Diets Don’t Work. So What Should You Do?

A NY Times story from May popped up on my Facebook feed and it got me thinking. (I’m not sure why a story from May would come up now but I’m glad it did.) Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet is a worthwhile discussion of the biological and neurological mechanisms of weight-loss, weight-gain and what happens when we diet.

(Though it’s not defined in the article, the term “diet” seems to refer to a strict, restrictive type of eating plan which causes prolonged hunger and feelings of deprivation. “Diet” implies the use of white-knuckle willpower. “Diets” are almost never sustainable over the long-haul.)

I won’t go into all the information but here are some important details:

Diets and weight-gain seem closely related.

“Long-term studies show dieters are more likely than non-dieters to become obese over the next one to 15 years. That’s true in men and women, across ethnic groups, from childhood through middle age. The effect is strongest in those who started in the normal weight range, a group that includes almost half of the female dieters in the United States.

“Why would dieting lead to weight gain? First, dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.

“Second, weight anxiety and dieting predict later binge eating, as well as weight gain. Girls who labeled themselves as dieters in early adolescence were three times more likely to become overweight over the next four years. Another study found that adolescent girls who dieted frequently were 12 times more likely than non-dieters to binge two years later.”

Weird huh? The question is do diets cause weight gain, or do weight-gain-prone people tend to diet? The chick-or-egg question is discussed in the article.

Diets change the brain. Not for the better.

“In the laboratory, rodents learn to binge when deprivation alternates with tasty food — a situation familiar to many dieters. Rats develop binge eating after several weeks consisting of five days of food restriction followed by two days of free access to Oreos. Four days later, a brief stressor leads them to eat almost twice as many Oreos as animals that received the stressor but did not have their diets restricted. A small taste of Oreos can induce deprived animals to binge on regular chow, if nothing else is available. Repeated food deprivation changes dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain that govern how animals respond to rewards, which increases their motivation to seek out and eat food. This may explain why the animals binge, especially as these brain changes can last long after the diet is over.

“In people, dieting also reduces the influence of the brain’s weight-regulation system by teaching us to rely on rules rather than hunger to control eating. People who eat this way become more vulnerable to external cues telling them what to eat. In the modern environment, many of those cues were invented by marketers to make us eat more, like advertising, supersizing and the all-you-can-eat buffet. Studies show that long-term dieters are more likely to eat for emotional reasons or simply because food is available. When dieters who have long ignored their hunger finally exhaust their willpower, they tend to overeat for all these reasons, leading to weight gain.”

I LOVE the part about diets teaching us to eat by rules rather than paying attention to hunger. More on that in a bit.

Diets don’t improve health:

“In addition, the evidence that dieting improves people’s health is surprisingly poor. Part of the problem is that no one knows how to get more than a small fraction of people to sustain weight loss for years. The few studies that overcame that hurdle are not encouraging. In a 2013 study of obese and overweight people with diabetes, on average the dieters maintained a 6 percent weight loss for over nine years, but the dieters had a similar number of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease during that time as the control group. Earlier this year, researchers found that intentional weight loss had no effect on mortality in overweight diabetics followed for 19 years.”

That’s surprising to me. Read more of the article to learn why this might be the case.

What should you do?

The research discussed in the article tells us that diets aren’t only ineffective, they’re actually harmful. Is it time to give up hope? I don’t think so. There are other, better strategies to weight-loss and health than the Spartan drudgery of the typical diet. Here are some suggestions:

Eat when you’re hungry. Stop when you’re no longer hungry.

My client Dorothy had a great insight. She made the distinction between being truly hungry vs. saying “I could eat.”

Question: “Are you hungry?”

Answer: “I could eat.”

If you’re eating ask yourself why. Is it hunger or something else? Are you eating out of boredom, sadness, happiness or some similar emotion? Are you eating because food is in front of you? We eat for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with actual hunger.

Further, as you’re eating, continue to pay attention to your hunger. Is it still there? If not, then it’s time to stop eating. We often keep eating until we’re stuffed. You may have been taught to clean your plate. Food often tastes great — so we keep eating!

I suggest that you wait to eat until you are truly, definitely hungry. I’m not saying you should walk around famished but rather know for certain that your stomach is definitely signaling you that it’s time to put something in there.

The idea of eating when hungry and stopping when no longer hungry seems like an obvious and easy concept but make no mistake, it’s a skill. (I say “no longer hungry” rather than “full” because to me, “full” is too much like stuffed.) It requires mindfulness, awareness and deliberate action. Many of us are probably out of practice on this front.

Eat protein

Eating protein at each meal is a very good idea for anyone looking to lose weight. Three reasons, as mentioned in this article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

“1) increased satiety—protein generally increases satiety to a greater extent than carbohydrate or fat and may facilitate a reduction in energy consumption under ad libitum dietary conditions;

“2) increased thermogenesis—higher-protein diets are associated with increased thermogenesis, which also influences satiety and augments energy expenditure (in the longer term, increased thermogenesis contributes to the relatively low-energy efficiency of protein); and

“3) maintenance or accretion of fat-free mass—in some individuals, a moderately higher protein diet may provide a stimulatory effect on muscle protein anabolism, favoring the retention of lean muscle mass while improving metabolic profile.”

Precision Nutrition recommends men eat two palm-sized servings of protein at each meal while women should get one palm of protein.

Lift weights.

Lifting weights (or any kind of resistance training) helps build and preserve muscle mass. Why is that good? Glad you asked:

Further advocacy for weight training is found in a recent interview with Dr. Wayne Westcott, professor of exercise science at Quincy College. The interview stemmed in part from research and news that contestants from the Biggest Loser seem to gain back all their weight and then some in the years following their weight loss. The article discusses several issues, but as it pertains this blog post, this is pertinent:

“But the key isn’t fat, it’s muscle: His [ Dr. Westcott’s] central point is that loss of muscle mass — whether through inactivity or aging or dieting — helps lead to many of our ills, from regaining weight to developing diabetes.

“But it doesn’t have to be that way, if only we’ll do a modicum of strength training — defined as any exercise that uses resistance to build muscle, from weightlifting to push-ups — and keep doing it.”

Sleep.

I’ve written about the link between lack of sleep and obesity. Dr. Westcott also emphasizes the role of sleep in staying trim. He says, “Sleep is probably more important than all the other put together.”

The journal Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition & Metabolic Care conducted a review of research on the sleep/obesity link. The key points:

The worldwide increase in the prevalence of obesity in the last several decades has been paralleled by a trend of reduced sleep duration in adults, as well as in children.
Evidence from both longitudinal and prospective epidemiological studies suggests that chronic partial sleep loss is associated with an increase in the risk of obesity.
Laboratory studies show that sleep restriction leads to hormonal alterations, which may favor an increase in calories intake and a decreased energy expenditure and ultimately lead to weight gain.
In addition to short sleep duration, evidence suggests that also sleep disturbance, such as obstructive sleep apnea and poor sleep quality, may increase obesity risk.
Prospective interventional studies are needed to clarify whether increasing sleep duration or improving sleep quality protects from weight gain or even favors weight loss.
Until results from such studies are available, the current evidence supports recommending sufficient amounts of habitual sleep and good sleep hygiene in patients at risk of obesity.

Want to lose weight? Sleep well.

Finally

Diets aren’t just a depressing drag, they may in fact facilitate the exact type of weight-gain you’re trying to avoid. In other words, they don’t work! Rather than diet, tune into your hunger. Eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re no longer hungry. Eat protein at each meal, lift weights and get solid, regular sleep.

Big benefits from the 5k

“Everyone thinks the marathon is the Holy Grail, when a lot of people should really be doing the 5K,” Jason Karp, exercise physiologist.

In the running world, many of us want to progress from the 5k to the 10k, half-marathon all the way to the marathon—and maybe beyond! More is always better, right? We think 5ks are for beginners and marathons are for the truly fit and powerful among us. And ultra-marathons? Those are for the real champions.

Well, I suggest that more isn’t always better. Sometimes more is just more. Maybe we should reconsider our view of the 5k. (Remember, the 5000m is an Olympic event. It’s not always easy.)

The 5K, Not The Marathon, Is The Ideal Race argues that for most people and most fitness goals, the 5k is the optimal distance.

The latest fitness trends

“Below are the newest and niftiest fitness programs that have been gaining in popularity, and the odds that they will attract the most disciples in 2016.”

In terms of fitness, exercise and strength training, I believe there is very little new under the sun. Lift heavy things. Sweat often. Eat right most of the time. Rest, recover, repeat. Those are the big-picture concepts that have built healthy humans since forever.

That said, if someone wants to make money in the fitness business, presenting this picture in new packaging is a wise idea. Further, if some sort of new fitness trend grabs someone’s attention then all the better. I believe that anything that gets someone to exercise and stick with it is probably a good thing.

Who’s afraid of chemicals?

“If you can’t pronounce an ingredient, then you shouldn’t eat it, right? Unfortunately, it appears that idea may not be the best advice nor very accurate.”

Those of us who value good nutrition tend to avoid processed foods in favor of those in a more “natural” state. The idea sounds reasonable. Many processed foods are unhealthy garbage. Cookies, crackers, breakfast cereal, many frozen meals and all sorts of packaged foods come with lots of calories but very little nutrition. If you look at food labels you often see a laundry list of strange-sounding substances that bear no resemblance to any sort of food we’ve ever heard of. These types of foods often go hand-in-hand with obesity and poor health. In contrast, we know that fruits, vegetables, minimally processed dairy, meat, beans and whole grains are generally healthier for us.

Internet gurus and quacks such as Vani “Food Babe” Hari, Dr. Oz, and Joseph Mercola have engaged in fear-mongering and misinformation which has led to confusion among consumers. (They’ve made a lot of money doing it too.) These people have told us that we must avoid all chemicals at all cost lest we be struck dead at any moment! The horror!

Here’s news for you: Everything is a chemical, including water, aka dihydrogen monoxide. Further, the central tenet of toxicology is “the dose makes the poison.” This means that a wide array of substances from alcohol to sugar to formaldehyde to chlorine to even water can become deadly at a certain dosage. Meanwhile lower dosages may pose no threat at all.

With these concepts in mind, I like the article from Science Driven Nutrition titled The truth about food ingredients. It’s brief and gives a rational breakdown of why many (but perhaps not all) chemicals in our foods are safe.

Physical Activity, Appetite & Weight-Loss

There is a lot of important research out there on subjects like exercise physiology and nutrition. I’m not a researcher and I have a difficult time deciphering information that I know is useful to me and my clients. So I appreciate Alex Hutchinson’s Sweat Science blog in Runner’s World. He does a great job of discussing complex research findings in language that I can understand.

A recent Sweat Science post titled the Jute Diet details some tremendously important research regarding the intimate relationship between physical activity and appetite. The research is from the 1950s so I was completely surprised that I didn’t already know this information. From the blog post:

image is from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

“What you see is that, above a certain level of physical activity, caloric intake increases linearly and weight is stable. For these workers, the body’s “balance” mechanism is functioning, and those who burn more calories also consume proportionately more calories.

“But below a certain level of physical activity, the appetite balance breaks down. Caloric intake rises again, and these workers are the ones who gain weight. The researchers call this “’he sedentary zone,’ and suggest that the regulation of food intake breaks down in this zone because ‘in his hundreds of years of evolution, man did not have any opportunity for sedentary life except very recently.'”

Hutchinson references other research that supports this idea that physical activity strongly influences body weight. More supporting research can be seen here, here and here. (Beyond that, some of the research shows a dose-response relationship in which more and more vigorous activity yields more weight loss and better weight-loss maintenance.)

I’ve never thought about the effect that exercise has on appetite beyond that it probably increases it. That exercise may make appetite more accurate is very interesting to me.

I have found that I tend to lose weight when I’m training a lot. When I try and track my calories while training I often find that I go over my suggested caloric intake and I still lose weight. I simply eat the amount that feels right and I’m able to maintain or improve my body composition. It’s much tougher to do though when I’m not training hard. That’s been a curious thing to me. This research seems to speak to my observations.

Health & Fitness News: Pain Science, Breakfast – To Skip or Not to Skip?, Carbs vs fat (Whither protein?), 8 Glasses of Water Mythology

Several articles have grabbed my attention. One is a concise summary of the current understanding of pain. Another discusses breakfast and the flimsy evidence supporting its importance. Next, science looks at the efficacy of reducing carbs vs fats for weight loss. Finally, drinking eight glasses of water a day is based on nothing.

Pain and lifting

The issue of pain is a continual theme in this blog. I’ve dealt with periodic bouts of lingering pain. The upside to this is that I’ve learned a lot about pain. Whether we’re an athlete or not, most of us will encounter non-acute or chronic pain.

It can be scary and depressing to us especially if it limits our ability to train. Interestingly, learning about how pain works can actually help us feel better (low-back pain in this case). Pain is NOT simply an indication of tissue damage. It’s very much a product of the brain. How we perceive our bodies (damaged or strong), our pain (threatening and scary or just a nuisance) and our expectations (“I’m broken and ruined,” or “I’ll be fine.”) are major influences on the pain process.

In that direction, Elitefts.com has a worthwhile article called 3 Things Lifters and Coaches Need to Know About Pain. It’s concise and fairly easy to understand for non-scientists. I think this information is useful for coaches and trainers who will certainly come across an athlete or client in pain. It may also prove helpful to you if you’re in pain. Here is a summary:

1. You are not your MRI or your X-Ray. Many people have tissue damage or degeneration on imaging but walk around without pain everyday. If you’re dealing with pain or an injury, get a thorough medical history and functional examination done by a qualified health professional, preferably one that works with athletes and lifters (they are out there).

2. Understand that pain (particularly chronic pain) isn’t purely related to biomechanics or injury. Biological and psychosocial factors both contribute to a person’s pain experience.

3. When working with clients, don’t create fear or a nocebo effect by berating your clients on their lifting technique, posture, or movement capabilities. Instead, work through your client’s issues with positive coaching and cueing to build a great training effect.

Read the article to get more detail.

Breakfast and weight loss

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

You’ve heard it. You believe. I’ve preached it to clients. It seems the earth rotates around this statement. But, is this bit of gospel based on anything of substance? Not really.

In The science of skipping breakfast: How government nutritionists may have gotten it wrong the Washington Post discusses research that shows the following:

“In overweight individuals, skipping breakfast daily for 4 weeks leads to a reduction in body weight,” the researchers from Columbia University concluded in a paper published last year.”

Another golden idol knocked from its pedestal! How can this be? Why would the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans tell us something that isn’t supported by good evidence?

The Post article does a good job of discussing the answer.

One of the key pieces of evidence, for example, examined the records for 20,000 male health professionals. Researchers followed the group for 10 years and published results in 2007 in the journal Obesity. They showed that after adjusting for age and other factors, the men who ate breakfast were 13 percent less likely to have had a significant weight gain.

“Our study suggests that the consumption of breakfast may modestly lower the risk of weight gain in middle-aged and older men,” the researchers said.

The advisory committee cited this and similar research, known as “observational studies,” in support of the notion that skipping breakfast might cause weight gain. In “observational studies,” subjects are merely observed, not assigned randomly to “treatment” and “control” groups as in a traditional experiment.

Observational studies in nutrition are generally cheaper and easier to conduct. But they can suffer from weaknesses that can lead scientists astray.

One of the primary troubles in observational studies is what scientists refer to as “confounders” — basically, unaccounted factors that can lead researchers to make mistaken assumptions about causes. For example, suppose breakfast skippers have a personality trait that makes them more likely to gain weight than breakfast eaters. If that’s the case, it may look as if skipping breakfast causes weight gain even though the cause is the personality trait.

It’s a reminder of the very important rule: Correlation doesn’t equal causation. Just because one detail appears alongside another detail, it doesn’t mean the one detail causes the other. (Tall people play basketball. Therefore one might conclude that playing basketball makes people tall. Is that right?)

Similarly we’ve seen a recent revision on dietary fat and cholesterol guidelines. We once thought that fat (particularly saturated fat) and cholesterol were the most evil of edible substances. Based upon flawed science, we were told to replace fat with carbohydrates and we’d all be well. Upon further review, it seems we may have been very wrong.

Low-carb vs. low-fat

Sticking with the diet and science theme, there’s been a lot of discussion on a recent study in Cell Metabolism that looks at low-carb vs. low-fat diets. This was a six-day study in a carefully controlled lab environment. The study had the same group of 19 obese participants spend six days on either a restricted-carb or restricted-fat diet. They then went home for several weeks for a “wash-out” period where they resumed their normal eating habits. The participants then returned and they were switched to the other diet. The same number of calories were cut from both diets, the difference being the calories came specifically from either carbs or fat. The participants were observed in a metabolic chamber and their caloric expenditure was very closely monitored. It was a well-designed study.

The result? The low-fat group lost more fat. Discussion over right? If you saw most of the popular-press headlines you’d think so. But there’s more to the story.

First question in my mind is “What about protein?” Though the jury is still out on some aspects of high-protein diets, several studies (here, here, here and here among others) suggest that high-protein diets can be useful for weight loss. The study doesn’t mention protein at all. Seems odd to me in that carbs, fat and protein are the main macronutrients in food. Why would we want to manipulate and study the effects of just two?

A good discussion of the low-carbs vs. low-fat study can be found at Examine.com. Really-low-fat vs somewhat-lower-carb – a nuanced analysis goes into some of the limitations of the study. This article is quite detailed. Read it all if you’re up for it. I won’t go into all of it but here’s a little bit.

One point to remember that this low-carb diet could be called a “lower-“carb diet in that some low-carb diets go much lower than this one. The Examine.com article says:

“The carb levels ended up being 352 grams for Restricted Fat versus 140 for Restricted Carb, and the fat levels 17 versus 108. In other words, (moderately lower carb than typical diets) versus (oh my goodness I can count my fat gram intake on my fingers and toes!).

This trial wasn’t designed to explore a real-life 100-gram-and-under low carb diet and especially not a ketogenic diet. Rather, it was a mechanistic study designed so that they could reduce energy substantially and equally from fat or carbs, but without changing more than one macronutrient. If they lowered carbs much more in the Restricted Carb group (like under 100 grams), they’d then have to go into negative fat intake for the Restricted Fat group. And negative fat intake is impossible (*except for in quantum parallel universes). One more note: all participants kept dietary protein constant and exercised on a treadmill for an hour a day.”

So it’s possible that if carbs were lowered further, we might see a different outcome of the study. Also, this was a six-day study. We must wonder what might happen over the course of six weeks, six months or six years.

Another very important point to remember is that this was a very tightly controlled experiment. It didn’t reflect the real world in which people trying to lose weight have to make their own food choices. Examine.com says:

And to repeat a very important point: this study was not meant to inform long-run dietary choices. In the long-run, the choice between restricting fat or restricting carbs to achieve a caloric deficit may come down to one thing: diet adherence.

While preference for certain foods may dictate which diet is easier to adhere to, this isn’t always the case. For instance, it seems that insulin-resistant individuals have an easier time adhering to a low-carbohydrate diet. Nowadays, new dieters often pair low-carb with higher protein, the latter of which can boost weight loss. And since there are plenty of high-sugar but low-fat junk foods (see Mike and Ike, et al.) but not so many high-fat but low-carb junk foods, low carb intakes can sometimes mean an easier time staying away from junk food when compared to low fat diets.

So we should remember that the dietary rubber meets the road when someone seeking weight loss can modify their diet in any healthy way and then stick to it for the long haul. If it’s less fat then great. If it’s fewer carbs, also great. If it’s some other improvement to the diet then wonderful!

Eight glasses of water a day is arbitrary

Another sacred cow of health and longevity is the admonition to drink at least eight glasses of water a day. That bunk has been debunked but much like a bell that’s been rung, it’s hard to change people’s minds once they’ve heard this information. The New York Times gets into this topic in No,You Do Not Have to Drink 8 Glasses of Water a Day. This one is simple. If you’re thirsty then drink. If you’re not then don’t. (How else would we have made it to the year 2015 if we didn’t have some sort of very good water gauge built into our physiology? Do my cat or dog think about the measured quantity of the water they drink?)

Health & Fitness Information: Fitness for Entrepreneurs, Dean Ornish is Wrong, Pesticides in Produce, Performance Enhancement Methods

Here are several articles with some interesting information that you may find helpful.

Dean Ornish is wrong

Scientific American offers a critique of the ideas of Dr. Dean Ornish in Why Almost Everything Dean Ornish Says about Nutrition Is Wrong.

Dean Ornish, MD is a very bright guy. He is the founder and president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif. He is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his medical training in internal medicine from the Baylor College of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a BA in humanities summa cum laude from the University of Texas in Austin.

Ornish insists that a very low-fat, high-carb vegetarian diet is the best way to good health. The problem is, he cites low-quality studies and draws conclusions that aren’t quite supported by the available evidence. The article states:

“Ornish goes to argue that protein and saturated fat increase the risk of mortality and chronic disease. As evidence for these causal claims, he cites a handful of observational studies. He should know better. These types of studies—which might report that people who eat a lot of animal protein tend to develop higher rates of disease—“only look at association, not causation,” explains Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. They should not be used to make claims about cause and effect; doing so is considered by nutrition scientists to be “inappropriate” and “misleading.” The reason: People who eat a lot of animal protein often make other lifestyle choices that increase their disease risk, and although researchers try to make statistical adjustments to control for these ‘confounding variables,’ as they’re called, it’s a very imperfect science. Other large observational studies have found that diets high in fat and protein are not associated with disease and may even protect against it. The point is, it’s possible to cherry-pick observational studies to support almost any nutritional argument.”

And:

“The recent multicenter PREDIMED trial also supports the notion that fat can be good rather than bad. It found that individuals assigned to eat high-fat (41 percent calories from fat), Mediterranean-style diets for nearly five years were about 30 percent less likely to experience serious heart-related problems compared with individuals who were told to avoid fat. (All groups consumed about the same amount of protein.) Protein, too, doesn’t look so evil when one considers the 2010 trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine that found individuals who had recently lost weight were more likely to keep it off if they ate more protein, along with the 2005 OmniHeart trial that reported individuals who substituted either protein or monounsaturated fat for some of their carbohydrates reduced their cardiovascular risk factors compared with individuals who did not.”

Also, regarding Dean Ornish’s research:

“So there’s little evidence to suggest that we need to avoid protein and fat. But what about the claims Ornish makes about the success of his own diet—do they hold up to scrutiny? Not exactly. His famous 1990 Lifestyle Heart trial involved a total of 48 patients with heart disease. Twenty-eight were assigned to his low-fat, plant-based diet and 20 were given usual cardiac care. After one year those following his diet were more likely to see a regression in their atherosclerosis.

But here’s the thing: The patients who followed his diet also quit smoking, started exercising and attended stress management training. The people in the control group were told to do none of these things. It’s hardly surprising that quitting smoking, exercising, reducing stress and dieting—when done together—improves heart health. But the fact that the participants were making all of these lifestyle changes means that we cannot make any inferences about the effect of the diet alone.

So when Ornish wrote in his op–ed that ‘for reversing disease, a whole-foods, plant-based diet seems to be necessary,’ he is incorrect. It’s possible that quitting smoking, exercising and stress management, without the dieting, would have had the same effect—but we don’t know; it’s also possible that his diet alone would not reverse heart disease symptoms. Again, we don’t know because his studies have not been designed in a way that can tell us anything about the effect of his diet alone. There’s also another issue to consider: Although Ornish emphasizes that his diet is low in fat and animal protein, it also eliminates refined carbohydrates. If his diet works—and again, we don’t know for sure that it does—is that because it reduces protein or fat or refined carbohydrates?”

I’m not paying a lot of attention to what Ornish says.

Exercise is more important than business

Why Exercising Is a Higher Priority Than My Business is an article in the Personal Health section of Entrepreneur magazine. The writer Joshua Steimle explains why he puts exercise above such things as client meetings. He says:

“I schedule my workouts during the workday and prioritize exercise over all my work activities. There is some flexibility, but if there is a conflict between a trail run I need to get in, and a meeting with a client, I’ll reschedule the client meeting first. I do this because I and my business can survive the consequences of rescheduling a client meeting, even if it means losing that client. But as soon as I start pushing workouts off, I’ll start missing workouts, and once I start missing workouts, I’m close to stopping workouts altogether.

Exercise must come first, or it’s unlikely to happen at all.

If exercise stops, then my health goes downhill. With the loss of physical health my productivity at work goes down. I become depressed. I lose motivation to do the things that makes my business successful. I’ve learned firsthand that excellence in one area of my life promotes excellence in all other areas of my life. Exercise is the easiest area of my life to control. It’s easy to measure. Either I get it in, or I don’t. When I do, it lifts up all other areas of my life, including my business.”

Smart man!

Avoiding pesticides in produce from Consumer Reports

To this point, I haven’t been fully convinced that organic produce is better for me. Though there’s a lot of fear-mongering and weird conspiracy theories around organic (and GMO) food, I haven’t found overwhelming evidence that organic produce is a) more nutritious or b) safer. An article in Consumer Reports has made me reconsider that stance.

Eat the Peach, Not the Pesticide recommends that we always buy organic whenever possible:

“Experts at Consumer Reports believe that organic is always the best choice because it is better for your health, the environment, and the people who grow our food. The risk from pesticides on conventional produce varies from very low to very high, depending on the type of produce and on the country where it’s grown. The differences can be dramatic. For instance, eating one serving of green beans from the U.S. is 200 times riskier than eating a serving of U.S.-grown broccoli.”

The article provides an interactive guide so you can see where various fruits and vegetables lie on the spectrum from high- to low-risk:

“If you want to minimize your pesticide exposure, see our risk guide. (Download our full scientific report, ‘From Crop to Table.’) We’ve placed fruits and vegetables into five risk categories—from very low to very high. In many cases there’s a conventional item with a pesticide risk as low as organic. Below, you’ll find our experts’ answers to the most pressing questions about how pesticides affect health and the environment. Together, this information will help you make the best choices for you and your family.

This short video from Consumer Reports summarizes their findings.

Gaining a competitive edge

I’m a fan of Alex Hutchinson’s Sweat Science colum in Runner’s World. Hutchinson is a former physicist, an award-winning science journalist and a runner. (Check out his bio.) He always does a good job of discussing the research that’s available on any number of fitness and sports related topics from training methods to diet to whatever else you can think of.

Recently he wrote Advice to a Young Athlete. The article started as a response to a cyclist who wrote to him asking for advice on getting to the elite level. Hutchinson insists first and foremost that talent and hard work are the essentials. Beyond that there are a galaxy of things (supplements, training methods, etc) that may or may not work.

In this piece he discusses the following:

caffeine
acidity buffers: baking soda, sodium citrate and beta-alinine
beet-root juice
creatine
recovery methods: massage, ice baths, compression garments, sleep
nutrition: fruits/veggies (Eat more.), fat vs. carbs, “training low,” and hydration
brain training
race preparation: warm-up, taper, heat training

If you’re an endurance athlete or a trainer/coach the you should read the column.

Thoughts on “Diet Cults”

I’m about to finish Matt Fitzgerald’s Diet Cults and I’m enjoying it a lot. He discusses the extent to which we identify ourselves by how we eat. Many of us proudly and loudly claim the label of Paleo, Vegan, Raw Food, High-Protein, Low-carb and similar type things. Food gurus try to convince us that there is as Fitzgerald calls it The One True Way to eat, a way that guarantees long life and good health. The various diet gurus tell us that the One True Way exists, but science tells us something different.

(I’ve noticed that there aren’t many other products or practices that incite such near-religious devotion. We don’t identify ourselves by the color of our car, the material our shoes are made out of or what type of carpet we have in our house. Dietary habits however are a major part of our identity. Fitzgerald goes into some history and possible reasons why.)

Mainly what we learn is that humans seem to be very flexible in our ability to not just live but thrive on all sorts of different eating patterns. Diet cults however tend to rigidly forbid various foods (grains, gluten, dairy, animal flesh, alcohol, even cooked foods are a few examples) with the threat that you will surely fall ill and possibly die from any number of ugly conditions.

Here are a few other interesting points I’ve gotten from the book:

Motivation (different from willpower) is far more predictive of long-term weight loss than any type of diet or eating pattern. Here’s the study from the National Weight Control Registry.
Fitzgerald profiles various individuals who have lost weight and improved or maintained their health on all sorts of diets: Paleo, raw food, Weight Watchers, high-protein are a few examples. He even discusses researchers who maintained very good health while eating nothing but white potatoes for a month! The point? There doesn’t seem to be any One True Way to eat.
He discusses chocolate, wine and coffee, three things that are often demonized and forbidden in various diets. (Our paleo ancestors definitely didn’t even have them.) Yet there is evidence that they can confer good health on us when consumed in reasonable amounts. I like that he brings up the joy and pleasure we often have when consuming them. Spiritual health is something to consider alongside the strictly “physical” health components of our eating habits.
He provides a very interesting discussion on autoimmune issues, GI tract issues, gluten (and the fear of gluten), trauma and stress. Specifically what I found most interesting were the studies on trauma, stress and autoimmune diseases. (Celiac disease is one of many autoimmune diseases.) A study from King’s College London “concluded that more than one in ten cases of low-grade systemic inflammation in adults may be attributable to childhood trauma. And there’s more. A study by the Centers of Disease Control found this:

“Four years later, Shanta Dube and her colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control went a step further. They gathered information about “adverse childhood experiences” from more than 15,000 adults. The categories of adverse childhood experiences were physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; witnessing domestic violence; and growing up with household substance abuse, mental illness, parental divorce, and/or an incarcerated household member. These data were used to create cumulative childhood stress scores for each subject. Dube and her colleagues then collected information from the subjects on hospitalizations for twenty-one selected autoimmune diseases in three categories. When the researchers crunched the numbers, they discovered that subjects were between 70 and 100 percent more likely to have developed an autoimmune disease than were subjects who had suffered no adverse childhood experiences.

The point? Food isn’t the only cause for our illnesses. Our emotions and the stress of modern living seems to have a very powerful influence on whether or not we’re “sick.” Thus, going on some sort of absolutist diet may have no effect whatsoever on such things.

So there are a few thoughts. Fitzgerald doesn’t give us license to eat all the garbage that we want but rather he illustrates that we can very comfortably attain excellent health through a wide variety of foods. (In my view, giving a damn at all about what you eat is probably the vast majority of what will get you where you want to be. Thinking about your food is a great starting place.) If you’re confused about all the mixed nutritional messages around you and some of the wild claims made by diet gurus then Diet Cults may deliver much welcome information.

“The new findings are part of a growing body of research that has challenged the accepted wisdom that saturated fat is inherently bad for you and will continue the debate about what foods are best to eat.”
– New York Times

The New York Times Well Blog posted an article recently called Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link. The article reports on a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. This is a literature review of 75 different studies that examined the relationship between saturated fat and coronary disease. The study’s conclusion:

“Current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats.”

Beyond the saturated fat factor, the discussion on cholesterol and the different types of low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) is pertinent and echos the information in this post. Note also the comments on carbs and sugar from Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, lead author of the new study and a cardiovascular epidemiologist in the department of public health and primary care at Cambridge University:

“The primary reason saturated fat has historically had a bad reputation is that it increases low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, or LDL, the kind that raises the risk for heart attacks. But the relationship between saturated fat and LDL is complex, said Dr. Chowdhury. In addition to raising LDL cholesterol, saturated fat also increases high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, the so-called good cholesterol. And the LDL that it raises is a subtype of big, fluffy particles that are generally benign. Doctors refer to a preponderance of these particles as LDL pattern A.

The smallest and densest form of LDL is more dangerous. These particles are easily oxidized and are more likely to set off inflammation and contribute to the buildup of artery-narrowing plaque. An LDL profile that consists mostly of these particles, known as pattern B, usually coincides with high triglycerides and low levels of HDL, both risk factors for heart attacks and stroke.

The smaller, more artery-clogging particles are increased not by saturated fat, but by sugary foods and an excess of carbohydrates, Dr. Chowdhury said. ‘It’s the high carbohydrate or sugary diet that should be the focus of dietary guidelines,’ he said. ‘If anything is driving your low-density lipoproteins in a more adverse way, it’s carbohydrates.’”

NPR also reported on this research in Don’t Fear the Fat: Experts Question the Saturated Fat Guidelines. This article offers a timeline leading up to the current research:

“So, let’s walk through this shift in thinking: The concern over fat gathered steam in the 1960s when studies showed that saturated fat increases LDL cholesterol — the bad cholesterol — the artery-clogging stuff. The assumption was that this increased the risk of heart disease.

But after all this time, it just hasn’t panned out, at least not convincingly. When researchers have tracked people’s saturated fat intake over time and then followed up to see whether higher intake increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, they haven’t found a clear, consistent link.

In fact, the new study finds ‘null associations’ (to quote the authors) between total saturated fat intake and coronary risk. And a prior analysis that included more than 300,000 participants came to a similar conclusion.”

Both articles include caveats and reservations by other researchers. Read the articles to see those. I’m not sure they’re anything but what’s been said in the past, and this new research seems like a strong basis to refute the old advice.

A Life Long Fight Against Trans Fats

Dr. Fred Kummerow is a researcher who has no reservations about consuming saturated fat. He was one of the first researchers to lead the charge against trans fats. The New York Times profiled Dr. Kummerow in A Lifelong Fight Against Trans Fats. He observed in the 1950s a link between the man-made trans fats and coronary disease. It took decades for the rest of the food science world to accept his findings. He’s 99 years-old and still working. Some of his findings on vegetable oil and cholesterol are worth considering:

“In the past two years, he has published four papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, two of them devoted to another major culprit he has singled out as responsible for atherosclerosis, or the hardening of the arteries: an excess of polyunsaturated vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower — exactly the types of fats Americans have been urged to consume for the past several decades.

The problem, he says, is not LDL, the ‘bad cholesterol’ widely considered to be the major cause of heart disease. What matters is whether the cholesterol and fat residing in those LDL particles have been oxidized. (Technically, LDL is not cholesterol, but particles containing cholesterol, along with fatty acids and protein.)

‘Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, except if it’s oxidized,’ Dr. Kummerow said. Oxidation is a chemical process that happens widely in the body, contributing to aging and the development of degenerative and chronic diseases. Dr. Kummerow contends that the high temperatures used in commercial frying cause inherently unstable polyunsaturated oils to oxidize, and that these oxidized fatty acids become a destructive part of LDL particles. Even when not oxidized by frying, soybean and corn oils can oxidize inside the body.

LDL’s and Kummerow’s own eating habits are discussed:

If true, the hypothesis might explain why studies have found that half of all heart disease patients have normal or low levels of LDL.

“You can have fine levels of LDL and still be in trouble if a lot of that LDL is oxidized,” Dr. Kummerow said.

This leads him to a controversial conclusion: that the saturated fat in butter, cheese and meats does not contribute to the clogging of arteries — and in fact is beneficial in moderate amounts in the context of a healthy diet (lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other fresh, unprocessed foods).

His own diet attests to that. Along with fruits, vegetables and whole grains, he eats red meat several times a week and drinks whole milk daily.

He cannot remember the last time he ate anything deep-fried. He has never used margarine, and instead scrambles eggs in butter every morning. He calls eggs one of nature’s most perfect foods, something he has been preaching since the 1970s, when the consumption of cholesterol-laden eggs was thought to be a one-way ticket to heart disease.

“Eggs have all of the nine amino acids you need to build cells, plus important vitamins and minerals,” he said. “It’s crazy to just eat egg whites. Not a good practice at all.”

(Contrast that statement with the recent news of a poorly designed study that suggested eating eggs were as bad as smoking.)

I’m glad to see this type of information getting out. I think the giant lumbering battleship that is our nutritional advice is slowly turning another direction. Real food trumps processed food every time it seems, even if it’s loaded with fat and cholesterol.

Summary of the NSCA Endurance Clinic: Day 1

Part of what I love about the Denver area is that it’s home to numerous very good athletes and coaches–particularly of the endurance variety. We’re also not far from Colorado Springs which is home to both the Olympic Training Center and the headquarters for the National Strength & Conditioning Association (NSCA), one of the top certification bodies in the world of health, fitness and sports conditioning.

I was at the NSCA from last Friday to Sunday attending an endurance clinic. It was SUPERB! It far exceeded my already high expectations. All the speakers had volumes of valuable information. Not only did they present valuable academic information, they also told us how they applied this information in the trenches with their athletes. These guys weren’t just born as successful coaches. They’ve gone through a lot of trial, error and very hard work to get where they are. It’s very helpful to hear that type of information.

We didn’t just sit and listen though. Saturday and Sunday had us getting out on the field and into the performance center to learn about strength exercises, mobility drills, and plyometric drills. I got to meet a lot of my very capable peers and I got to work out in what is likely one of the top lifting facilities on earth. It was a fantastic weekend.

I’m going to give a rundown of some of the pearls of wisdom I collected on Day 1. I can’t do each presentation thorough justice, but I’ll try to highlight some of the most important things that I heard. I’ll follow up with days 2 and 3 as soon as I can.

Day 1:
Dr. Carwyn Sharp – Intro to Endurance Training

Exercise scientist, triathlete and ultra-runner who’s worked with NASA and has 14 years coaching experience.
Endurance athletes are often averse to resistance training thinking it will bulk them up.
He presented several studies which demonstrate that strength training enhances speed and endurance performance.
Sand, snow, wind, and hills can all contribute to the athlete’s resistance training.
On recovery from intervals: if you feel the effects of previous interval → you didn’t recover sufficiently.
The basis of speed is strength. Several studies demonstrate that heavy resistance training and explosive training improves performance.
1-leg training is very important.
Progression
- Move well on 2 legs (squat, deadlift) and get strong.
- transition to split squat
- then to 1 leg stability
- 1 leg squat and deadlift
- 2 leg plyos
- 1 leg plyos

Bob Seebohar: – Nutrition for the Endurance Athlete

Registered Dietitian and USAT coach who has coached and advised Olympic triathletes
Metabolic efficiency – use more lipids/less carb/preserve glycogen
Nutrition periodization – “Eat to train. Don’t train to eat.”
Food First – Don’t use supplements to make up for poor eating.
moderate supplement use; only part of the season
prevent weight gain in off-season – no sport supplements during
He supports the lower-carb/higher-fat approach. I was very happy to see that.
Food log
- Doesn’t as about amount of food eaten but rather…
- What?
- When?
- Why? I love that he asks “why” someone ate something.

Dr. Randall Wilber – Overtraining: Causes, Recognition, Prevention & Illness

Physiologist to the US Olympic team.
Overtraining–or “underperformance” as he calls it–often isn’t due to too much training.
nutrition
blood work
- Iron is often low in women.
- Vitamin D deficiency is common
endocrine panel
urinalysis
Physiological and psychological metrics for tracking fatigue/recovery
- overnight heart rate
- blood chemistry
- sleep quality
- Salimetrics – He said look for the price to come down on this.
Take the athlete back to active recovery. Progress very gradually back to regular workouts.
If they perform well and feel good at their first LT workout then they’re on the right road back.
Coach Bobby McGee: “More performances are spoiled by slight overtraining than by slight lack of fitness. An athlete who is 90% conditioned for an event will do better than an athlete who is 0.5% overtrained.”

Interesting and Informative Information: Fat Isn’t So Bad, Skimpy Research on Injury Prevention in Runners

Read this! Learn things!

What if bad fat isn’t so bad?

“Ronald Krauss, M.D., won’t say saturated fats are good for you. ‘But,’ he concedes, ‘we don’t have convincing evidence that they’re bad, either.'”

I’ve written here that I’ve been persuaded that not only is fat good for us, that “bad” saturated fat is also at the very least not as bad for us as we’ve been led to believe. I found another article to further support my thoughts. What if fat isn’t so bad? is a 2007 article from NBC News. In it, we get a good dissection of the various flawed studies by which we’ve arrived at the idea that fat–particularly saturated fat–is pure evil.

The article discusses among other things Ancel Keys’s landmark Seven-Countries Study from 1970. This study did more to advance the fat/cholesterol/heart disease link than anything else around. This study went on to frame our current low-fat guidelines. Seems the conclusions that were drawn were quite inaccurate. From the article (emphasis is mine):

“The first scientific indictment of saturated fat came in 1953. That’s the year a physiologist named Ancel Keys, Ph.D., published a highly influential paper titled “Atherosclerosis, a Problem in Newer Public Health.” Keys wrote that while the total death rate in the United States was declining, the number of deaths due to heart disease was steadily climbing. And to explain why, he presented a comparison of fat intake and heart disease mortality in six countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Italy, and Japan.

The Americans ate the most fat and had the greatest number of deaths from heart disease; the Japanese ate the least fat and had the fewest deaths from heart disease. The other countries fell neatly in between. The higher the fat intake, according to national diet surveys, the higher the rate of heart disease. And vice versa. Keys called this correlation a “remarkable relationship” and began to publicly hypothesize that consumption of fat causes heart disease. This became known as the diet-heart hypothesis.

At the time, plenty of scientists were skeptical of Keys’s assertions. One such critic was Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy pointed out that while data from the six countries Keys examined seemed to support the diet-heart hypothesis, statistics were actually available for 22 countries. And when all 22 were analyzed, the apparent link between fat consumption and heart disease disappeared. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico, even though fat-consumption rates in the two nations were similar.”

The large-scale Women’s Health Initiative is discussed:

“We’ve spent billions of our tax dollars trying to prove the diet-heart hypothesis. Yet study after study has failed to provide definitive evidence that saturated-fat intake leads to heart disease. The most recent example is the Women’s Health Initiative, the government’s largest and most expensive ($725 million) diet study yet. The results, published last year, show that a diet low in total fat and saturated fat had no impact in reducing heart-disease and stroke rates in some 20,000 women who had adhered to the regimen for an average of 8 years.”

Several other studies are discussed. The comment from the article on these studies is this:

“These four studies, even though they have serious flaws and are tiny compared with the Women’s Health Initiative, are often cited as definitive proof that saturated fats cause heart disease. Many other more recent trials cast doubt on the diet-heart hypothesis. These studies should be considered in the context of all the other research.”

The article goes on to discuss the subtle differences between the types of LDL or “bad” cholesterol. Seems that all LDLs aren’t created equally:

“But there’s more to this story: In 1980, Dr. Krauss and his colleagues discovered that LDL cholesterol is far from the simple “bad” particle it’s commonly thought to be. It actually comes in a series of different sizes, known as subfractions. Some LDL subfractions are large and fluffy. Others are small and dense. This distinction is important.

A decade ago, Canadian researchers reported that men with the highest number of small, dense LDL subfractions had four times the risk of developing clogged arteries than those with the fewest. Yet they found no such association for the large, fluffy particles. These findings were confirmed in subsequent studies.

Link to heart disease
Now here’s the saturated-fat connection: Dr. Krauss found that when people replace the carbohydrates in their diet with fat — saturated or unsaturated — the number of small, dense LDL particles decreases. This leads to the highly counterintuitive notion that replacing your breakfast cereal with eggs and bacon could actually reduce your risk of heart disease.”

In much of the medical community, this talk of fat being healthy (or at least not un-healthy) is heresy. There seems to be a strong bias against openly discussing evidence to the contrary.:

“Take, for example, a 2004 Harvard University study of older women with heart disease. Researchers found that the more saturated fat these women consumed, the less likely it was their condition would worsen. Lead study author Dariush Mozaffarian, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Harvard’s school of public health, recalls that before the paper was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, he encountered formidable politics from other journals.

“‘In the nutrition field, it’s very difficult to get something published that goes against established dogma,’ says Mozaffarian. ‘The dogma says that saturated fat is harmful, but that is not based, to me, on unequivocal evidence.’ Mozaffarian says he believes it’s critical that scientists remain open minded. ‘Our finding was surprising to us. And when there’s a discovery that goes against what’s established, it shouldn’t be suppressed but rather disseminated and explored as much as possible.'”

Go here to read the full article.

Injury prevention in runners – “skimpy research”

The smart people at Running-Physio have done a good job of summarizing a research review of studies looking into injury prevention in runners. In all, 32 studies involving 24,066 participants were examined. The relationship between injury and running frequency, volume, intensity and duration were examined. The results? I’ll let the writers tell you;

“Regular followers of RunningPhysio will know of the ongoing debate we have with those staunch supporters of research who insist we must be evidence based. Surely this shows us just how unhelpful research can be in reality – over 30 studies, involving 24,000 runners and no firm conclusions on injury prevention! No wonder Verhangen (2012) described it as “skimpy published research” and went on to conclude,

‘Specifically for novice runners knowledge on the prevention of running injuries is practically non-existent.’

Nielsen et al. isn’t the first review of its kind in this field – a Cochrane Review in 2001 reached a very similar outcome and was updated in 2011 with equally negative conclusions; Yeung, Yeung and Gillepsie (2011) completed a review of 25 studies, including over 30,000 particpants and concluded,

‘Overall, the evidence base for the effectiveness of interventions to reduce soft-tissue injury after intensive running is very weak.’

They go on to make the very wise observation that, “More attention should be paid to changes in training charactisitcs rather than the characteristics themselves.” Based on their reading of the research review, Running-Physio makes the following suggestions:

Novice runners should be especially cautious with increasing volume or intensity of training.

Increase in weekly mileage should be done gradually. The higher the weekly mileage the more caution needs to be applied in increasing this distance. Running expert Hal Higdon talks about runners having a ‘breaking point’ – a weekly mileage above which they start to develop injuries. For every runner this is different but with experience you can find your breaking point and aim to work below it. A gradual increase in mileage helps avoid crossing this point and picking up an injury.

Changes in intensity of training should be added in isolation, rather than combined with increase in distance. Be cautious when adding interval training or hill work and use each training session for its specific goal (i.e.long slow runs at an appropriately slow pace).

Be aware of signs of injury – look out for persistent or severe pain, swelling, restricted movement or sensations of giving way.

Use rest sensibly – don’t be afraid to rest or replace running with cross training when your body needs it.

Seek help – the right GP, Physio or health care professional can make a real difference!

Something I observe here is that we’re often looking for the (training variable) that causes the one thing (an injury). In reality, it’s typically many variables (some of them unseen) that bring on an injury. Also, nowhere in the article or the research is the discussion of running technique. I would think that how someone runs probably has a big effect on whether or not he or she becomes injured. I’ve mentioned previously that where the foot lands in relation to one’s center of mass is quite important as it pertains to impact and running efficiency. I’d be interested in an analysis of the foot placement (and stride length and cadence) in the role of injury.

Small Frequent Meals? Bad Idea for Weight Loss.

Bloomberg News is reporting on some very interesting weight-loss news. (I guess there’s not much going on in the financial world…) Two Large Meals a Day Tops Six Mini-Meals for Weight-Loss reveals evidence that contradicts the hallowed advice to eat several small meals per day if you want to lose weight.

Here’s what’s important:

“Over 12 weeks, people with Type 2 diabetes who ate just breakfast and lunch lost an average of 1.23 points in body mass index, or BMI, compared with a loss of 0.82 point for those who ate six smaller meals of the same nutritional and energy content. The data, in a small study involving 54 patients, were presented today at the American Diabetes Association meeting in Chicago.

The study builds on previous results disproving the theory that eating more frequently improves weight loss. That pattern, thought to work because it helps control appetite, was shown to produce no more weight loss than three regular meals in a 2010 study published in the British Journal of Nutrition. The latest report eliminates one additional meal.

In today’s study, sponsored by the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Health, both the frequency of the meals and the timing were important, according to Kahleova. Eating earlier in the day — just breakfast, between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., and lunch, between 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. — is associated with better results than skipping breakfast, she said.

Two meals a day also led to a greater decrease in liver fat content and a bigger increase in insulin sensitivity than six smaller meals.”

I find it very interesting that the researchers recommend skipping dinner instead of breakfast. That counters what I’ve been doing and what I’ve learned as a good fasting strategy. As I’ve said in recent posts (here and here), I like the idea of continuing the nighttime fast well into the day, then eating later in the day. In fact, in recent weeks I’ve been trying to eat two big meals on my fast days: a mid-day meal and an evening meal. Perhaps I’m doing this less than optimally if this recent study is accurate.

I think the big picture is that we should spend several hours not putting food in our mouths. There is mounting evidence that being hungry for a while is a good thing. Clearly in this country we eat too much food. It seems we not only eat too much–we eat too often. Further, the weight-loss gospel that a small-frequent-meal strategy aka “grazing” may be entirely wrong.

If you’re interested in this topic, there are a couple of worthwhile articles from Dave Tate’s site EliteFTS.com. Logic Does Not Apply Part I: Meal Frequency and Part II: Breakfast are well-referenced and interesting. Both discuss and support the idea of a) skipping breakfast and b) spacing out our meals by several hours. The writer notes though that small frequent meals throughout the day may be best for putting on weight. So if you’re looking to gain a bunch of muscle then eat often!

Denver Fitness Journal

All Things Health and Fitness by Kyle Norman, MS, CSCS, FMS, RRCA Running Coach

Nutrition