It really boils down to good vs. bad habits, and being in control of what one puts in one’s mouth. People focus so much on things like insulin, carbs, protein, ghrelin, leptin, hormones, etc., but it seems like diet is overwhelmingly a behavioral issue for most of us.

For a long time I’ve been focusing on diets like Warrior Diet, Fast-5, IF, etc. These may be the wrong approaches for me, esp. the first two. IF is better because you’re supposed to eat normally after the fast, but in the real world, people like me can end up over-compensating. Several months ago, I tried two IF’s per week for three or four weeks and I lost a pound or so. Pretty paltry. It’s pretty to easy to wipe out the calorie deficit of two fasts with over-eating the rest of the time, and I know Brad and John would agree with that. But with the Warrior Diet and Fast-5, you’re supposed to get most (WD) or all (Fast-5) of your calories in a relatively small time period, and that may be the wrong approach for someone who tends to eat excessively large meals. Perhaps it’s “snackers” who tend to benefit from these approaches…?

I think my underlying desire has been to find a way to lose weight while continuing my bad habit of eating too much in one meal. It’s been one great big juicy rationalization. So lately I’ve been tinkering with the idea of eating small-to-medium meals. Not six meals per day, that’s a bit much. More like three or four. In particular, I need to reduce the size of my dinner meals. Those are so big. This is all probably pretty obvious for other people: eat less in each meal. Duh! But it’s a different thought process for someone who has been trying to rationalize eating bigger meals for a few years now.

I don’t know how much weight I’ll lose, but at the very least it should help me to develop better habits. Later I could combine this with one or two IF’s per week, but for now, I don’t want to do anything that could potentially contribute to my compulsive over-eating. So it’s small-to-medium meals for now.

This is building on MikeGP’s comment earlier. I’ve read so many books by registered nutritionists that they all start to blend together, and I’ve gone through too many lectures on metabolism in my HKIN classes, where they all say that you should eat small meals frequently, and not skip breakfast. I’m getting really tired of that, especially since people quote it as law now. One book in particular that bugs me is “The Metabolism Advantage”, by some of the guys at Mens Health.
Anyway, I tried the ‘eating small meals frequently’ deal for a while, and I gained weight. Realistically you can’t expect to do that unless you plan to avoid eating with anyone else, since they’re going to be eating normal sized meals. Not to mention, for me at least, just having food around makes me eat more. So the more frequently I seek out food, the more I eat. My point is, these studies done on starvation, and the studies that show a relationship between skipping breakfast and obesity (which I chalk up to the fact that if you skip breakfast, naturally your blood sugar drops later in the day and most people will gorge themselves on junk food at that point), how do you defend the position that any drop in metabolism, or gain in metabolism by eating frequently, is insignificant compared to overall calorie consumption? I don’t even know for sure if there is a drop or not, insignificant or not, maybe you can clear that up for me. I’ve also heard people say “if you eat less frequently, but the same calories, you’re going to put on way more fat than if you’d eaten the same amount but in smaller portions more frequently”. Is there any study I could look at to see where this all started?

Sorry for the long post!

The specifics of how they work are too complicated to get into here, but the bottom line is that they signal the muscle cell to start growing faster and bigger and it might be that this enhanced rapid growth causes enough of a metabolic demand that it does in fact cause a large enough increase in calorie burning that you might actually get leaner. On the other hand I know many guys who have taken lots of steroids and were just as fat while they were using them as they were before they used them. So it’s not very obvious what is going on with fat loss associated with steroid use.

Some research indicates that taking testosterone without even working out will cause you to build muscle, get stronger and decrease your bodyfat %….but be careful with interpreting the last part…if your muscles got bigger and your total fat stayed the same, your PERCENTAGE of fat will still drop…so it would appear that you lost fat, but in reality you built up so much muscle the same amount of fat now accounts for less % of your total body weight.

JB