The Disappearing Diet: How to Disappear in a Year
For those of you who have read my articles before, you likely know I’m not the biggest proponent of “diets” in general and don’t agree with the overly simplistic view that calories in equal calories out. Things have changed though. I have flip flopped and since come up with the most revolutionary diet of all time – The Disappearing Diet.
How does this amazing and incredible disappearing diet work?! Just follow every mainstream caloric deficit diet for roughly ONE YEAR! If we think of the body as a very simple machine only capable of first grade arithmetic, then we should disappear in roughly a year no problem.
I’m going to unveil all of my secrets using a 175 pound male, let’s call him Houdini, as proof of my revolutionary disappearing diet. We’re going to make this as SIMPLE as possible. So let’s assume that Houdini wants to disappear, and for simplicity sake, is made up ENTIRELY of fat (which of course is completely absurd, and we will get to that in a second). Everyone knows that one pound of fat equals 3500 calories, right?
The vast majority of fitness professionals will say “easy, you want to lose weight, just create a caloric deficit of approximately 500 calories a day,” which would theoretically lead to 1 pound of weight loss in 1 week. Seems simple and sustainable. Houdini’s got this.
So what happens to this huge fat ball, who sticks to his diet for 3 years and 19 weeks (175 weeks)? POOF! He should disappear, right? 500 calorie deficit per day, 3500 calories (one pound of fat per week), 175 weeks. Simple math.
The math is actually too simple here, and if you were to break down Houdini into the calories in calories out paradigm, he would actually disappear MUCH quicker. This is where I’m able to cut over a FULL TWO YEARS off of Houdini’s magical transformation.
No one has 100% body fat. It just so happens that an average adult male is comprised of 65% water, which you don’t need to “burn.” This means that Houdini is actually only 78.75 pounds of actual raw organic material. If he is an average male at say, 15% body fat (of total weight), his total fat is 26.25 pounds. Not too bad, Houdini! After a quick 6 months, he shouldn’t have any fat left at all.
But what is left? 52.5 pounds of muscles, bones, ligaments, tendons, organs. These are generally made up of proteins, which as most people know, are less “calorically dense” than fats. This is good news! Houdini’s protein mass will burn up even faster than his fat. Since protein is 4 calories per gram, and there are only 453.6 grams per pound, it actually only takes an 1814 calorie deficit to burn one pound of organic protein matter by this insanely over simplified view point of the human body. Maintaining the same 3500 calorie/week deficit, Houdini should be gone within a very short 27 weeks.
So when we take into account body composition (water vs protein vs fat), Houdini (and any 175 lb male) actually can disappear in 1 year, 1 week and 4 days.
But, wait…
No 175 pound man has ever disappeared after eating 500 calories under “maintenance” for shortly over one year? How can that be?!
Does someone want to explain why this logic fails and why you shouldn’t disappear after a year? We will explore how the body works in Part II, but for now I want to hear your expert opinions.
Chime in the comments below, write into my email at [email protected], or post to my Instagram, Twitter or Facebook with your suggestions of how YOU think weight loss actually works. I’ll include a lot of responses in discussion this in the next post.
Until then, I leave you with this…