Quick personal update: I pulled a fast one on the weather. I got up at 1 am this morning when the house was a cool 66 degrees and did 5 sets of 8-12 reps of biceps, triceps, and shoulders. Then I did some leg isometrics, all while watching television. Then I had a snack of 3 ounces of smoked salmon and some whole wheat crackers. By 4 am I was back to sleep until 8:30 am. Hot weather will not stop this weight training train. Full steam ahead. (Colitis pain is almost gone too. Yeah!)
Weight this morning 121.5 pounds, body fat 23.2 percent.
I've decide to push any attempts at fat loss to a future *cooler* time and just concentrate on muscle gain for now. You'd think Summer would be a perfect time to eat light and less, the traditional approach to losing weight, but eating too light or light enough to lose body fat won't necessarily help me build muscle. Yes, lots of people swear you can do both at the same time, but I'm dubious that their way is the optimal way to build the most muscle possible. I'm not a big guy with a butt load of testosterone floating around, and I'm old too so my GH levels probably aren't optimal. Let's face it, my fat loss goals are for cosmetic reasons only.
The more research I read leads me to believe it's at cross purposes to approach losing body fat through diet alone (no matter what your macro-nutrient ratios). Virtually anyone can exercise and accomplish muscle maintenance or even muscle gain.
Bottom line, when you have lots of muscle mass your metabolism is faster and it takes less calorie cutting to burn fat. This is particularly true when a small calorie deficit is combined with aerobics AND weight training.
My personal experience (yes it's anecdotal evidence) has always been that I have to do quite a bit of aerobics to burn off body fat, at least an hour a day along with weight lifting. This is certainly partly due to me refusal to go on low calorie diets. And that level of aerobics ain't going to happen until the heat breaks. I'm not even getting much swimming in because it's TOO HOT!
A big fat lie - the nutrition expert who says diets actually cause weight gain
Geoffrey Cannon tells Sophie Morris why he declared war on the slimming industry
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
The weight-loss industry is swelling as quickly as our waistlines at the moment, which seems something of a paradox. If body conscious consumers are so happy to buy dieting products, why are we facing an obesity crisis? The truth is, no calorie-controlled diet works. If they did, dieting professionals could kiss goodbye to repeat business. Even worse: restricting what you eat will make you fat. Worse still: yo-yo dieting can cause depression, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. Frequent dieters are 60 per cent more likely to die from heart disease than people who don't starve themselves.
The weight-loss successes trumpeted on the front of slimming magazines contradict this. They tell the stories of women (it usually is women) who have lost a lot of weight by following a diet which restricts calorie intake. As the pictures show, these women have clearly not been made fat by following such regimes. This, though, is only part of the complex dieting jigsaw, as Geoffrey Cannon explains in his book
Dieting Makes You Fat. Yes, if you consume less energy than your body burns off in a day, your weight will drop. But Cannon, a public health advisor and nutrition expert, looks longer term, and says that nearly all dieters are forced to turn to drugs, surgery, further dieting or exercise to maintain that initial weight loss.
If the title of the book rings a bell, it is possible you read Cannon's earlier book of the same name, which he wrote 25 years ago. Conclusive new scientific evidence to support the claims in the first book, a global public health crisis caused by obesity and its attendant illnesses, and a booming diet industry prompted Cannon to completely rewrite this text.
Dieting Makes You Fat was ground-breaking a quarter of a century ago, but its message is perhaps even more urgent today. As people are getting fatter (a government report from 2007 predicted that by 2050 most British adults will be obese), the market for weight-loss products is growing. The dieting industry in the US is worth $46bn a year; in Europe it is worth €93bn. Clearly, our appetite for losing weight is not matched by our capacity to actually shed fat.
Why did we not take Cannon's advice the first time round? "When people are sceptical of dieting regimes. they will say that diets don't work," he explains. "But they always stop short of saying that dieting makes you fat, which is a concept with explosive implications." He points to scientific studies which illustrate how the dieting trap leads to weight gain. A 2007 UCLA review concluded: "We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more... most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all."
Further evidence came from an experiment in a closed-off ecosystem in Arizona in the early Nineties. Eight scientists had agreed to live inside the man-made biosphere for two years. Once inside, they discovered they were unable to grow enough food, but agreed to diet for the two years and continue with the experiment. They all dropped about 9kg, before their weights stabilised. Within six months of leaving the biosphere, they had piled the weight back on, and – crucially – almost of all of it was fat, not the lean tissue they had started out with. Not only does dieting make you fat, it makes you flabby, too.
"Throughout history humans have evolved and adapted to survive famine and starvations," explains Cannon. "The people who survived were the people who were best able to, those who had their larders inside themselves, in the form of body fat. A dieting regime will fail, because you're training your body to survive famine and starvation better."
Cannon takes pains to dilute the science in Dieting Makes You Fat and includes just one table in the whole book, which looks at the difference between the energy our bodies burn at different weights and with different body compositions – whether lean (physically fit, but not necessarily light) or fat (not necessarily heavy, but with a high proportion of body fat to lean tissue). A lean woman who weighs 70kg (154lb) burns 600 calories more at rest per day than a 70kg woman who has lots of body fat.
What, then, is the answer to losing weight, if diets are out? Cannon says there are a lot of people out there who need to lose a lot of weight, without subscribing to the misconception that a thin person is a healthy person, and that fat people are unhealthy. Dieting Makes You Fat proposes seven golden rules for losing weight, the most salient being to take lots of exercise and eat plenty of fresh, whole foods. He writes from experience, having jumped on the dieting wagon at a young age himself.
When he realised that the diets he tried were ineffective, he set about proving why.
You do need to wait six or seven months to see positive results, admits Cannon, but follow his rules and you will dig your body out of the dieting trap.
'Dieting Makes You Fat' by Geoffrey Cannon is published by Virgin Books, £16.99 in hardback
Related Links:
Isometrics IS the Fastest Way to a Firm Physique!
Isometrics for Mass! How to get bigger by not moving a muscle by Christian Thibaudeau
Hold It Right There!
Can you get stronger by not moving a muscle? According to the scientific literature, yes, you sure can! Isometric or "static" training has been shown to stimulate strength gains in numerous studies. In the real world, I've been using it with success for years in my own training and with my athletes.
But can isometric training increase muscle mass as well as strength? There's very little info out there on this topic. In fact, the literature seems to be telling us that isometrics can lead to strength gains without influencing muscle mass. So, understandably, this form of training never made it into the bodybuilding world. That's too bad because it can be an effective tool for muscle gains!
Isometric Action Training: A New Dimension
An isometric muscle action refers to exerting muscle strength/muscle tension without producing an actual movement or a change in muscle length. Read more.
Dieting Truths - Traditional Diets Don't Work
Most people who decide to lead a healthier lifestyle go on traditional diets. The truth is, however, that 95% of those who go on such diets fail; what's worse, they often end up in worse shape than when they started.
Diets are both ineffective and potentially harmful; long-term health-oriented programs should replace them.
Low calorie diets, result in muscle loss, in preference to fat so that the most useful tissue is preserved for times of starvation. Fat produces 9 cal's of energy per gram compared with only 4 cal per gram produced by your muscle tissue.
However, muscle determines the overall metabolic rate of the body, so if muscle is lost, the metabolic rate will be reduced. This means that when the dieter returns to a normal pattern of eating again, the lower metabolic rate will result in rapid weight gain.
The other problem with having a low level of lean muscle tissue is the feeling of fatigue, when doing simple exercise tasks. The muscles and the liver both store energy supplies, in the form of glycogen.
This situation has developed simply because many people are looking for an easy way to lose weight that delivers quick results. No such approach exists, yet the slimming industry continues to misguide people into believing that fast weight loss can be achieved with minimum effort.
Achieving target weight requires lifestyle changes. These changes include regular exercise, a sensible approach to healthy eating and the right mental attitude.
Why Dieting can make you FATTER The conventional approach to dieting is a disaster. The first mistake is to call a program a "weight loss program". There are many weight reduction programs, which if followed can produce rapid weight loss.
However, this weight loss is neither sustainable nor healthy as it involves dehydration and loss of muscle tissue. Read more.
