The new ME diet: why the different.

Jade Teta ND, CSCS
Since the release of The New ME Diet, a lot of people have been asking us how this book is different from other diet and health books.  They also wonder about the subtitle, Eat More, Workout Less and Actually Lose While You Rest. It may sound like marketing hype, but the science actually supports our contention that you can actually consume more food, spend less time in the gym and reprogram your metabolism so that you burn fat more efficiently even when your not working out.
Fat Loss vs. Weight Loss
One of the key differences of the diet is that it focuses on fat loss, not weight loss. It is important to understand you may be burning calories and losing weight, but you may or may not be burning or losing fat. Ironically, the things you do for weight loss (i.e., eat less and exercise more) can work against your fat burning physiology.  Consider the way elite sprinters look vs. elite long distance runners.  What is obvious to most people when they watch professional track and field events is how much more muscular sprinters are when compared to long distance runners.  What is less understood is that sprinters usually have less body fat as well. That is where most people become a little confused. They are confused because they usually understand long distance athletes like marathon runners burn much greater amounts of calories. Keep in mind that long distance runners exercise for hours when training for and engaging in their sport.  Sprinters on the other hand exercise in short bursts lasting seconds to minutes and then have long periods of time where they rest and recover before they repeat. The calorie comparison is not even close. So, the idea that you can exercise less and still develop a lean muscular physique is something that is revealed in the example of these two athletes.
Caloric weight loss vs hormonal fat loss
The question than becomes why?  If it is not calories that are making the sprinters more muscular and leaner, then what is it? It is hormones. Where “weight loss exercise” is about burning calories, “fat loss exercise” is about changing hormones. When I say hormones, most people will think of the sex steroids including estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.  But, there are other hormones that impact hunger (ghrelin, leptin, CCK), brain chemistry and mood (serotonin, dopamine), as well as fat storage (insulin, glucagon, adrenaline, human growth hormone). The fact that hormones impact fat storage is easily demonstrated by looking at the fat distribution of men vs. women.  Women store their body fat in hips, thighs, and butt while men store fat in the middle.  Hormones determine whether you burn mostly sugar or fat and where on the body that fat may be burned (belly vs butt).
Consider a doughnut and a chicken breast. Which has more calories?  A Dunkin Doughnut Kruller and a chicken breast with the skin on each have 250 calories.  The doughnut is high in fat and sugar and very low in protein.  The chicken breast is high protein, has moderate fat, and very little sugar. If you eat a doughnut for breakfast vs a chicken breast which is going to keep you full, balanced in energy and free from cravings before lunch? The chicken will win every time.  Not because of calories, but because for the hormonal signal induced by the protein/carb/fat ratio present in each food. Another interesting thing to consider; most people can easily eat  5, 6 or more doughnuts.  On the other hand, it is very difficult to overeat chicken breast. Most people would be lucky to get down two.
To illustrate further how powerful hormones are consider 2 meals.  Meal 1: 2 cups Kashi Go Lean Cereal, Skim Milk, and a large glass of OJ.  Meal 2: 8 egg white omelet stuffed with 1 cup each of mushrooms, spinach, tomato. 1 large apple and a cup of blueberries on the side. Many people would be surprised to know meal 1 has more calories. But, it is obvious meal 2 contains much more food. Before you think we are simply reverting back to talking about calories, consider what meal 2 does. The large volume of food causes the food transit to slow, increases the stretch of the stomach (called gastric distention) and leads to a balance of hunger hormones.  This results in the feeling of being full and satisfied much earlier in the meal.  In addition, the after effects of the meal result in a balanced insulin response (decreased fat storage) and enhanced glucagon response (enhanced fat burning).  This is due to the amount of fiber and protein in meal 2 relative to the sugar/starch in the meal.
Another key distinction of weight loss compared to  fat loss is the impact on shape and tone of the body.  If you play the weight loss game, you will shrink in size, but remain the same shape.  If you are an apple shape, you will end up being a smaller apple shape. Likewise, many people who focus on weight loss lose muscle making their bodies saggy and soft.  It is healthy to lose the weight if you are overweight, but it is not fat loss.  Fat loss is not only healthier, but only fat loss results in the body changing its contour an increasing its tone. Eating meals like meal 1, may be considered “healthy” but they will do little to help you burn fat.
A healthy diet does not equal a fat loss diet
There are plenty of healthy foods that will not aid fat loss.  Beans, whole grains, milk, nuts and seeds, avocado, etc.  These are all very healthy foods, but they don’t aid fat loss. This is why many people struggle with body transformation.  Because they are getting advice from doctors, nutritionists, and personal trainers who do not get the distinction of weight loss vs. fat loss or a healthy diet vs. a fat loss diet.
Similarly, healthy exercise does not equal fat loss exercise.  Aerobic exercise is certainly healthy for you, it just is not ideal for fat loss.  Aerobic exercise results in both the loss of fat AND muscle. In time, this results in a less efficient metabolism. This is why runners who get injured or can no longer keep up the mileage will often develop soft and saggy bodies. Contrast that with runners who engage in weight training and other more intense activities.  In the later scenario, they are able to stay leaner and maintain more muscle mass. Just because an exercise is healthy does not mean it will optimize fat loss.
Individual approach
Finally, each person is as different on the inside chemically as they are on the outside physically. There is no one size fits all approach that will work for fat loss.  This is the key difference between The New ME Diet and other programs. Any diet book that attempts to fit its participants to a protocol or standard “start to finish process” will work for some, but leave most disappointed. The more sound approach is to understand your unique metabolism, start out with a blueprint, and then use your own biochemical reactions to help you find the unique diet suited to you.
In The New ME Diet, we do this by first stratifying you into your unique burner type. You take the metabolic questionnaire in the book and it helps give you a general idea about your hormonal balance.  It then assigns a diet based on burner type: sugar burner, muscle burner, and mixed burner.  This, however, is just the beginning of the program.  Obviously, it is impossible to stratify all people into three groups.  Once you know your burner type, you learn how to monitor your biofeedback tools of hunger, energy, and cravings to adjust the diet to the perfect formula for you.  We call this your “Metabolic Effect” or ME and it is different for everyone. Hence the acronym “ME”.
Individual fitness
Like the diet, exercise cannot be one size fits all either. There is certainly a more efficient way to do things as illustrated by the sprinter vs. marathon runner example.  However, treating everyone as if they are a teenager (they usually respond to any change in diet or exercise), athlete, or fit celebrity will not work for most people. Teens, athletes, and most celebrities usually have “highly functioning metabolisms” and/or have an internal motivation for staying healthy and fit looking. Their livelihood depends on it. High intensity programs built to simply work people into exhaustion or improve athletic performance usually don’t work for the average fat loss seeker.
In order to use the high intensity principles that burn fat, yet keep it safe and individualized, The New ME Diet, uses rest-based training.  This is a concept we developed for Metabolic Effect Inc. It entails individuals working to their maximum comfort level, then resting for as long as needed and doing it again.  In this way, participants rest whenever they need to, within a set or between sets.  This approach changes the game and takes the focus off of sets and reps and instead on the total volume of exercise and individual can accomplish in a given time. The language we like to use is “push until you can’t, then rest until you can”. This makes the workouts employed in the book universally scalable for all fitness levels and physical abilities. One additional benefit is the workouts only require a set of dumbbells and a small area of floor space. No fancy equipment or gym membership is necessary.
The goals of all ME workouts are to generate the appropriate “metabolic after-burn effect”. This effect is hormonally driven. The workouts are designed to create the proper response by focusing in on what we call the “Bs and Hs”. These are Breathless, Burning, Heavy, and Heat.  Each of these parameters deliver a hormonal advantage to the exerciser.
Pushing yourself to the point of becoming breathless and where you are unable to talk and remaining there until you have to rest has benefits.  It is correlated with the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline.  These two hormones are the trigger for creating the metabolic effect or after-burn.  Without them, the effect cant happen.
Burning is related to lactic acid. Lactate has often been thought of as a waste product. However, it is now being viewed by researchers as a hormone and it is highly correlated with the release of  human growth hormone a key muscle building and fat burning hormone.
Heavy means lifting heavy weights that force the body to strain.  This is correlated with the release of testosterone and IL-15 two fat burning and muscle building hormones for men and women.  Finally is the Heat component.  This is related to adrenaline and noradrenaline release and gives key insight into how many fat calories the workout is consuming.
Final Thoughts
The New ME Diet is a lifestyle system that allows the use of nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle factors to create the proper hormonal balance for sustained fat loss. Weight loss does not equal fat loss. The tools for weight loss, eating less and exercising more, are different than the tools for fat loss. Fat loss involves eating more food more often, remember the 8 egg white omelet?  It also involves exercising in a way that stimulates fat burning at rest, not just during exercise.  In other words, fat loss exercise is about working smarter not longer. Similar to a weight loss diet and exercise approach, a healthy diet or healthy exercise habits are not the same as fat loss diet and exercise.  Finally, any approach to fat loss must take into account the unique genetic, metabolic and psychological sensitivities of the person. The New ME Diet changes the weight loss approach to diet and exercise into metabolically charged fat loss leading to a more sustainable and significant body change.
To learn more about the book or get involved in this new fat loss system check it out on amazon and/or get involved in out 10-week fat loss acceleration program.
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