The Petite Advantage Diet (6 page)

Eating a much more substantial breakfast at 6:00
A.M.
will result in you not being nearly as hungry later in the day and probably not hungry at all. Why? Satiety. You simply feel full throughout the day (actually for about twenty-four hours) when you “front load,” or eat a bigger breakfast and allocate more of your calories to much earlier in the day. Eat breakfast and you will physically need to eat less
later
in the day and at night. The old adage, “eat like a king for breakfast, like a prince for lunch, and like a pauper for dinner” is absolutely right.

You can control your metabolism by how you behave–how and when you eat, exercise, sleep, stress out, etc. Just skipping breakfast, or any meal for that matter, will weaken your metabolism.
Don’t do it
! Even when I drill this into some of my clients, readers, and followers, they still continue to do it. Come on. The excuse that you don’t have time doesn’t fly with me, as I know it takes less than a minute to eat a hard-boiled egg, scoop down a container of low-fat yogurt with fruit, or drink a well-balanced protein shake. Remember, the excuse that you’re not hungry also doesn’t fly, because the only reason you are not hungry in the morning is that your body is tired of asking for food. It just gives up trying and you subsequently don’t feel hungry anymore. You blew out your body’s hunger mechanisms. But you can reverse that by eating breakfast–a key to my plan. To be perfectly honest, the only time you should feel hungry is first thing in the morning. My goal for the rest of the day is to keep hunger at bay. If you still don’t plan to eat breakfast (there’s that flawed belief system again), then you are destined to stay at your present weight–and then some.

Body Weight

In the next chapter, I will introduce you to the Harris Benedict Equation. If you are at a heavier body weight, your BMR goes up. For the overweight, the excuse of having a bad metabolism is generally inaccurate. You actually have a higher metabolism than you would at a lighter weight, because everything you do–from getting out of a chair to shopping to running to your office to cleaning–takes more energy since there is
more
of you to move around.

The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolisms are typically burning off
more
calories rather than fewer.
³

In addition, for the overweight, digesting all those extra calories actually boosts their metabolism. Their bodies have to work harder to digest all the additional calories. I’ve told you that your body slows down when you restrict calories, which is what you have to do to lose weight. The exact opposite happens when you overeat. Your body actually speeds up, as it wants to burn off some of the calories rather than store them as fat. The problem is that you may overeat so many calories that your body can’t speed up to that degree, so you gain weight. Please own this fact and stop making excuses that don’t help you achieve weight loss. And if you have annihilated your metabolism with repeated, gimmicky diets, I can still help you fix that, so don’t blame your metabolism. Blame your past behavior, which you can change starting today.

Spicy Food

Did you ever wonder why you start sweating when you eat food with some added “kick.” Well, like a fever–which is also a boost in your metabolism as your very smart body attacks the infection or whatever foreign substance has entered it–your body speeds up when you eat spicy food and that translates into a bump in your metabolism. Some new research out of Canada even proves that spice in food may also help to tip satiety mechanisms. This new research took adult men and served one group an appetizer with hot sauce and another group without. If you can believe it, the group that consumed the hot sauce ate, on average, 200 fewer calories at lunch and later in the day. Capsaicin, a compound found in chili peppers, was what they used to spice up the appetizers and the researchers theorize that it may work as an appetite suppressant.
⁴
I have always found that moderately spicy food also tastes better. One of my favorites is lemon pepper, which is recommended as a spice in your eating plan. I avoid the salt shaker for obvious reasons, but that does not mean that your food can’t be tasty and low in calories.

Moreover, spices are packed with antioxidants. In the January 2010 issue of
Nutrition Journal
, researchers claimed that “culinary herbs and spices have the highest antioxidant content of all foods.”
⁵
Therefore, you receive
über
benefits from spices, including enhanced health. In fact, some research says that combining spices makes them even more potent. Spices can give you a metabolic kick, as all spices–especially capsaicin, black pepper, and ginger–give your metabolism an extra jump start. And even small increases in calorie burn can add up to big results over time. When you see your eating plan in chapter 5, you will see that spices play a starring role, for all these reasons.

Caffeine

In chapter 7, I will tell you all about the true magic of tea and, to some extent, coffee. Yes, it does boost your metabolism, but you need to use it intelligently and cautiously.

Lean Muscle Tissue

Ah, the mother lode when it comes to an optimized metabolism! But you have to wait until chapter 8 to hear about that, or you can flip there now to find out why your lean muscle tissue is the motor of your metabolism and the magic bullet when it comes to a metabolism that gets the weight off and then keeps it off.

The Fidget Factor

Mayo Clinic researchers outfitted lean and obese individuals with underwear with sensors that monitored their every movement. What they found was that the overweight people simply moved
less
than the leaner participants. I have always been a fan of this research. For years, I’ve noticed that overweight people sit a lot, while those that are lean move around more. Now, to be clear, I don’t know which came first, the weight or the lack of movement. Of course, overweight people have told me for years that they are not comfortable moving around a lot, giving a number of reasons–it is simply difficult for them, or it is painful for joints (especially knees and hips) to bear the added weight, or they are most likely not living in an environment where anyone is moving around much. When was the last time you saw an obese family on the front lawn playing touch football, riding bikes, or playing tennis?

I even ask spouses, partners, family members, or co-workers what they observe when it comes to activity levels. Hands down, I hear comments like “He or she is always moving around” when referring to the lean and, conversely, “He or she just sits around the house” for those
less
lean.

Researchers theorize that part of this may be genetic (albeit, a small part), but yes, you can program yourself to get off the couch if inactivity has become your habit. In addition to what is defined as “exercise,” I still do, personally, move around constantly and urge you to do the same.

Very recently, research came out about the dangers of sitting for many hours in the day. This relates to one of the Seven Behaviors of Successful Weight Loss–watching less than ten hours of television a week. The findings went so far as to say that, even if you exercise for thirty minutes a day, eight hours of sitting cancels out all the benefits of those thirty minutes.
⁶
Yikes! There’s a good reason to start a “stand up and lose” movement in this country!

I walk around when I talk on the phone, at home or at the office. I try to stand up (which is what I am doing right now as I work on this chapter) and put my laptop on a kitchen counter in my home or on a counter at the office. There is also research that shows that you are more creative when you are moving, since more blood is flowing to your brain. Looks like standing up is a “win-win” proposition for more than just weight loss.

Now, I find that recommendations like “park your car at the farthest space and walk” are highly impractical, as my clients rarely subscribe to these behaviors. So I needed to create certain rules that may make more sense to you. Here, just to give you an example, are some of my movement habits while traveling, when I know I will be sitting for a period of time:

1
. No moveable walkways, escalators, or elevators. I walk and climb, and that also makes you think twice when packing, since you have to pick up your suitcase (even if it rolls) from time to time. And if you do use the moveable walkway, then please,
walk
. It’s not a moveable “standway”! Don’t just stand there–move!

2
. If my flight is delayed, I take to the concourse and walk and talk, as I am generally on my cell phone (but with my Bluetooth or other earpiece, as I do believe too much cell phone use can be hazardous).

3
. When in the air, I purposely get up to go to the bathroom when there is a line. That way, I get to stand up without being harassed by the flight attendant.

As a Petite, you need a calorie-blasting metabolism to get the weight off, because it’s harder for you to create a caloric deficit. Don’t forget that you have to expend more calories than you take in to force your body to use its own stored energy source–fat! You will have a clearer understanding of this issue once you get through the next chapter and understand The Math of weight loss.

Y
ou now understand that a booming metabolism translates to a smaller, sexier, “tighter-lighter” physique (I will explain why the quotes are around “tighter-lighter” later). Now, let’s go to the next step–understanding simple math. The math we are concerned with here applies to women of all shapes, heights, and sizes, but is especially important to Petites.

As with most math problems, we start with an equation.

The classic equation that determines your body weight is:

Calories In (Food) - Calories Out (Activity and Metabolism) = Your Present Body Weight

Most people are shocked when I tell them that their present body weight is the function of every single calorie they have ever consumed, minus every calorie burned through activity and metabolism. This covers your
entire
life. Instead of embracing the power of this equation, most people hold on to certain beliefs that they feel are the reason for their present body weight. In fact, it just comes back to The Math each time you lose weight (that’s good), or gain weight (that’s not so good), or stay the same (which may or may not be good, depending on the number).

You should also realize that if you are carrying extra weight and the scale is staying within a small range (say two to three pounds), then your equation is in balance. Your calories in are roughly equal to your calories out. Now, you may not be happy with this number and want to reduce it, which is probably why you have this book in your hands. But I need you to own up to the fact that
you
have balanced your equation to determine your present weight. Once I teach you how to manipulate the equation, you will have the knowledge to bring that number down.

In this chapter, we will look at the simple numbers for weight loss. In subsequent chapters, we will dig deeper into other factors that influence this weight-loss equation–factors like what foods positively influence your equation, what habits positively influence your equation, what activities enhance your weight loss, and what exercise is essential to your weight loss. But for now, let’s think of this as Weight-Loss Math 101.

You may be wondering why this equation is so specifically important to Petites. It is because smaller figures do not possess a very large margin for error. Once you embrace the numbers and understand their importance to weight loss, you will, for the first time, understand why your prior weight-loss attempts did not succeed or only worked for a short (no pun intended) period of time.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are the lifeguard at your community pool. There are actually two pools: one that is considered the “baby” pool, for children of a certain age, size, and ability level, and another much larger, Olympic-size pool that is used by the majority of people. At the end of each night, you have to refill both pools, and you do so by placing a hose in each one. By accident, you leave the water hoses turned on at the same pressure in each pool. What happens?

1
. The baby pool fills up much faster, since it is smaller. Therefore, it overflows much more water and really soaks the area around it.

2
. The Olympic pool fills up more slowly and doesn’t overflow as much, since it takes a lot more water to fill it up given its size.

Petites are the baby pool. When you overeat, you fill up faster, just like the baby pool. And all that extra water soaking the surrounding area, for you, represents body fat.

Your taller counterparts also fill up–no doubt about that–but they don’t get nearly the amount of overflow, which is why they gain less body fat (unless they really, really overeat).