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You know the basic 10x rules: Up to (but no more than) 10 calories per 1 gram of protein, plus all the greens you can eat.

Also important:  In addition to being 10x, food items should be low carbohydrate for your lowest blood insulin level.  Carbohydrates (absorbed sugars) stimulate insulin secretion into your bloodstream.  High insulin levels STOP fat burning.  Keeping absorbed carbs low keeps your insulin level low, allowing you to burn (and lose) your stored fat.  Sustained low insulin levels tell your body to mobilize and burn stored fat for energy.  Fiber carbohydrates are not absorbed by your intestines, so fiber carbs never enter your bloodstream, and don’t elevate insulin levels.  So, on the Nutrition Facts label, carbs that are fiber don’t count, because they’re not absorbed.  Absorbed carbohydrates on the Nutrition Facts label equals “net carbohydrates,” and is actually more meaningful than total carbohydrates.  Net carbs = Total carbs MINUS Fiber (grams total carbohydrates minus grams of  fiber).  Net carbs should be minimized to lose weight, no more than 30-40 grams/day.

You just learned an important metabolic lesson: INSULIN is the hormone chiefly responsible for “energy partitioning,” which means insulin tells your body whether to burn fat for energy or carbohydrates (sugar) for energy.  If sugar (carbs) are available, your body will burn these, and hunger for more in 30-60 minutes when the carbs are gone.  If sugar (carbs) are NOT available, your body will burn fat to meet its energy needs.  Burning fat is what you absolutely need to do, so KEEP YOUR NET CARBOHYDRATE INTAKE AS LOW AS POSSIBLE.

It’s our job to help you accomplish this in a world that surrounds you with bread and immerses you in sugar.  Thankfully, food science has introduced an entirely new category of SUPER HEALTHY FAT LOSS choices.  These new items have flavor and texture like familiar carbs so cravings are satisfied, but because they substitute fiber for absorbable carbs, your body won’t absorb them, your insulin stays low, and you continue mobilizing fat.  YES, you got that right: you may eat and enjoy carbs without actually absorbing them, IF you understand the nutrition facts label and choose correctly.  Marathon runners, cyclists, and other professional competitors call these “carbohydrate crutches.” Although their use is not strongly encouraged, when you need them, here are some of our favorites (purchase online if not in your grocers):

 

Among western populations in affluent society, losing excess weight for a healthy, lean, natural body composition requires greater change in mental process than in physical process.  Change in thinking drives changed action.  Changed actions, repeated over time, become changed habits.  Your changed habits, over time, change your body weight and maintain it at a healthier leaner level.  Your enjoyment of the new lighter you, the more mobile active you, the you that enjoys your own body, further drives your healthier 10x eating habits.

How does 10x initiate changed thinking about food?  SIMPLE, but at the same time COMPLEX.  By comprehensively addressing:

1. Facts of human behavior

2. Facts of human metabolism, and

3. Facts of modern society responsible for our epidemic weight problem.

We’ll consider now changes in behavior (attitude, psychology) for10x success.  10x diet program success is defined as you losing all of your excess weight, or as much weight as you want to lose, and maintaining your new reduced weight over time.  You must want to lose weight, and you must understand these facts.  Understanding WHY helps you implement change.  The success of 10x depends on what you do, but you’ll follow 10x better if you realize how and why it works.  If you know how and why you’re carrying excess weight in the first place, we at 10x believe this knowledge helps you change habits and overcome forces promoting obesity, to lose your extra weight, and to keep it off.

The most basic fact of human behavior behind the 10x diet is this:

• Hunger and sensory experiences (taste and smell) drive food-seeking behavior and food selection.  Join me in your mind on a trip back in time, before antiquity, back to the time of early ancestral man and woman.  Like many animals, human beings evolved as hunter-gatherers, both hunting for living prey to eat and gathering edible fruit, vegetables, seeds, and grain from the earth.  Nature provides this food in variable measure, but work is required to find it and to secure it for consumption.  It’s the impulse of hunger that drives hunting and gathering.  Historically, our survival depended on hunger sensations.   Hunger sensations developed as an adaptive characteristic.  Without hunger, we would not seek food and would starve.
• Taste and smell are also adaptive sensations.  We enjoy the smell of good food but avoid rancid decomposing organic matter.  Our tongue has taste buds specifically developed for the enjoyment of sweets and salt, and to warn us of sour and bitter food, like poisonous plants or berries.  These buds developed over millennia and drive us to consume nutritious high-energy foods (rich in protein and calories) but avoid food that would sicken us (rotting vegetable matter and/or flesh).

Our brain strongly responds to hunger, smell, and taste as survival imperatives.  The drive to seek and consume food is powerfully built into the fabric of our being.  Constant physical exertion burns calories, and in early times was also a survival mandate: to secure shelter, food, and water, and to avoid becoming prey.  This was the world for hundreds of millennia.  Our bodies evolved in that world and for that world, and because evolution happens over millions of years, the blueprint for our bodies remains unchanged.

However, our world has drastically changed!!  Although our physical activity has diminished, the greatest change has been an abundance of food in our existence.  Food is plentiful in time and place, available everywhere at all times.  We don’t work hard to hunt or gather food.  Agriculture is advanced and provides massive quantities of carbohydrates that we seek and pleasurably consume, but that our bodies cannot handle.  Our metabolism continues storing the excess as body fat to help us survive drought and famine, but there is no drought or famine limiting modern food supplies.  Just more food at the next snack, the next meal, the next business meeting, the next traffic light, or the next freeway exit.  Producers and purveyors profit from production, sales, and marketing high carbohydrate foods like baked goods, cereals, pasta, and sweets.  Corporate profit depends on your consumption.  Like tobacco companies not advertising harmful effects, food producers and purveyors only want you to buy and eat more and are not responsible for your health.

Our problem today is the OPPOSITE of our ancient ancestral problem.    Starvation is no longer a threat.  Their survival depended on securing sufficient nutrition which was sparse in their surroundings.  In contemporary society, our metabolism is maladaptive, storing every extra calorie we consume.  Our challenge is to avoid food that’s constantly in front of us, and to choose carefully what we consume.  Bypassing or discarding extra food is far better than consuming it and storing it in our body as burdensome extra weight that diminishes fitness and mobility, that makes us look bad, that burdens our bones and joints, that keeps us sedentary, and that offers NO survival advantage.  Our modern environment guarantees food availability and safety.  Clearly, to lose weight, our inherited food-seeking behavior must be controlled and adapted to our environment of profuse abundance.

The good news: food producers and marketers control the availability of food, but YOU control your behavior and your consumption.  You have the power to say NO, to avoid food, to walk away from food, to select your food, and to escape or discard the excess rather than consuming more and forcing your body to store excess calories as heavy, harmful fat.  Because we’re social eaters, this requires that you NOT eat socially, that you be “contrarian” among friends and family to some degree, and that you not “follow the crowd” when the crowd is eating.

10x diet program adapts your pre-historic metabolic machinery to the modern world by changing behavior from inherited food-seeking patterns to food avoidance and purposeful food selection.  You must embrace this change.  Avoiding and limiting food intake is the modern imperative, the effort you must engage in, and the challenge 10x helps you successfully overcome.  Choosing 10x in your shopping cart, in the restaurant, at your lunch break, at social and professional events, everywhere all the time is easier than you think and supports your success.  It’s not a sacrifice, it’s correct and proper for your body.  If you’re overweight and don’t enjoy your body, you’re sacrificing your own health and well-being, but for what?  The more you learn about 10x diet, the easier your success will be, and the change in your body and overall health will be totally worth it!! see also treatment for overweight