Chris Powell's Choose More, Lose More for Life by Chris Powell Page B

carbs, so it starts ripping through body fat. That’s one way carb-cycling maximizes weight loss!
    I’ve developed a carb-cycling program that’s doable for nearly everyone and consistent at getting amazing results. It will help you achieve your weight-loss and fitness goals incredibly quickly without requiring a huge amount of effort. You can use this approach to drop as many pounds as you wish, and when you stick with it, you’ll be able to maintain your ideal weight and stay in excellent shape
for the rest of your life
!
    Before we get into the nitty-gritty of my system, here’s a little background info that’ll help you understand your weight and make it easier for you to get hold of the carb-cycling process.
Burn Baby Burn
    If you’re out to shrink your waistline (and any other measurement!), you want to burn fat as fast as you safely can. In order to prime your body to start losing weight and keep on losing weight, you’ve got to follow three rules. They may surprise you:
    Rule 1: Eat more carbs and eat more often.
    Rule 2: Develop shapely muscles.
    Rule 3: Move your muscles.
    Are you kidding me, Chris? More meals, more carbs, and more muscle—that can’t make me skinnier! But in fact, feeding your body
in the right way
, together with growing and shaping your muscles, will power up your metabolism—and keep it powered up—so it blazes right through your fat. It’s textbook physiology! I’ll lay it all out for you a little later in this chapter.
The Three Fires
    First, let’s make sure you understand how your metabolism works. I covered the details in my first book,
Choose to Lose
, so you probably already know that the term
metabolism
refers to the way your body uses energy to power your organs and muscles. That energy is measured in units called calories. Where does all that energy go? Your metabolism burns calories for three purposes:
       
Digestion:
You probably don’t realize it, but your body burns calories when it digests and absorbs the food you eat. Around 10 to 15 percentof the calories you use every day gets eaten up here. The
quantity and quality
of those calories lay the hormonal foundation of weight loss.
       
Being (Resting Metabolic Rate):
The calories that don’t get burned up during digestion get used by your organs: your beating heart, your breathing diaphragm, your filtering liver, and all the others. When you’re not moving, your
resting muscles
use calories as they repair and remodel themselves. The basic functioning of your body accounts for 60 to 75 percent of the calories you burn daily.
       
Movement:
When you move, putting your muscles to work, they need a lot of fuel—20 to 35 percent of the calories you use. That’s just for
ordinary motion
: Endurance athletes burn up to 50 percent of their calories to power their muscles!

    That’s the
how
of calorie-burning; now here’s the
how much
. The number of calories you burn each day varies according to how active you are. If you follow the same routine every day, eating and moving around (or not) in pretty much the same ways, you’ll burn roughly the same number of calories every day. The proportion of calories used by each of your body’s three energy users—digestion, being (resting metabolic rate), and movement—will also stay pretty constant.
    So how many calories are we talking about? That depends on four things: your age, your weight, your height, and your gender. All other things being equal, a bigger body needs more calories than a smaller one does, and a younger body needs more calories than an older body does. Take a look at the chart on the opposite page to see your estimated baseline calorie usage. It shows how many calories a body your size and age typically burns in a day with light movement.
Figuring Out Your Figure
    All these numbers are swell, but you’re reading this book because you want to slim down, not because you want to study science. Let’s put the facts and figures together into tools