Tuesday 19 August 2014

The Facts of Life.

No, not those Facts of Life!
From http://www.clipartbest.com/stork-carrying-baby

It's becoming painfully obvious that there's a lot of ignorance about certain dietary "Facts of Life". This post will dispel the myths - backed up by evidence, where necessary.

1. Everyone is Different: This has been a recurring theme on my blog, starting in 2009 with the aptly-named Everyone is Different. What this means in practice, is that:-
a) You can't calculate your Energy Expenditure exactly, using one of those fancy equations (e.g. Harris-Benedict).
b) Weight change is proportional to caloric excess/deficit ± inter-personal variation.

2. CALORIES COUNT: If there's zero caloric surplus, there's zero weight gain. There can be water balance shifts due to glycogen shifts, hormonal shifts, electrolyte shifts etc. Somebody fitted a lovely straight line to the weight gain data in Bray et al shows that a calorie *is* a calorie (where weight is concerned), but their line didn't pass through 0,0. Duh!

3. Glycaemic Index (GI) has NOTHING to do with calories: A low-GI carbohydrate still has 4kcals/g. GI is a useful hint as to whether a carbohydrate may disturb blood glucose levels, but it isn't as useful as Glycaemic Load (GL = GI x grams of carbohydrate in the serving). Watermelon has a very high GI, but 100g of watermelon contains only ~5g of carbohydrates, so the GL is less than 5 i.e. watermelon is as safe as houses.

4. Exercise DOESN'T burn as many calories as you think: Exercise is for fitness, not weight loss (unless you're a professional sports-person, who can expend 1,000's of kcals a day in training).

5. Weight loss doesn't ALWAYS result in reduced Basal Metabolic Rate: Whether or not Basal Metabolic Rate reduces with weight loss depends on the degree of Adipocyte Hyperplasia that occurred during weight gain. Humongous weight gain, also weight gain in childhood, increases adipocyte hyperplasia, which is protective against developing T2DM, but makes the subsequent loss of significant amounts of FM more difficult.

6. For Muscle Hypertrophy, a STIMULUS is required: Eating too much food and/or swallowing loads of protein without hypertrophy training doesn't make muscles grow significantly bigger. See http://hillfit.com/. Chris Highcock knows what he's talking about.

7. Yo-yo dieting isn't ALWAYS a bad thing: Bodybuilders (BB'ers) do cycles of "cutting" and "bulking". Cutting is Fat Mass (FM) loss with minimal Lean Body Mass (LBM) loss. Bulking is LBM gain with minimal FM gain.

Non-BB'ers tend to get it the wrong way round. They go on crash diets with insufficient protein intake and lose loads of LBM (which increases weight loss, due to the lower Energy Density of LBM relative to FM). They then eat way too much, gaining weight way too rapidly for much (if any) of it to be LBM, even if they are doing hypertrophy training.

8. FM loss CAN be rapid: See The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook. A Scientific Approach to Crash Dieting.

9. LBM gain CANNOT be rapid: See What’s My Genetic Muscular Potential? to find out how much LBM you can gain and how quickly you can gain it.


Finally, see http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/. What Lyle McDonald doesn't know about fat loss, general nutrition, muscle mass gain and training fits on a postage stamp. He also explains things in language that the sort of person who reads my blog can understand. Just don't leave a comment asking him a question, that's already been answered elsewhere on his site!

11 comments:

Nigel Kinbrum said...

That's their problem.

StellaBarbone said...

"I haven't lost any weight since I started dieting and exercising, so I must be putting on muscle." If you are a woman, particularly an older woman, you are unlikely to build more than a very little bit of muscle without an incredible amount of work or even with an incredible amount of work. That doesn't mean that weight lifting isn't really good for you -- it decreases risk of injury, protects joints from arthritis, decreases risk of fracture, and improves balance -- but it's not likely to affect your weight by any significant amount. If you aren't losing weight with diet and exercise, it's most likely due to the fact that you aren't actually producing enough of a caloric deficit to lose fat.

"BMI is meaningless." BMI is not good for judging very, very fit men, very tall people or very short people, but for regular people it is an adequate screening -- not diagnostic -- tool.

Jane Karlsson said...

What Lyle McConald doesn't know about nutrition would fit on a postage stamp? Well it would have to be a very large postage stamp because he knows almost nothing about micronutrients. Practically everything he says about them is out of date and has been seriously questioned.

Nigel Kinbrum said...

Almost nothing, you say? http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/index.php?s=micronutrients

Practically everything YOU say about them is as a result of an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. http://itsthewooo.blogspot.com/2014/07/neurons-and-enegy-substrate-potential.html#comment-1519440140

I omitted Anthony Colpo's name. http://anthonycolpo.com/?p=852

Jane Karlsson said...

I see you're having problems deciding whether to white list me or black list me.

Nigel Kinbrum said...

I was having a problem. Problem now solved!

StellaBarbone said...

There are a couple of testosterone products available for women (who need a really low dose). They do a really good job of controlling hot flashes and provide a good feeling of wellbeing, but can cause acne and hair loss which most women find unacceptable. They also negatively affect lipids.

Nigel Kinbrum said...

I think that women have ~10% the T that men have. I read somewhere that teenage girls have higher-than-normal T levels, which makes them spotty and stroppy!

I wonder how such a teeny-weeny amount of T can cause acne & male pattern baldness? Also, how negatively are lipids affected?

Would trans-dermal oestrogen & progesterone fix those problems?

StellaBarbone said...

No, I think that would lower the availability of sex hormone binding globulin and thus raising the level of free testosterone plus providing more substrate for the production of more testosterone. The problem with supplementation is that you can swamp out the negative feedback loop....

Nigel Kinbrum said...

I hope I'm not annoying you by posting links to Lyle McDonald. His EBE may not be 100% accurate, but for most people, it's accurate enough. It's also a lot easier to understand than the heavy-duty maths by Chow & Hall!

I'm just trying to be practical & provide information that's usable by people reading my blog. In practical terms, McDonald's information works well enough and that's all I care about.

People have got a lot of "odd" ideas about Diet, Nutrition & Fitness, so I'm trying to give them a nudge in the right direction.

Anyway, it's bean fun! Do you have Heinz Baked Beans in the US? We have a little ditty about them over here.
"Heinz beans are good for the heart.
The more you eat, the more you fart.
The more you fart, the better you feel.
So eat Heinz beans with every meal!"
:-D

Cheers, Nige

Hafthor Bjornssen said...

You're not ,Nigel. I know you like Lyle. It's fine.

I like you. You're a good guy. :))

I like itsTheWoo and Stephan , too.

Take care, Nige.

Razmattazz