In this episode Meatwad is trying to ‘exercise the fat away’ by power walking. What you don’t see in this clip is the pile of gummy bears he sets out for himself as his target to walk to. Once he arrives at the pile of gummy bears he eats them as a reward for his exercise. (Once again Carl is right on the money with his criticism of meatwads strategy)

As ridiculous as this sounds, this is exactly what many people do who start working out…they reward themselves with food after they complete a workout. This totally defeats the purpose of working out in the first place. (the other day I saw a large woman with a personal trainer, and she was eating a granola bar between her sets in the gym…I can only imagine how absurd the conversation between her and the trainer must have been that allowed a granola bar to become part of the workout)

Back to reality:

The so called ‘health benefits’ of physical activity and exercise are very similar to the health benefits of caloric restriction and the subsequent weight loss that follows.

If you think you can be ‘healthy’ without losing weight you’re missing half or most of the picture. The extra fat mass and added weight itself is a risk factor for many lifestyle diseases and therefore simply being active while eating more food (such that you don’t lose any weight) still does not address the issue of losing body fat (if you have excess bodyfat to lose).

There are many ‘meatwads’ out there who would rather tell themselves the lie that they can eat as much as they want and overcome any ill effects simply by exercising more, but those people will never get the body changing results they really want and likely wont be much ‘healthier’ either.

John

He's not going to lose too much weight this way!

Fat loss is just a matter of having a caloric deficit, this isn’t news (or at least it shouldn’t be news to you). You can create the caloric deficit 3 ways.

1. Caloric restriction

2. Increasing activity/exercise (without conscious attention to calories)

3. A combination of the previous points

Regardless how you create the deficit the fat loss with be the same. It’s probably easiest to focus primarily on restricting food intake and consider any extra exercise induced fat loss as a bonus.

Cutting 500-700 calories in a day is much easier than trying to do 500-700 calories worth of exercise.

So even though theoretically you could try to create a deficit with exercise alone, it is only as effective as your ability to maintain a consistent calorie intake close to BMR.

In other words, you can easily out eat a workout session, but you can never out workout an big eating session (but I think this is what so many people in the gym are trying to do)

The actual pattern of fat loss will be the same no matter what you do to get there, so it’s just up to you to find the best solution that fits with your life. I suggest Eat Stop eat and my soon to be coming out book (shameless plug!

John

I only believe what the read button says

We ended up with a pretty good list of weight loss diets yesterday, thanks for your contribution. So can all of the diets listed work? (of course as long as they get you to eat less calories than you burn). Are all of these complex strategies necessary?…of course not.

But what about the specific mechanism of how they work? Isn’t there an advantage to one style over the other?…nope.

The one that is easiest for you to follow is the one that will work the best for you. For me it comes down to simplicity, the simpler the diet the more effective it is likely to be. (by the way this is also shown in the research to be true)

Most of the diet books you ever come across will be based on a marketing gimmick to sell a new concept, but in the end the only way any diet can actually work is by getting you to consume less total calories.

Think about how impossible it would be to combine some of the diets listed on yesterdays post.

How could you eat for your blood type, as well as eat low carb, and then cycle your carbs (which contradicts the theory of low carb), and then eat low fat (which contradicts low carb and carb cycling and blood type dieting),  and then try to eat ‘zone’ style with a 30/30/40 nutrient ratio split (which contradicts low carb low fat carb cycling and blood type diets), then fast (contradicts all diets), then try to avoid cooking your food, then try Mediterranean dieting (whatever the hell that means), point counting systems like weight watchers (contradict all of these diets) etc…

How could the rules of any of these diets fit together?…They can’t.

The truth is that you can eat whatever you like and lose weight, as long as you eat less than you burn.

And if you’re getting ready to drop me a comment and say (but what about_______ diet)…stop for a moment and look at the diets listed above and how they all contradict each other and yet each one has a list of people who will swear by them as the best way to lose weight. The only way this can be possible is if all of these diets share a common theme, and that is less total calories.

Calories in vs out is not a sexy marketing angle so it has to be hidden behind crazy stories about blood types, specific times of day to eat, evil nutrients and bad foods to avoid, fat burning foods to consume, romanticism about other countries and ways of eating from the distant past etc.

It’s all nonsense. When they’re put to the scientific test the only way any diet produces weight loss is a caloric deficit, the food choices and eating patterns are up to you.

John

P.S. my new diet book is actually going to be about calories in vs calories out. I know that doesn’t sound very interesting but I think you’ll be surprised to see how much more there is to the calorie story…It’s not as simple to count calories as you think.

Muscle improves your proportions, but fat ruins them.

The shape of your body is largely determined by your muscle mass, however that is assuming that you don’t have an excess of body fat distorting you true shape. The point of working out with weights is to manipulate your muscle mass to augment your look. Having fat covering all of those muscles makes your effort in the gym seem pointless.

Part of the reason fat distorts your shape is because it is not evenly distributed over you body. For example men typically build up significantly more fat around their abdomen and women typically store more fat around their hips and thighs.

If we gained fat evenly over our whole body then fat gain would look exactly like gaining muscle (the only difference would be less definition, but proportions would always be good)…this however isn’t the case. As we gain more and more fat both men and women start to look more like blobs with most of the fat stored closer to the middle of our bodies (abdomen and hips thighs) and thus proportions look worse and worse the more fat we gain.

The point of both gaining muscle and losing fat (besides any health benefit) is to improve our proportions for the aesthetic appeal. This of course is also measurable with the Adoins Index for men and Venus Index for women. (waist to shoulder ratios and waist to shoulder to hip ratios respectively)

John

What are the Weight Loss Rules?

I’m in the middle of writing my new diet book and I need your help with one of the sections. I want to review the validity and research of the most common diet ‘rules’ that you hear about it in the popular diet and weight loss media including magazines, television and online.

I’ve got a short list of rules I want to tackle but I need your input to round out the list and make sure I hit all of the big ones that you’ve heard but aren’t sure about and want the truth about (ex: these are rules like “you must eat breakfast every day to get your metabolism going”)

So please give me your list of the ‘rules’ you’ve heard or read about that you’d like to know the truth about and I’ll include them in the top 10 list in the new book

John