Why “Just Eat Less and Exercise More” Doesn’t Work For People Trapped in the Standard American Diet

By Brian Cates

Recently Matt Walsh got himself some higher-than-usual attention by discussing how many fat people out there are simply deluding themselves about the science of fat loss.

Why, to hear Matt tell it, we have a current on-going severe obesity crisis in this country because fat people make the key mistake of rejecting the incontrovertible science of weight loss:

Now, I have to be careful here…because Matt is right…but he’s also wrong.

I’m speaking from both the science aspect and personal experience.

“Eat less, exercise more!” in a short term paradigm, will cause you to lose some weight.

I know this because I followed that ‘wisdom’ for 34 years.

Initially, each time, I would indeed lose some weight when I cut the daily amount of calories [energy] I was taking into my body, and increased the amount of physical activity my body engaged in daily.

But here’s the missing piece of the puzzle. Here’s what Matt doesn’t know about.

People didn’t get fat and morbidly obese in the first place because they were eating a healthy diet of real food.

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What happened was, they were eating the awful Standard American Diet [SAD], which left their bodies addicted to wheat/grains and sugars and loaded with toxins.

Until the ROOT of the problem that CAUSED the person to become obese in the first place – THE DAILY DIET – is fixed, any ‘solution’ is only going to be temporary.

Let’s say you were eating 100% of the SAD, full of ‘healthy’ wheat bread and other grains. Now you want to lose weight, right? And what are you told by well meaning people?

Take your 100% daily SAD and CUT some of it off. Like, instead of 100%, now you’re going to be eating only 75% of the SAD every day. While increasing your physical activity.

Should work right?

Well…not exactly.

Here’s what happens to you when you try that, just cutting back on how much of the SAD you eat while stepping up your physical activity:

When an addict CUTS BACK on their addiction, their cravings skyrocket. Your body is going to INSTANTLY notice you’re not giving it the amount of wheat or sugar it was previously used to.

And it’s going to protest this unwelcome development. LOUDLY.

You didn’t quit cold turkey. You just CUT BACK on how much of the addictive substances you eat every day. But here’s the problem:

The heavily modified wheat and sugars are **designed** to be incredible opiates that have chemicals in them that goes straight to your brain and demands you KEEP EATING MORE WHEAT AND SUGAR as they tirelessly stimulate your hunger response.

And here’s the really cruel thing: it doesn’t matter how much wheat with gluten/gliadin in it you eat every day. You can reduce it from 4 slices of wheat bread to only two; the gliadin you are still eating is gonna go straight to your brain and start SCREAMING for you to keep eating, telling you that you are not full and you ‘need’ more food.

You are STILL eating incredibly addictive substances every damn day. That are messing with your brain.

So the first result from scaling back on the SAD is you will indeed FEEL like you are hungry all the time and you want to eat MORE than you were eating before. Because of the chemicals from the Wheat and Sugar you’re still eating every day playing havoc in your brain. Your body will be VERY UNHAPPY you’ve scaled back your consumption of wheat, sugar and seed oil fake food products and will try to get you to go back to what it considers the ‘normal’ amount.

Then there’s the second thing that happens. You’re eating less and stepping up your physical activity. When you take in less energy in the form of food, your metabolism starts slowing down. So your daily energy level begins to drop. But you are stepping UP your energy expenditure daily.

What happens as the weeks roll by is that you end up increasingly hungry for more wheat and sugar products while your energy level keeps dragging.

You can only fight your body for so long, with its the intense cravings and low energy level.

34 years I ran on the hamster wheel of ‘just eat less and exercise more’.

But I was eating the SAD, see. I was told all these GMO wheat whole grains were ‘healthy’ and ‘good’ for me. I was still eating around 150-200 grams of carbs a day, because I was told that’s where my energy came from, and to work out I needed to be eating a lot of carbs to ‘power’ my workouts.

After a few months of being hungry all the time and when your energy gets so low you can’t even make yourself go to the gym any more….SURPRISE! You quit.

So as long as you are trying to do this while following the Standard American Diet chock full of GMO Wheat, Corn, Sugars, Seed Oils and various chemicals – which is to say, as long as your trying to do this while still eating FAKE FOOD every day – you will never have long term success.

You are sabotaging yourself by eating something that causes intense hunger and cravings at the same time your body is running on an energy deficit and sooner or later you’re going to crash and burn.

I wish somebody had sat me down when I was 24 and explained to me that to lose the weight and keep it off, I was going to have to abandon the SAD of Fake Food and start eating real food every day. Food as close as possible to how God invented it.

The heavily altered wheat they put in almost everything these days is an opiate. High Fructose Corn Syrup and other sugars are also addictive. Seed oils are toxic sludge.

Just ‘cutting back’ on how many calories of that Fake Frankenfood sludge you eat/drink every day and ‘burning calories by exercising’ is not addressing the real causes of the obesity you’re trying to deal with.

This is what people have been trying to explain to Matt Walsh, without much success.

The reason many people get obese in the first place is because they don’t even know their brain has been conditioned by Big Corporation Fake Food products stuffed to the gills with various forms of wheat, sugar and seed oils that makes them crave more and more fake food.

Once you abandon the fake food full of the wheat and the Gliadin in it, the cravings to CONSTANTLY EAT begin go away.

Thin people who were never fat telling fat people their Frankenfood cravings are an imaginary phenomenon and the urge to eat more Frankenfood is just a lack of willpower and they just need to ‘try harder’ and ‘stop denying the science!’ is asinine.

We need a real food reformation in this country, and a lot of people are going to discover their obesity problem solves itself when they stop eating the Frakenfood and return to how our ancestors ate.

So all those well meaning folks out there who were never morbidly obese and think just encouraging fat people to ‘eat less, exercise more!’ is ‘science’?

You need to consider this:

The last thing that very a overweight person trapped by an insidious addiction to the SAD’s Frankenfood needs to hear as they struggle with their constant hunger and low energy issues is ‘just eat less and exercise more!’

Here’s what that translates to in the real world to morbidly obese person addicted to the SAD’s Frankenfood:

“HEY FATSO! You know what you need to do to get down to a healthy weight? You need to EAT LESS every day so you are even MORE hungry all the time than you are now! Then you need to drag your fat ass to the gym as your metabolism slows down and make yourself even more tired by working out! That’s what the science says, and if you aren’t willing to follow the science, that means you’re just a lazy slob with no willpower!”

Is It REALLY Their Own Fault They Got Fat?

Look, many people didn’t know any better at the time the FDA came out with that very ‘helpful’ Food Pyramid in the early 1990s.

You remember that Food Pyramid, right? The one that gave everyone the ‘expert advice’ about ‘6-11 servings of healthy whole grains per day’?

Yeah, that one.

‘Bread. Cereal, Rice, Pasta Group’ = three out of four made from wheat. That’s going to be immediately converted to glucose when it hits your stomach and then spikes your blood sugar.

[6-11 daily servings of ‘healthy whole grains’ that we now know were comprised of genetically modified wheat full of gluten and gliadin!]

Ever notice how in the 1990s, Americans started blowing up like blimps trying to follow the FDA’s ‘expert nutrition guidelines’? And things have only gotten progressively worse since then? Why, do think, did that happen?

I want to stress: just cutting daily caloric intake on the SAD is setting yourself up for self-sabotage. Your cravings will immediately get stronger because you’re still eating the wheat/sugar/seed oils every day, you’re only eating LESS of them. Which doesn’t stop the hunger cravings; in fact, scaling back will increase those cravings. While your daily energy level – probably not that high to begin with – will also start to drop, just as you commit yourself to a new exercise routine several times a week.

Here’s Dr. Benjamin Bikman with one of the best brief explanations as to why this ‘eat less and exercise more!’ advice for permanent weight loss is so very bad:

So the conventional solution to losing weight and keeping it off for a person trapped in the SAD is no real solution at all. It is, in fact, a recipe for repetitive self-sabotage.

Exercise speeds up the weight loss **once you’ve fixed the diet issues**.

If you’re still eating the same awful, terrible, rotten, no good SAD Frankenfood you were eating before, the food that got you fat in the first place, you are just eating LESS OF IT, you are making a major error. You are setting yourself up for eventual failure.

This is why abandoning the SAD for good for a consistent daily diet of Real Food is the first necessary step to permanent weight loss.

When you switch from eating the SAD to a Real Food Diet, from Frankenfood that is nutritionally empty to real, nutrient-dense food, the urge to constantly eat every 2-3 hours will go away. Since you won’t be ingesting wheat and sugar products, over a period of about 14 days [for most people], those constant cravings ‘magically’ disappear.

No Ketosis = No Sustained Body Fat Reduction

A lot of people honestly and truly believe that while they’re eating well North of 200 grams of carbs every day, they are ‘burning body fat’ by exercising at the gym.

And this is not true. Unless they’re working at very intense levels like an Olympic athlete.

You are not, in fact, burning any of your stored body fat if are eating 200+ grams of carbs daily. All you are burning in the gym are the carbs you ate that day.

The wheat bread, oatmeal and orange juice from your breakfast, the artisan bread from your lunch sandwich, and the ‘healthy’ corn/wheat chips you had with the sandwich, by the time you get to the gym in the late afternoon and start working out, your digestive system is already working on breaking down the 200 grams of carbs you took in that day for its energy.

No matter how intensely you exercise in that gym session, why would your body even need to LOOK AT its stored fat when you’ve already fed it 200 grams of its PREFERRED ENERGY SOURCE already?

Understand this: your crafty body is not even gonna LOOK AT using its precious stored body fat for its daily fuel until you MAKE it start looking at that stored fat.

Until you do that, your body will ALWAYS be looking FIRST for its daily energy in one specific place before it will reluctantly begin to look elsewhere.

What is that one place the body will ALWAYS look to first for its daily energy needs?

It’s your stomach and liver. Your body is gonna check every day, stick its head into the stomach and liver and go “HEY, ANY CARBS/GLUCOSE IN HERE?! I SURE HOPE THERE ARE SOME CARBS/GLUCOSE IN HERE!”

Only when it DOESN’T find enough carbs in the stomach and liver to power itself through the day is your body going to VERY RELUCTANTLY turn itself from looking for newly ingested carbs in your digestive system to looking at your stored body fat.

And again I want to stress this. Your body is designed to avoid burning its precious stored body fat. You have to ‘help’ and ‘convince’ your body to begin burning up all that stored fat for its fuel.

Despite what some people may have told you, convincing your body to make the transition from burning daily carbs to burning stored fat does not involve long sessions of physical exercise.

So how do you pull off this arcane act of sorcerous warlockery? How do you ‘talk’ your body into doing what it prefers NOT to do; start utilizing stored body fat for fuel?

You cut your daily carb intake to less than 30 grams a day. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

When you’ve spent decades eating the SAD, like I did? The transition from eating 200+ grams of carbs [where most of that is from fake food wheat/sugar products] to under 30 can be rough. I won’t lie to you. For ten days as I was breaking my wheat/sugar addiction there were intense cravings…and then suddenly, they were gone.

Note this wasn’t me just cutting back on how much of the SAD I was eating every day. This was me switching from the SAD to the Real Food diet. Which by necessity entailed me no longer buying any Frankenfood with wheat, sugar, seed oils or chemicals in it.

But to get your body to make that crucial transition from burning daily eaten carbs for its energy, to burning stored body fat instead? You MUST do this. You MUST make your body change where it draws its daily energy from.

When a fat person tells you they DID try eating less and exercising more, they tried it repeatedly and couldn’t sustain it, are you really helping by claiming they are ‘denying the science’, and this is the root of their problem? Just try it again and really mean it this time?

34 years I tried just eating less of the SAD and exercising more. Not until I ditched the SAD for good and switched to the Real Food diet and put my body regularly into the ketosis state of burning my body fat for energy by limiting daily carb intake did the pounds start to melt off.

And since I’m never going back to the SAD way of eating, I can freely say that this weight loss is permanent. I’ve gone from 345 pounds in June of last year to 275; and I won’t be stopping until I hit my goal weight of 200 pounds.

Trying to force your body to lose fat while still eating the SAD is why so many people fail in the long run. Scaling back on how much of the SAD fake food you every day while hitting the gym multiple times a week is not weight loss ‘science’ no matter how many people confidently assure you it is.

These people mean well. They’re just not seeing the whole picture.