Fat Loss 4 Idiots? What The Heck Is This?

I came across Fat Loss 4 Idiots a few months ago when a friend of mine lost 24lbs in three months. Upon quizzing her about her successful weight loss, she informed me that she had come across a diet called Fat Loss 4 Idiots. Naturally, I was intrigued and went ahead and bought a copy. The diet comes as an e-book and with diet-generator software, which we’ll come back to later on.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots attacks the problem of fat loss by implementing “Calorie shifting”. Essentially, the diet allows you to eat almost any food you like, as long as you rotate it with other foods frequently. The immediate advantage of this scheme is that you’ll never get bored of the diet, since you can eat various types of food pretty much frequently. One of the main reasons why diets fail is due to the inability of the dieter to stick to the diet. By allowing you to eat lots of different types of foods, adherence to the diet should be increased immensely.

Does the science hold up for Calorie shifting? Well, the only way to lose weight is to expend more calories than you consume. Calorie shifting is an extremely clever way of enabling you to do this without making it seem as if you are reducing calories. What this means is that Fat Loss 4 Idiots is implementing criteria required for any successful weight loss diet without you even realising it. Thumbs up for that.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots uses 11 day diet blocks. You diet for 11 days, then have a 3 day period during which you can eat whatever you want. This is perhaps the best part of the plan. It’s easy to diet for 11 days knowing you will have 3 days during which you can eat all those foods you’ve been craving. More importantly, breaking up diets with 3 day overfeeding periods such as this has a positive effect on metabolism. After time on a diet, your body will reduce your metabolism to compensate for the reduction in calories. At this point, you’ll see a slowing (or stall) in weight loss. The only way to get past this stall and resume weight loss is to increase food for a short period. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true (technically, circulating levels of the hormone leptin are being reduced to due negative feeback signals from the reduction in body fat mass, which in turn is causing a cascade of events initiated by the brain to reduce metabolic related hormones). Thus, the 3 day block is the main reason why we like Fat Loss 4 Idiots.

You’re allowed 4 meals per day on this plan, which is a nice number. Frequent feeding will help with satiety (hunger). The meals themselves should be high in protein, relatively low in carbs and fats. The ebook shows you how to choose suitable meals.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots comes with diet generator software. This is a tool that enables you to set up the Calorie shifting with foods of your choice. You plug in foods you’ve chosen based on the guidelines in the ebook, and the software generates the rotation scheme for you. This makes it extremely easy to setup the plan.

Now, the issues we have with Fat Loss 4 Idiots are twofold.

Firstly, there are no guidelines for exercise. Now, unless you are doing hours of exercise a day, your diet will have more of an influence on weight loss than exercise will. So it’s entirely possible to lose all the weight you want just by changing your diet. However, exercise can help speed up weight loss and help improve the composition of weight lost (i.e. exercise can help ensure that the weight you lose is just fat and not muscle). Fat Loss 4 Idiots skips this part of the diet game, which we think is an oversight. However, let’s go ahead and fix this right now by providing you some exercise guidelines you can incorporate into the diet.

Cardio: If you’ve never done exercise (or haven’t done it in a while) start with some cardiovascular exercise 2-3 times a week. 20-30 minutes on an exercise bike or brisk walking is fine. Gradually build this up until you are doing up to 45 minutes 5-6 times a week (or everyday if you really feel like it!)

Weight training: Everyone can benefit from some weight training, even women! Weight training will help ensure all the weight you lose from a diet is pure fat and no muscle. Training the full body, 2-3 times a week is plenty during the diet. Make sure each muscle group is worked for about 2-3 sets.

Fat Loss 4 idiots is setup so that you don’t need to do exercise to achieve the weight loss you are after, but we recommend you try at least some form of physical activity a few times per week.

The second issue we have with Fat Loss 4 Idiots is that there’s no information on how to come off the diet. After completing a successful diet, your body is primed to store fat again at an accelerated rate, and it’s sensible to plan how you are going to resume normal eating again. Well, let’s fix this right now! Our recommendations for ending Fat Loss 4 Idiots are to continue with the Calorie shifting plan you built using the diet generator software and ebook, but replace one of the diet meals with a regular meal of whatever you would like. So everyday, instead of eating 4 diet meals, have 3 diet meals and 1 regular meal. The regular meal can be any time during the day. Do this for the first week. On the second week, substitute another one of the diet meals for a regular meal. So in week 2, you’ll be eating 2 diet meals and 2 regular meals. From the third week onwards, eat 1 diet meal and 3 regular meals everyday. This slow build up of calories should help prevent the weight gain typically seen at the completion of a diet.

Conclusion

We like Fat Loss 4 Idiots a lot. The Calorie shifting concept is a neat way to implement a calorie deficit (which all diets need to work) without you having to fret about counting calories. The 3 day periods of normal eating help metabolism and adherence. We’ve fixed the two issue we have with the plan with the recommendations above (exercise and coming off the diet), leaving us with nothing bad to say. Head on over now to Fat Loss 4 Idiots and pick up a copy. While there should be no real reason you don’t like it, if that happens, you’re covered by an 8 week money back guarantee.

Click here to visit Fat Loss 4 Idiots.