Why Dieting Makes You Fat...

Think of the word ‘diet’. What words come to mind? Restriction? Deprivation? …Failure? I’ll also place a bet that your mental representation also involves some ‘temporary’ way of eating.
This is what the word has come to represent, although it doesn’t actually mean that at all. Yes ‘diet’ does refer to a way of eating, but with no emphasis on a temporary period of time or restriction. Yet the word has been misused so many times in this manner that any reference to the word will dredge up these misplaced associations.

Because of this mindset, a typical person will go on a diet, lose ‘weight’, go off the diet, gain ‘weight’, go on a diet, lose ‘weight’, go off the diet, gain ‘weight’ and continue this cycle either for the rest of their life or just throw their hands up in despair and give up permanently.

The facts speak for themselves, with usual dieting 95% of people will regain any weight lost, and a good percentage of those will gain back even more.

This is diametrically opposed to the way dieting should be approached. Why?

‘Dieting Paralyses Metabolism’

With usual dieting you generally eat less. When you eat less, you decrease what is known as Energy Flux. By decreasing Energy Flux, you limit the energy that flows through your body. Any time you limit energy flow, you slow your metabolism dramatically. A slow metabolism is the absolute worst scenario if fat loss is your goal.

When you eat less, you also have fewer opportunities to increase your metabolism by using the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF). The act of digesting and metabolising food requires energy and certain foods have a much bigger effect than others, in some cases it’s the difference between a 0% and 30% increase.

As I’ve shown before when you reduce your consumption of food, your body goes into emergency mode which causes it to preferentially store as much incoming energy as fat as it can to prepare for famine. The effect of this is a potentially permanently compromised metabolism because of its influence on your fat cells, muscle, hormones and neurotransmitters. It slows down the function of your body, both physically and mentally to a point of feeling constantly tired, unenthused and living in a world with the colour set to grey.

With the right nutrition the opposite is true. You’ll eat more which gives you access to more energy which will result in a more dynamic, vibrant, passionate life full of vivid colour.

Want to re-ignite your inner flame? Then join us in the Lean for Life Program, where you’ll be guided step by step towards realising the body of your dreams.

What’s Lean for Life? Click on the link and find out.

http://hpc-uk.net/6.html

What Your Gym/ Exercise Class Doesn’t Tell You…

 ‘The Exercise Equation’

Exercise sessions in themselves don’t actually result in appreciable fat loss. That’s a pretty bold, counterintuitive, and almost heretical statement, but it’s actually closer to the truth than you would’ve been told. Here are the approximate energy expenditures for a range of activities (please remember I’m only using Calories as a measurement as it will be the most familiar to most people):

During 1 hr of Exercise an average sized person will expend:

- Aerobics 414 Cal
- Running @ 8mph 1098 Cal
- Weight Training (40s btw Sets) 898 Cal
- Weight Training (90s btw Sets) 450 Cal

So if we were to just look at the ‘Eat Less, Move More’ simplistic premise, which activity would we choose? Running right? After all we expend over twice as much ‘energy’ as both aerobics (low intensity) and weight training (90 second rest between sets). Even if we drop our rest periods to less than half (40 seconds) during weight training, running still expends 120% more energy. However, as you’re beginning to appreciate there’s nothing simple about the Human body. Here’s why just looking at Caloric expenditure is insufficient when approaching exercise for losing body-fat.

‘The First Kicker’

The first 20-30 minutes of any exercise primarily uses carbohydrate as a fuel source due to hormonal restraints. So no matter what exercise type you choose or how you structure these sessions, hardly any fat is used in the first half an hour. After this initial point depending on the intensity, duration, and ingested nutrients, the relative percentage of fat used changes. Let’s have a quick look at the above activities in light of this knowledge and what it means for fat loss:

Aerobics

- 414 Cals
- (-first 20 mins) = 276
- 40% fat = 110 Cals from fat
- To use 1 lb of fat would require around 32 of these sessions

Running

- 1098 Cals
- (- first 20 mins) = 732 Cals
- 25% fat = 183 Cals from fat
- To use 1 lb of fat would require around 19 of these sessions

Weight Training

- 898 Cals
- (-first 20 mins) = 598 Cals
- 25% fat = 150 Cals from fat
- To use 1 lb of fat would require around 23 of these sessions


In fact it’s even worse than this; if you had just sat on your bum for an hour, an average sized man would’ve still used 72 Kcal worth of Energy; and because the intensity is low, a fairly large percentage (47 Kcal worth) would be from fat. So you have to take this away from the above equation which would lower the fat loss from each session further.

So a 1 hour aerobics class only puts you ahead by 63 Kcal worth of fat, running only 136 Kcal from fat and weight training only 103 Kcal from fat. Or put another way: 1, 3, and 2 teaspoons of fat, respectively.

‘Putting the Boot In’

And these are in situations specifically set up to tilt the balance in favour of fat oxidation. If you’re performing them in the morning after an overnight fast and you’re metabolically healthy then, you ‘may’ approach these numbers. If you’re doing it in the evening in a non-fasted state and you’re metabolically ‘damaged’, then the entire dynamic is altered away from fat usage.

One final wrinkle is your current conditioning; to be able to achieve the above sessions you need to be in fairly good shape already. For example, the running workout requires you to run at 8 miles per hour outdoors; that is not an easy pace especially when factoring in the weather and terrain. On a treadmill you’d need to be clipping along at 13kph at a minimum 2-4% incline for an entire hour. If you’re well conditioned you can do this and your body will start incorporating fat into the mix after 20 min’s. If you are not currently in great condition then you’d struggle to complete the workout, and even if you could, because the relative intensity would be higher for you, then your body cannot incorporate fat into the fuel mix.

So am I saying exercise is ineffective for fat loss? Not at all, but it’s nothing to do with the fat (or even the ‘Calories’) used during the workout, nor is it really to do with the raised metabolic rate outside of the workout either. So if your gym or exercise class is belabouring the Calorie ‘burn’ or even ‘After-burn’ of a particular workout then consider what they do actually know, because it certainly isn’t exercise science.

What Your ‘Detox’ Guru Doesn’t Tell You…

De-tox or Re-tox?

For the past few years there have been an increasing number of diets that promise to ‘detox’ your body, usually in 3 to 9 days. They are often touted as helping you become healthier and lose fat. These diets usually come ‘bundled’ with, or purely are, a set of products to aid you in flushing out the toxins; trouble is they usually do the opposite.

Many of these products are based on juicing (mostly fruit, then a smaller amount of vegetables, and sometimes finally a few herbs and spices, all of which have been blended and sometimes mechanically separated into fluid and pulp). Looking at the ingredient list of some of these products, you’d be hard pressed to say anything bad against them; ‘if’ they were in context. The problem is they’re so far from context that it’s not even funny.

I’m looking at one particular product right now that on the surface looks amazing; 7 different fruits, 9 different vegetables and an assortment of herbs and spices. Problem is in biochemistry it’s the dosage often separates the cure from the poison. Just analysing the fruit content of this product, in one day you’ll be ingesting 225g of sugar, of which 135g is fructose. That is A LOT.

I’m not so worried about the glucose element of the equation (acutely, chronic intakes are a different story), as a generally healthy body is pretty adept at handling that form of sugar even in large amounts. But the fructose component is a completely different animal.

To put it in context, our ancestors living on a diet of mostly vegetables and in-season fruit would’ve had a daily intake of roughly 15g of fructose; this is the amount we evolved to consume. This amount of fructose is fairly easily dealt with by the body, even double this would be too. However, just one day on one of these juice de-tox’s loads your body with 9 times that amount of fructose, and that’s just from the fruit part, there’s more if you factor in the vegetables.

So what does this fructose load do? Well, only the liver can metabolise fructose, so by ingesting huge amounts of ‘juice’ you’re placing a massive burden on this vital organ. And as you’ll see, instead of helping you de-tox, these types of juicing products actually end up doing the opposite.

When fructose is metabolised by the liver it goes through a number of steps, of which we’ll only cover a few briefly, just to demonstrate the problem with these diets and their products. The first step is for fructose to be converted into fructose-1-phosphate by the enzyme fructokinase. A by-product of this step is the production of uric acid, you may have heard of uric acid, it’s a crystalline compound that when elevated invades joints contributing to arthritis and it’s most common manifestation gout. This is a problem in itself, but high uric acid levels also inhibit the production of nitric oxide (NO), which is involved in regulating your blood pressure, so hypertension (high blood pressure) is the result. Nitric oxide is also involved in thermogenesis, so, far from helping you lose fat, it actually reduces your ability to burn it.

The next step in fructose metabolism via 3 different pathways all increase de novo lipogenesis (the formation of fat). This in excess contributes to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which I’ve written about previously; you can find that article here (http://humanperformanceconsulting-uk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/timing-is-everything.html)

In addition to the development of NASH, excess de novo lipogenesis also contributes towards the pre-diabetic condition of insulin resistance due to the increased blood levels of Triglycerides and Free Fatty Acids, plus the inflammation caused as a result of the JNK-1 pathway.

Another common claim for these products is that they contain high amounts of antioxidants; possibly, but that’s not always a good thing. Oxidation is a vital component of life, without it, well you wouldn’t be alive. It’s the precise balance of controlled oxidation that is needed, this will become big in the next few years as the knowledge of re-dox reactions and signalling becomes more widespread. When oxidation is uncontrolled, that’s when problems arise.

These products claim to help this situation by providing the antioxidants to quench the reactive oxygen species (ROS or free radicals). Alas, again, in general they usually do the opposite. The metabolism of fructose generates large amounts of free radicals that need to be stabilised by a particular antioxidant, in this case glutathione, which we’ll come back to in a moment.

So I think you can see that already these products put you in real bad shape. But here’s the kicker, they actually reduce your ability to detoxify.

Metabolic detoxification is a specific metabolic pathway, active throughout the human body, that processes unwanted chemicals for elimination. This pathway involves a series of enzymatic reactions that neutralise and solubilise toxins, then assist in transporting them to secretory organs (like the liver or kidneys), so that they can be excreted from the body. It happens via three main steps called phase I, II and III, ending with elimination.

Generally, phase I enzymes begin the detoxification process by chemically transforming lipid soluble compounds into easier to remove water soluble compounds in preparation for phase II detoxification. However, this intermediate product is in many cases more reactive then the original toxin, which makes them potentially more destructive than they once were. Luckily for us, we have phase II; ummm…or we did…

Phase II enzymes modify phase I products to both increase their solubility and also
reduce their toxicity. One of the key chemicals your body uses to perform this trick is glutathione; oops. If you recall, glutathione is being tied up combating the free radicals generated by the metabolism of fructose in the liver.

So in effect by using these products high in fructose to ‘detox’ yourself you’re actually increasing the toxic burden on your body, by increasing one phase of the pathway while simultaneously reducing the activity of another.

Your body is continually detoxifying itself, and if our meddling simian fingers stopped prying for a moment, it would generally achieve this with the exquisite precision that the body has developed over millennia. If you try to push the body, I guarantee, it’ll push back, often in unpleasant ways.

Here’s a simple way to support your body in detoxification and all it takes is to trust Nature, it’s been here a lot longer than we have, and knows what it’s doing. This simple method of detoxification can be summed up in an easy to remember acronym:

JERF (Just Eat Real Food).


Darren Jackson – Human Performance Consulting-UK

Website: hpc-uk.net
Facebook: Human-Performance-Consulting-UK
Twitter: @HPCUK
Blog: humanperformanceconsulting-uk.blogspot.com

What Your Slimming Club Doesn’t Tell You…

'The Metabolic Shift'

The usual piece of advice given by Doctors and other health related professionals in relation to fat loss is to ‘Eat Less and Move More’, which is a way of saying take in fewer Calories, and use more Calories through physical activity. And in all likelihood if you follow this advice you will lose weight; although not necessarily fat. The problem with the ‘Eat Less, Move More’ maxim is that it makes it progressively harder to lose, or even maintain, weight. It creates what is known as a ‘Metabolic Shift’.

‘Move More’

In brief, here’s the way it works. The usual exercise promoted for weight loss is aerobic type exercise, there are many reasons why this has become so, but as you’ll see the idea is actually based on faulty logic. Aerobic activity increases efficiency in utilising energy especially the pathway that uses fat as a fuel. So the more trained this system the more efficiently the body can use fat, and for people whose sports require them to perform for long durations such as distance runners, this is a great adaptation. For fat loss, it’s disastrous.

Let’s use an automotive analogy to see why it’s terrible for fat loss. Take two cars; one being the newest eco-friendly designed model; and the other a huge off-road vehicle the size of a small house. If you wanted to save money on fuel bills, which model would you choose? The obvious answer is the eco-model. Why? Because everything about its design is specifically directed towards efficiency, from its size, to the way the engine produces power. On the same tank of fuel, the eco-model would do a week’s worth of journeys, whereas in the off-roader you may be worried about being able to reach the end of your driveway.

Now substitute a human body for the cars, and substitute fat for petrol. Which model would you choose for fat loss? The ‘off-roader’ of course. It will use many-fold the amounts of fat that the eco-model uses. So why do we get told to train our bodies so that they develop into eco-models? Good question.

‘Eat Less’

Let’s look at the other half of the equation ‘Eat Less’. ‘Eat Less’ again, like ‘Move More’ is based on faulty logic. ‘Eating Less’ is another way of saying take in fewer Calories, which, if you’ve been following HPC-UK for a while, you’ll know that this ‘Calorie concept’ in itself is a fallacy when it comes to Human metabolism; so it’s already on shaky ground. Your body is not merely a static machine; it’s one of the most sophisticated creations in existence, so you shouldn’t really expect it to respond in a simple way to a change in its environment.

Going back to the car analogy, regardless of how much fuel is put into the tank, the car will continue to use the same amount of petrol to fuel its functions. The car doesn’t care if you only put in a days worth amount of fuel, it will continue to burn this fuel in the same way it would as if it had a full tank. The human body doesn’t work this way. If you put less energy into the body, the body will sense this and then make huge adaptations to its function so that it increases the efficiency in fuel usage. Not only does it do this, it will also make changes so that a larger percentage of energy taken into the body will be partitioned towards fat storage as this is the most efficient storage form of energy in the body.

People who have undergone a metabolic shift generally feel cold. This also compromises their immune system so they are more susceptible to chills and infections.

The human body is not a mere machine; it’s a dynamic organism that adapts to its environment. However, the body is still treated, even by very educated individuals that should really know better, as a simple mechanism.

So ‘Eat Less, Move More’ is based on a totally wrong premise, however it is still the most widely used approach for losing weight, and we can see the results of this maxim in others and probably in yourself in the past. The results? Eventually ending up fatter and less able to lose or even maintain weight. I’m sure this wasn’t the result you were after, but in all likelihood it’s the one you got. Why? Regardless of how strongly willed you are, because of the increasingly efficient manner the body operates when asked to reduce energy intake and expend more energy, it becomes only a matter of time, where you can’t realistically starve yourself any further, put in any more time into increasingly longer bouts of exercise or a combination of both. And when you do break, and you will, the body has become so efficient that any excess of food or drop in activity, no matter how miniscule will be cause fat accretion at an alarming rate.

Simply put, once more normal levels of either activity or food intake is resumed the body had adapted to doing ‘more with less’ and promptly stores the excess as fat

Be very careful with the questions you ask your body, as the answers (adaptations) last a loooong time after your temporary change in diet or exercise finishes.


Darren Jackson – Human Performance Consulting-UK

Website: hpc-uk.net
Facebook: Human-Performance-Consulting-UK
Twitter: @HPCUK
Blog: humanperformanceconsulting-uk.blogspot.com