant, do you just tell your family, “Sorry I can't go?” No. Go eat with your family. If you go over your calorie goal by a few hundred calories today, just tighten your belt and make up for it over the next few days. No harm no foul.

Your diet is still on track. It's not broken at all. You get to live like a real person, and you have a sustainable diet model that you can keep up over the few weeks that it takes to execute a dietary intervention.

This is one of the most popular features of our program with our clients, the flexibility to allow for variations in calorie levels throughout the week. As long as your average calorie intake is close to your goal, then what's the problem? Our clients don't have a problem, and they consistently gain muscle and lose fat on our program, every time.