Reduce Every Day Calories
The Gene Smart Anti Inflammatory Diet & Exercise Program principle, Reduce Every Day Calories is the only efficient way to effectively lose weight. If one of your goals is weight loss, reduce your targeted intake of every day calories by 20% to 30% of what is needed to maintain your current weight. Knowing your caloric goal and measuring your progress is the key to successfully reducing every day calories and losing weight.
Weight Loss Math: Reduce Every Day Calories vs. Increasing Exercise
Can't I reach my weight loss goals by just exercising more, instead of reducing every day calories? For most, the answer is no. It’s not that you can’t lose weight by exercising. You can. The weight loss equation boils down to burning more calories than you take in, and exercise is a way to burn every day calories. But it’s a pretty inefficient system, and sets up a lot of people for failure. Think of it this way: to burn 100 calories, you’d have to bike at 5 miles per hour for 32 minutes, walk at 3 miles per hour for 23 minutes, swim slowly for 20 minutes, or engage in vigorous aerobic activity for 10 minutes. That’s a lot of work! By comparison, it’s easy to consume 100 calories; you can do it in the blink of an eye. Just eat one medium-size banana, one medium-to-large apple, or 1 ounce of American cheese. One cup of sweet tea or a cookie, and—calorically speaking—you might as well have skipped your bike ride altogether.
Please note that exercise is a critical component of the Gene Smart Anti Inflammatory Diet & Exercise Program, however its primary role is in reducing whole body inflammation and promoting healthy active aging by following a specific approach to exercise. For weight loss, its benefits are secondary to those of reducing every day calories.
Our Reducing Every Day Calories Principle Has Powerful Allies
The great news with the Gene Smart Program is that fewer every day calories does not necessarily mean less food, or going hungry. Each of the program’s proven diet & exercise principles provides strong allies, so you are not left to rely on your will power alone to defeat the powerful forces of your genes and our calorically excessive environment.
The single most important ally for reducing every day calories is the principle Increase Fiber, but each of the other priniciples - add omegas, increase polyphenols, and exercise to reduce inflammation also play a role, and together will help you lose the weight you want without taxing your willpower and leaving you feeling hungry and deprived.
Wellness vs. Weight Loss
You'll note that in contrast to reducing every day calories, the first three principles in the Gene Smart Anti Inflammatory Diet and Exercise Program are focused on ADDING the right foods to your diet that provide beneficial bioactives that work with your genes naturally to promote health and reduce whole body inflammation. We do not call Gene Smart Program a weight loss program because it is so much more! However, for many, losing weight is part of the process to improve health because excess fat is pro-inflammatory and increases risk of many diseases. Unlike fad diets, with the combination of Gene Smart principles, you will lose weight and keep it off - in our clinical study, participants lost on average 1 1/2 to 2 lbs. a week, which a safe rate to shed pounds and nearly three quarters maintained or continued to lose weight in a 10 week follow up.
Reducing Every Day Calories - Adjusting Your Goals
The Gene Smart Diet will kick-start your body’s adaptive stress response by reducing your every day calorie intake by 20 to 30 percent for the first 3 weeks. Depending how much weight you need to lose, you may stay in this first phase for a bit longer. Many of our study participants were in this phase for the full 8 weeks.
When you’re ready, you’ll increase your every day calorie intake so that it’s just 10 to 20 percent below where you started. You’ll stay at this level for another 2 weeks—or longer, again depending on your starting weight.
