Today, I was happy to see that Stephen Guyenet (who’s one heck of a lot more interesting than Colpo) had felt that he had to blog about it due to the volume of email he’d gotten on the subject.

The body can only maintain body composition in the face of a calorie deficit up to a certain point. After that, it has no choice but to lower fat mass. It will do so reluctantly, at the same time increasing hunger, and reducing lean mass***, muscular strength and energy dedicated to tissue repair and immune function. However, I hope everyone can agree that a sufficient calorie deficit can lead to fat loss regardless of what kind of food is eaten. Mr. Haub’s 800 calorie deficit qualifies.

So, definitely not a newsflash. Guy eats a lot less for two months, guy loses weight. This, however is more interesting:

My hypothesis is that, in many people, industrial food and an unnatural lifestyle lead to gradual fat gain by dysregulating the energy homeostasis system. This “breaks” the system that’s designed to keep our fat mass in the optimal range. This system is not under our conscious control, and it has nothing to do with willpower.

The fat among us are being told over and over that they are committing two of the seven deadly sins, gluttony and sloth, and that that’s why they are fat.

My theory is that eating nutritionally empty foods causes people to overeat. Their bodies are still looking for nutrition, and if they are trying to get it out of Lucky Charms, they are going to eat a lot more calories in the process. Eating a cereal bar and a glass of skim milk for breakfast is going to make you hungry again in short order. Is that because it’s sugary? If you don’t have reactive hypoglycemia, then I don’t think so. It’s because it’s industrially processed fake food. You can’t fool mother nature – your body knows that you need something more nutritious, so it’s going to drive you to eat more. Can you get away with eating nothing but crap for a couple of months and lose weight? Of course you can, but what happens then?

Unfortunately, we’re never going to see a follow-up to this, I’m quite sure. Will the professor gain weight back? Will he continue to diet, but see his blood markers go the other way? Has he ever dieted before, if no, then damn near anything would work anyway. I will also note that I cannot find his blood glucose numbers on his Facebook page or in the article.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find that eating every few hours actually makes me *hungrier* resulting in more food eaten in a day.¹ Here’s a graph of typical post-prandial blood glucose fluctuations on a three meal a day plan:

When your blood glucose gets low, your body will try to make some from your fat (these would be ketones from lipolysis). Unless you’re trying to put on fat, this is a *good* thing. Even if you’re not eating carbohydrates, you still won’t reach into your fat stores if you’re taking in enough fuel during your snacks and meals. If I were conspiracy minded, I’d suggest that diet authors who call for all this snacking are just trying cause failure and make sure you need their next diet book!

In short: Americans seem to eat constantly. We also seem to be getting fatter. Maybe these two things are connected.

Here’s a terrific quote from The Leptin Diet by Byron Richards:

The advice to eat five to six small meals a day or to snack between meals to maintain a steady blood sugar level and keep metabolism “stoked with food” is among the worst advice possible. It boggles the mind that a majority of doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, and fitness instructors promote this absurd approach to energy management. It is as if someone started a bad rumor and everyone accepted it as a truth. If a person does lose weight eating this way, it is usually because he or she is eating fewer calories in total than before. This may “work” for a few weeks, until leptin levels readjust to the new level of calorie intake and slow down metabolism. However, this eating strategy inhibits normal fat burning by interfering with the proper function of leptin and insulin.

There are several diets that prohibit snacking, but they are not in the majority. First, there are plans mostly about fasting: The Fast-5 Diet, The Warrior Diet, and Eat Stop Eat.

More traditional ideas can be found in The No-S Diet and The Leptin Diet (quoted above). These give advice more like what you’d get from your grandmother. The No-S Diet takes a simple, logical approach in that it doesn’t really talk about the science at all.

The Leptin Diet covers a lot of science and is about mostly about inflammation and hormones. It has no meal plans or food lists. Here are the basic rules:

• Never eat after dinner. Allow 11 to 12 hours between dinner and breakfast, and finish eating dinner at least three hours before bed.
• Eat three meals a day. Allow five to six hours between meals and do not snack. Snacking causes leptin to malfunction.
• Do not eat large meals. Eat slowly and stop eating a meal when you are slightly less than full. Consistently eating large meals is the easiest way there is to poison your body with food.
• Eat a breakfast containing protein. Your metabolism can increase by 30 percent after a high-protein meal. A high carb meal such as cereal or a bagel will increase your metabolism only by four percent.
• Reduce the amount of carbohydrates eaten.

While poking around on the web for info about The Leptin Diet, I saw a lot of people (incidentally, all were women) saying that it was too hard or totally unrealistic to not eat for five or six hours or to let 11 to 12 hours pass between dinner and breakfast. I find that totally baffling. Why is that so hard? If you really can’t go that long without eating, you either aren’t eating enough at meals, or your meal choices simply don’t have enough nutrients.

Of course, I’m also confused by people who can’t manage to eat protein at breakfast or can’t stomach breakfast at all.

While writing this entry, I read an entry on the Fat Head blog. Check out this hilarious take on energy balance from Tom Naughton’s blog.

¹This was one of the problems I had with Gundry’s Diet Evolution – the nut snacks were just keeping my appetite up all the time. I can eat nuts at meals, and I do just fine with them. If I eat them between meals…I get hungrier and eat more at meals. In the case of that diet, I was eating a *lot* more green vegetables and possibly making other choices that involved eating more. While more vegetables seems like a good thing, it really is possible to eat too much of them. It’s a lot for your system to deal with, if you eat enough of them. I also seemed to discover that some vegetables cause inflammation for me, but enough about my adventures with broccoli for the moment – inflammation is a subject I’ll be covering in the future.

What I particularly liked about the book is that he did not blame any one thing, at least not directly. Instead, he goes over all the likely culprits, the things other diet books complain about (sugar, Omega-6 fats, grains, etc) and comes up with what I think is a compelling case.

What I got out of it, and it may not be what the author actually intended, was that food additives (flavorings, artificial sweeteners, MSG, vegetable gums) and prescription drugs are causing our gut bacteria to be completely out of whack ultimately resulting in weight gain and chronic disease. He’s arguing for an all natural foods diet; if it didn’t exist 100 years ago, don’t eat it. If your great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized it as food, don’t eat it. This is *not* a new idea, but most of the arguments that I’ve seen for this kind of a diet are strongly associated with political ideologies that I consider to be pointless hair-shirtery. This makes them easy to dismiss. That the same people are all about ablutions like colon cleansing makes it even more annoying.

If you don’t know anything about the important role that all the wee beasties living inside you have on your health, it’s worth knowing about. There are literally *pounds* of them in there, and you will have the best results if it’s the friendly kind.

Accepting that my Very Low Calorie Diet with a very short list of allowed foods significantly reduced gut flora and diversity really explains a lot of things. Now that I have a better understanding of that, I’m not having water retention, gas and bloating from eating lots of green vegetables. Seeing the scale creep up eating *salads* is an incredible annoyance, and I’m pleased to think I’ve got a handle on it.

The other problem with diet books and eating plans is that most of them seem to believe in eating five times a day. That’s a huge contrast with most of the other stuff I read that talks about the value of intermittent fasting. These are two extremes, and neither one works for me. What *does* work is a traditional plan of three meals a day.

Up next – a post about the dangers of snacking.

This study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has been producing quite an uproar since it was publicized. From that link:

Methods: Fifty-eight sedentary overweight/obese men and women (BMI 31.8 ±4.5kg/m2) participated in a 12 week supervised aerobic exercise intervention (70% heart rate max, 5 times a week, 500kcal per session). Body composition, anthropometric parameters, aerobic capacity, blood pressure and acute psychological response to exercise were measured at weeks 0 and 12.

And the results that cause a certain type of health nanny’s brain to explode?:

Results: Mean reduction in body weight was -3.3 ±3.63kg (P<0.01). However, 26 of the 58 participants failed to attain the predicted weight loss estimated from individuals’ exercise-induced energy expenditure.

I generally like Calorielab.com, but their nutritionist suffers from the usual delusions about ARTERYCLOGGINGSATURATEDFAT and ACALORIEISACALORIE.

Her piece starts:

A major news magazine’s cover story sent out ripples of shock waves when it suggested that exercise, although good for you, may not make you lose weight. Actually, research shows that if you burn more calories without increasing calories from food and drink, you will lose weight.

Except that it doesn’t. That was the WHOLE POINT of the study! Then we have this:

A 150-pound adult who adds that activity daily (and doesn’t cut back on other activity) burns about 120 to 140 extra calories per day.

With no changes in diet, that should lead to weight loss of one pound in 25 to 30 days. On the other hand, if the new walker rewards that walk with an extra muffin, 24-ounce soda or second helping at dinner, after 25 to 30 days his or her weight would probably be a pound higher, not lower. That’s because the increased calories from any one of those are more than double the calories burned in the walk.

Here’s what I take away from that paragraph: You people adding exercise to your lives to lose weight? You’re far too stupid to realize that adding an extra muffin or two cans of coke or another plate of food at dinner? That stuff might make you even fatter!. One of the overwhelming ideas one sees coming from those who think they know better than us is that everyone’s fucked but me.

Whenever we hear about how something that tastes good is also good for us, these people have to come out and yell NO IT ISN’T or say that just because resveratrol is a good thing doesn’t mean we should take up heavy drinking to get more red wine into our diet. Because, you know, we couldn’t figure that out because we’re all idiots and morons.

On to one of my favorite idiot columns, the The New York Times Well blog by Tara Parker-Pope. This article has a by-line by Gretchen Reynolds, but presumably, Ms. Parker-Pope is the final arbiter of taste.

Near the end of the article, a different study is being discussed. This one is specifically about the idea of afterburn, but there’s something really important they discovered. It’s worse than the idea that afterburn apparently doesn’t exist:

Each of Melanson’s subjects spent 24 quiet hours in the calorimeter, followed later by another 24 hours that included an hourlong bout of stationary bicycling. The cycling was deliberately performed at a relatively easy intensity (about 55 percent of each person’s predetermined aerobic capacity). It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.

To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.

Um, wow. So, that number of calories burned you see on your Wii or the treadmill or elliptical at the gym? 100% fictional. I’m not especially surprised by this, but the Well Blog decides to point out how stupid people are:

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”

Because no one is aware that every snack sold in the U.S.? It has this thing called a Nutrition Facts label on it that says how many calories are in it! WOW, who knew, right?

Then right after that:

This does not mean that exercise has no impact on body weight, or that you can’t calibrate your workouts to maximize the amount of body fat that you burn, if that’s your goal.

“If you work out at an easy intensity, you will burn a higher percentage of fat calories” than if you work out a higher intensity, Carey says, so you should draw down some of the padding you’ve accumulated on the hips or elsewhere — if you don’t replace all of the calories afterward.”

Because we don’t like the results of the study, we’re just going to ignore it. Obviously, those people in the lab were not working out right.

In fact, it always comes down to saying that Americans are fat because they just aren’t following the government’s advice closely enough. It’s never that recommending the same thing over and over and expecting different results THIS TIME is simply insane.