Q: My husband has been really discouraged because he has been trying to lose weight for almost a year now. In the winter he began training for a marathon and finally started to lose some, but then got injured at work and couldn't walk (other than with crutches) for three months. He has still been dieting and has tried everything. He has cut his calories down to 1600 hundred a day, roughly and is gaining weight. He wad been steady at 195 for the past year or so and is now at 215. He is about to give up, if something doesn't work. Allof his weight is in his belly. Can you give me some ideas to help him. Also, could lack of sleep prevent you from losing weight-we average 5-6 hours a night.
Thanks

A: Sorry to hear about your husband's troubles, but I think I can help. From what you said he has three things going against him:

1) Lack of sleep. You are completely right to suspect that only 5-6 hours of sleep a day is hurting him. That's simply not enough to maintain optimal function for most people, let alone conducive to losing extra fat. 8 hours a day is optimal, 7 hours is acceptable. 5-6 hours once in awhile is fine, but if 5-6 hours is the norm then over long time it will have all sorts of adverse affects on your husband's body, including making it much more difficult to lose fat.

2) Too few calories. While it is certainly true that losing fat and weight requires cutting calories, it can become counter-productive if taken to extreme. 1600 calories for a 200-pound man is starting to push this limit. What happens when the body gets too few calories is it goes into what's called "starvation mode" -- this means the body will try to eliminate what it perceives as unnecessary calorie expenditure and hang on to what it perceives as vital to survival. Unfortunately for your husband, from body's perspective fat is a lot more vital than muscle, so it tries to hang on to all the fat it can while sacrificing muscle for energy. This makes your husband's situation that much worse because his muscle is his single best natural fat-burner. So when his body destroys muscle for energy it means in the future it will have even less fat-burning potential. This results in a vicious cycle: too few calories consumed lead the body to hang on to fat and to burn muscle which leads to lack of progress in fat loss (or even outright fat gain like what's happening with your husband) which leads the person to conclude that he or she should eat even fewer calories which starts the cycle all over.

For your husband's situation, since he does a lot of cardio training (such as preparing and running marathons) he should not drop below 2000 calories per day and probably, once he is on a good exercise program, should be able to eat 2500 calories or so and still lose fat. Which brings me to the third thing he's probably doing wrong...

3) It sounds like your husband is trying to lose the fat via doing a lot of cardio and only cardio. Cardio is similar to eating too few calories -- it's definitely good in moderation but when taken to extreme can become counter-productive for most people. There is nothing inherently wrong with training for and running marathons, but by itself it's not an effective way to lose weight. Heavy whole-body resistance training is a much more effective way to burn fat and keep it off. Furthermore, by eating so few calories and getting so little sleep your husband is simply not providing enough energy and rest time for his body to support marathon-level cardio efforts.

So here's my advice for your husband:

1) Get at least 7 hours of sleep daily. It doesn't even have to be all at night -- an hour-long nap and a six-hour long night sleep is just as good. But 5-6 hours a day is just not enough for most people to function optimally and losing fat does require him to function optimally.

2) Increase his calories to at least 2000 daily. Read through my Diet and Nutrition article to learn how to put together a good diet. You can use http://www.mikesfitness.com/content/fat-loss-diet-1900-calories as a starting point for your husband and then customize it to his tastes as the article suggests (i.e. adding/substituting veggies, herbs, and spices). Eventually your husband should be able to consume even more -- something like http://www.mikesfitness.com/content/fat-loss-diet-2400-calories -- while still losing fat. Note that it's very likely that his change to a 2000-calorie diet will result in a few extra pounds initially. This is to be expected and is not a problem (most of it will be new water weight) -- he just needs to tough it out until his body adjusts to the new, higher calorie level. In the long run a balanced diet and reasonable amount of calories will help him lose fat much much more effectively than a low-calorie diet.

3) Assuming he is fully recovered from his injury he needs to change his training program to include Heavy whole-body weight training. For example, this is a good simple starter program: http://www.mikesfitness.com/content/exercise-program-weights-low-volume-... . He will need to read the article I linked carefully to learn how to select appropriate weight for his exercises (essentially, select such weight that he is pushed to his physical limit or close to it on every set, while maintaining perfect exercise form). Using light weights won't have much effect and using too much weight or using bad form (such as swinging the weight up) will only result in new injuries.

He doesn't need to give up his cardio or even marathon training but he should not overdo it to the point of injuries. My rule of thumb for cardio when doing it in conjunction with heavy weight training (as he should be doing) is to keep it under two hours per week total. That still leaves his with four 30-minute cardio sessions, for example. Again, this is conditional on his recovery from his injury -- that should be the priority and he should not dive into weight training or cardio training until his doctor clears him.

Hopefully this will help your husband. Assuming he is now injury-free and follows my advice about more sleep, getting 2000+ daily calories through a protein-rich balanced diet, and heavy whole-body weight training I would expect him to take 2-4 weeks to adjust to the new diet and program during which he might gain a couple of pounds (due to more calories) and after that start to steadily lose fat and likely build new muscle at the same time. Once that fat-loss process is under way and especially if he still does heavy cardio he should continue to slowly increase calories till he gets to 2500 calories per day or so. Ultimately he should aim for weight loss pace of about one pound per week -- losing weight faster than that is likely to be counter-productive in the long run and he should increase his calories if he finds himself losing weight faster than that. Best of luck to him and you!