Chris Powell's Choose More, Lose More for Life (9 page)

Then Rachel got a phone call about a new show, ABC’s
Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition
. She figured it wouldn’t hurt to try out. So she wrote a letter to me and poured her heart out about how badly she wanted to transform her life, and promising to give my program her all. In tryouts
she proved her determination. When I invited her onto the show, she was ecstatic. Little did she know that her life was about to change forever!

As we started working together, Rachel could feel the confidence I had in her—confidence that she didn’t have in herself. For once in her life, she really believed she could drop hundreds of pounds, and she was ready to do whatever it was going to take. After some deep soul searching, she challenged herself to lose 50 percent of her body weight. It was a commitment to herself, but she also hoped she could become an inspiring example for other desperate people. This vision of her future was her motivation.

Before she met me, Rachel didn’t know what a carb was. But now she learned all about the importance of carbs and the impact that nutrition has on her metabolism. She learned which foods could help her lose weight and which she should avoid. How to make balanced meals, how to control her portions, how to spread her meals out over the day: Rachel learned how to feed her body without hurting it.

One of the key elements of any successful long-term program was especially valuable for Rachel: the ability to cheat! Being able to splurge on her favorite foods helped her curb cravings, because she knew that if she couldn’t have a cupcake or ice cream today, she could have it tomorrow. It was easier for her to stick with the program because to her, it didn’t really feel like a diet.

Day by day, Rachel’s confidence grew and she saw great results. After she lost her first one hundred pounds, medical tests showed she was perfectly healthy. Within a year, she lost 161 pounds! She hit some bumps in the road as she neared her goal weight—she couldn’t afford groceries, so she ate with her family; her progress plateaued—but her expanding knowledge and self-esteem helped her conquer the problems.

Rachel’s down to 208 pounds, and she’s maintaining her weight. Carb-cycling has actually simplified her life! Nowadays she eats when she wakes up and then every two to three hours after that. She tries to drink a gallon of water daily. Her favorite low-carb foods are Ezekiel 4:9 brand breads and tortillas—they even make her feel like she’s cheating! Sweet potatoes and baked potatoes are her favorite high-carb foods. As a binge-prone eater, she keeps things realistic by enjoying cheat meals three days a week.

It’s a lifestyle that goes far beyond diet. Rachel’s learned how to balance
her work life with her social life and personal life. Plus, she’s become a certifiable gym rat! She goes first thing every morning and whenever she wants to celebrate an accomplishment or blow off stress. When she’s angry, she puts on her pink boxing gloves and hand wraps and beats the bag. The adrenaline junkie has reemerged, and she’s trying all kinds of new things, like bungee jumping, that scare her. When faced with a challenge, she takes it on. And she loves meeting new people.

Rachel feels like she took a lump of dirt and created a masterpiece. Her story is an amazing example of what a healthy diet and a little exercise can do for you: It can change your life! Success like Rachel’s is within your reach. Before she started carb-cycling, Rachel was scared and overwhelmed—she didn’t think it was possible to transform her life. But in her moment of clarity she decided that she was worth the extra effort, the hard work, to give herself a happier, healthier life. When you open them up, the human mind and
human heart are amazing things! That’s exactly what Rachel did, and because she did she’s proven that anything is possible.

The moment of clarity, when it happens, is different for everyone. For some it may be when they hit a brutal rock bottom, for others it may simply emerge from curiosity about what a better future might look like. When you have yours, the desire for a new lifestyle will spark to life within you. Your desire will grow and grow, finally bursting forth as motivation. That’s what will turn your clarity and desire into action. That’s when you’re ready to get going with carb cycling. That’s what will make your transformation journey a fantastic success!

So what’s the big deal about carb cycling? In a nutshell, it’s a way of eating that
alternates days of high-carbohydrate meals with days of low-carbohydrate meals
—and allows you to reward yourself regularly along the way! Carbohydrates come from plants and are the major component of foods like bread, potatoes, pasta, corn, beans, fruits, vegetables, and sugar-heavy “bad carbs” such as soda and candy. Carbs have certainly gotten a bad rap over the last couple decades, but there are profound benefits to eating good carbs! They’re the fuel source that your muscles and organs prefer.

Carbs fire up your body’s calorie-burning metabolic furnace, and you can
make the most of that process
by carb-cycling. On days when you eat more carbs, you stoke the furnace, and on days when you eat fewer carbs, your furnace burns fat like crazy. The high-carb/low-carb pattern tricks your metabolism into burning hot even on days when it doesn’t get many carbs, so it starts ripping through body fat. That’s one way carb-cycling maximizes weight loss!

I’ve developed a carb-cycling program that’s doable for nearly everyone and consistent at getting amazing results. It will help you achieve your weight-loss and fitness goals incredibly quickly without requiring a huge amount of effort. You can use this approach to drop as many pounds as you wish, and when you stick with it, you’ll be able to maintain your ideal weight and stay in excellent shape
for the rest of your life
!

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of my system, here’s a little background info that’ll help you understand your weight and make it easier for you to get hold of the carb-cycling process.

If you’re out to shrink your waistline (and any other measurement!), you want to burn fat as fast as you safely can. In order to prime your body to start losing weight and keep on losing weight, you’ve got to follow three rules. They may surprise you:

Rule 1:
Eat more carbs and eat more often.

Rule 2:
Develop shapely muscles.

Rule 3:
Move your muscles.

Are you kidding me, Chris? More meals, more carbs, and more muscle—that can’t make me skinnier! But in fact, feeding your body
in the right way
, together with growing and shaping your muscles, will power up your metabolism—and keep it powered up—so it blazes right through your fat. It’s textbook physiology! I’ll lay it all out for you a little later in this chapter.

First, let’s make sure you understand how your metabolism works. I covered the details in my first book,
Choose to Lose
, so you probably already know that the term
metabolism
refers to the way your body uses energy to power your organs and muscles. That energy is measured in units called calories. Where does all that energy go? Your metabolism burns calories for three purposes:

That’s the
how
of calorie-burning; now here’s the
how much
. The number of calories you burn each day varies according to how active you are. If you follow the same routine every day, eating and moving around (or not) in pretty much the same ways, you’ll burn roughly the same number of calories every day. The proportion of calories used by each of your body’s three energy users—digestion, being (resting metabolic rate), and movement—will also stay pretty constant.

So how many calories are we talking about? That depends on four things: your age, your weight, your height, and your gender. All other things being equal, a bigger body needs more calories than a smaller one does, and a younger body needs more calories than an older body does. Take a look at the chart on the opposite page to see your estimated baseline calorie usage. It shows how many calories a body your size and age typically burns in a day with light movement.