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

The ECA stack was definitely potent. I used to use that stuff and I worked for a couple supplement companies that sold fat burners based around that stack. Still there is no evidence to prove that the ECA stack alone can cause real fat loss without eating less. I think it’s a double effect…ECA gives you so much energy that you end up doing more work in the gym and are more active throughout the day and eat slightly less…the combination of the extra exercise and movement with a slight drop in calories could easily account for all the weight loss seen with these products…and lets not forget the diuretic effect this stack has…it’s not uncommon for an ECA stack to cause a drop in water retention as well. All of these factors can contribute to what appears to be fat loss without eating less.

The diuretic effect of supplements like these was something we knew about and we also knew that our customers would be happy with any kind of weight loss even if it was just a drop in water.

JB

That theory is a misinterpretation of some good research done on human starvation. The reason there is a decrease in daily metabolic rate after months of starvation is simply because these people have less total body mass. But this only happens to people who are starving…for real starving.

This would never happen to you and me.

As for the thermogenics you tried. I can’t say that you’re not remembering things accurately (but scientifically there is good evidence to show that our memories are not reliable at all)…and I also can’t tell you that you didn’t lose weight without eating less (although scientifically there is no proof at all that thermogenics can help with weight loss beyond their effect on reducing calorie consumption)…

So I can say that in any well controlled research study the only thing ephedra can do is reduce appetite and cause people to perhaps eat less, but they certainly cannot just heat you up and make you burn more calories and lose weight with the same amount of food eaten. <— this has never been shown to happen, and if you say it happened to you, then you’re the only person in the world so far.

You most likely just don’t really remember exactly what you ate and are assuming that the supplements somehow caused weight loss on their own.

Btw there is also some good research to show that people can’t even remember what they ate 24 hours ago let alone years later.

I’m not suggesting you personally have a bad memory, I’m pointing out that none of us can accurately remember things from so long ago, especially something as particular as daily calories consumed.

JB